The Responsibilities of the Irresponsible

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

WOODROW WILSON has been clubbed, in some quarters, ‘the psychological President.’ This is in ironical reference to his belief that the subtle agency called confidence, which is needed to set the wheels of productive industry a-whir after their long rest, is more a matter of the state of the public mind than a fabric built on visible and palpable facts. Nearly every critic seems to have forgotten that the same belief was entertained by the late John Pierpont Morgan, who certainly would not be classified as an unpractical idealist. A modified phase of it came out in his testimony at a Congressional hearing several months before his death, where he stated his conception of the real basis of credit. It surprised a multitude of people to learn, for instance, that a man of his business experience and acumen was ready to set his judgment of human nature far ahead of any mere inventory of negotiable securities, in determining the question whether an applicant for a large loan ought to be accommodated.

Yet not a few of those to whom this conceit appeared so novel are showing every day, by their own conduct, how little they regard the purely material standards of responsibility. The chief difference between them and Mr. Morgan, indeed, is that he put his esteem for the character of a specific individual here and there above any accounting of that individual’s resources, whereas they walk through life with a sort of blind faith that, because a majority of the men and women with whom they come into frequent contact appear to be honestly trying to do right, the presumption of good motives and a sense of duty should extend to all mankind.

If it were not for some such notion lying in the back of his mind, what a terrifying thing would a railway trip or a sea-voyage be to the average traveler. Not once in a thousand times, it is safe to say, does he know personally the man who runs the engine that is drawing him hither and yon. The dispatcher who starts a train, the signal-man in a tower where tracks cross, the captain who commands his vessel, the light-keeper on a dangerous reef, are strangers to him. He does not know their names, or ages, or antecedents. Any dereliction on the part of one of them would imperil, not only immense values in property, but human lives by the hundred. They receive wages out of which they cannot hope to save even a modest fortune; yet if one were open to a bribe, he could make himself rich in a night. Let a capitalist cause damage to your purse or your person, and you can reach him through the courts and compel him to make good to you as much of the injury as can be estimated in dollars and cents; but from the wage-earner who has no assets subject to levy you are unprotected, except by his realization of his duty and his desire to do it.

Even where there is no moral question immediately involved, but bare carelessness might work incalculable harm, we are daily entrusting ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor’ to the keeping of what, in the familiar parlance of the streets, would be described as the irresponsible class. Letters which will do as well if they reach their destination next week as tomorrow, we leave in charge of a postman who has at least been subjected to certain civil-service tests as to his good repute and general intelligence; but if time-saving is of great importance, we make use of the special-delivery device or we telegraph. In either event, our communication makes the last stage of its journey in the custody of a boy who follows the calling of a messenger only because, through immaturity, poverty, lack of education, or some kindred handicap, he has been unable to prove his fitness for a better one; while a telegram runs also the initial risk of inaccurate transmission, possibly a complete reversal of its meaning. True, we can hold a telegraph company accountable in damages for a pecuniary loss suffered through such fault of an operator, whether due to his defective skill, or to his being worn out by overwork, or to any other cause, however innocent morally; but a misleading business report, or a garbled item of family news at a critical moment, may inflict a mortal shock on the recipient or dethrone his reason, and no satisfaction for an injury of that magnitude could be obtained from mulcting the offender’s employer.

Taken acutely ill in the midst of a long journey, we accept the ministrations of a fellow traveler whom we have never seen before but who says that he is a physician. Even the prescription given us by our family doctor is liable to be filled by an unknown compounding-clerk, yet we swallow unquestioningly whatever he hands us in bottle or box. We hail a passing cab to take us to our destination in the middle of the night, feeling no alarm lest the driver be in league with a gang of foot-pads. We send our cash deposit to the bank by the hand of a messenger concerning whose virtues we have no guaranty beyond the fact that thus far we have not found him light-fingered. We add our names to this and that petition, on the say-so of some one who may or may not, for all we are aware, have an ulterior and illegitimate interest in swelling his list; and we sign letters and other documents which we have only hurriedly skimmed over in their final draft, and in which our tired copyist may have embalmed an error fatal to our purpose.

Worse yet, we take strangers into our homes as servants, fully conscious that a recommendation by which we lay great store may have been wrung unfairly from a former master who is habitually too easy-going to note or too soft-hearted to disclose the shortcomings of his working people. No matter how well-meaning, the cook may be ignorant enough to poison us twenty times a week without suspecting it; the housemaid may be too scatter-brained to reflect that she must not leave loose papers in front of an open fire which is bombarding the floor with sparks; the children’s nurse, though amiable of disposition, may have no more conception of what a baby’s spine is like than she has of the differential calculus. Yet the years come and go, and we live on in smug content with ourselves and everything under our roof, as if, because yesterday’s sun set in no cloud-bank of disaster, to-morrow’s will take its course through a firmament quite as clear of troubles due to over-trustfulness.

Is n’t there a lot of ‘psychology’ in all these commonplace confidences of ours?