Part 54 (1/2)

First, not letting people be bad. (Moses.)

Second, being good for them. (Karl Marx.)

Third, letting them be good themselves. (Any Democrat.)

The first of these ideas means government by Prison. The second, means government by Usurpation, that is, the moment a man amounts to enough to choose to do right or do wrong of his own free will, the moment he is a man, in other words, being so afraid of him and of his being a man, that we all, in a kind of panic, shove into his life and live it for him--this is Socialism, a scared machine that scared people have invented for not letting people choose to do right because they may choose to do wrong.

The third, letting people be good themselves, letting them be self-controlling, self-respecting, self-expressing or voluntarily good people, is democracy, a machine for letting men be men by trying it.

Moses was the inventor of a kind of national moral-brake system, a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten. The question that faces President Wilson just now, while the world looks on is, ”Is a government or is it not a moral-brake system--a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten?”

There is a considerable resemblance between Moses' position and the new President's in the United States. When Moses looked around on the things he saw the men around him doing, and took the ground that at least nine out of ten of the things should be stopped, he was academically correct.

And so, also, President Wilson, gazing at the business of this country to-day, at nine out of ten of the humdrum thoughtless things that trusts and corporations have been doing, will be academically correct in telling them to stop, in having his little, new, helpless, unproved, adolescent government stand up before all the people and speak in loud, beautiful, clear accents and (with its left fist full of prisons, fines, lawyers, of forty-eight legislatures all talking at once) bring down its right fist as a kind of gavel on the world and say to these men, before all the nations, that nine of the things they are doing must be stopped and that one of the things, if they happen to able be to think out some way of keeping on doing it--n.o.body will hurt them.

But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our world looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering upon a career of stopping people. The real and serious question is, does stopping people stop them? And if stopping people does not stop them, what will?

Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing things they are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done. A government that does not express what it wants, that has not given a masterful, clear, inspired statement of what it wants--a government that has only tried to say what it does not want, is not a government.

The next business of a government is a statement of what it wants.

The problem of a government is essentially a problem of statement.

How shall this statement be made?

CHAPTER IV

THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO

It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife) could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little further in moral evolution, than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and it was further toward the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does things.

One of the things about the real artist that makes him an artist, is that he is always and always has been and always will be profoundly dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an emblem of purity. He challenges the world, he challenges G.o.d, he challenges himself, he challenges the men and women about him when he is being put off with a Statue as an emblem of purity. He demands, searches out, interprets, creates something concrete and living to express his idea of purity.

How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be corrupt, in trying to win them--how can President Wilson make the law alluring? How can he make the People have a Low Voice?

A great deal if not nearly everything depends in tempting business men to be good, upon the tone in which they are addressed. Every government, like every man, soon comes to have its own characteristic tone in addressing the people. And, as a matter of fact, it is almost always the tone in a government, like the voice in a man, which tells us the most definitely what it is like, and is the most intimate and effective expression of what it wants and is the most practical way of getting what it wants. Everybody has noticed that a man's voice works harder for him, works more to the point for him in getting what he wants than his words do. It is his voice that makes people know him, that makes them know he means what he says. It is his voice that tells them whether he is in the habit of meaning what he says, and it is his voice that tells them whether he is in habit of getting what he wants, and of knowing what to do with what he wants when he gets it.

A government does not need to say very much if it has the right tone.

The tone of a government is the government.

If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business men to be good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depending on three principles.

These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be stated as three principles or as three personal traits.

First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from Moses.)

Second, by being concrete. (Bathsheba.)