Hartford Monday Evening Club
We are continually warned to be consistent—by the pulpit, by the newspaper, by our associates. When we depart from consistency, we are reproached for it by these censors. When a man who has been born and brought up a Jew becomes a Christian, the Jews sorrow over it and reproach him for his inconstancy; all his life he has denied the divinity of Christ, but now he makes a lie of all his past; upon him rests the stigma of inconsistency; we can never be sure of him again. We put in the deadly parallel columns what he said formerly and what he says now, and his credit is gone. We say, Trust him not; we know him now; he will change again; and possibly again and yet again; he has no stability.
There are men called life-long Democrats, life-long Republicans. If one of these departs from his allegiance and votes the other ticket, the same thing happens as in the Jew’s case. The man loses character. He is inconsistent. He is a traitor. His past utterances will be double columned with his present ones, and he is damned; also despised—even by his new political associates, for in theirs, as in all men’s eyes, inconsistency is a treason and matter for scorn.
These are facts—common, every-day facts; and I have chosen them for that reason; facts known to everybody, facts which no one denies.
What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows—it must grow; nothing can prevent it. It must grow downward or upward; it must grow smaller or larger, better or worse—it cannot stand still. In other words, we change—and must change, constantly, and keep on changing as long as we live. What, then, is the true gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.
Yet, as the quoted facts show, there are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency—and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency—and a vice. They will grant you certain things, without murmur or dissent—as things which go without saying; truisms. They will grant that in time the crawling baby walks and must not be required to go on crawling; that in time the youth has outgrown the child’s jacket and must not be required to crowd himself into it; they grant you that a child’s knowledge is becoming and proper to the child only so they grant him a school and teach him, so that he may change and grow; they grant you that he must keep on learning—through youth and manhood and straight on—he must not be allowed to suppose that the knowledge of thirty can be any proper equipment for his fiftieth year; they will grant you that a young man’s opinions about mankind and the universe are crude, and sometimes foolish, and they would not dream of requiring him to stick to them the rest of his life, lest by changing them he bring down upon himself the reproach of inconsistency. They will grant you these, and everything else you can think of, in the line of progress and change, until you get down to politics and religion; there they draw the line. These must suffer no change. Once a Presbyterian, always a Presbyterian, or you are inconsistent and a traitor; once a Democrat, always a Democrat, or you are inconsistent and a traitor—a turncoat.
It is curious logic. Is there but one kind of treason? No man remains the same sort of Presbyterian he was at first—the thing is impossible; time and various influences modify his Presbyterianism; it narrows or it broadens, grows deeper or shallower, but does not stand still. In some cases it grows so far beyond itself, upward or downward, that nothing is really left of it but the name, and perhaps an inconsequential rag of the original substance, the bulk being now Baptist or Buddhist or something. Well, if he go over to the Buddhists, he is a traitor. To whom? To what? No man can answer those questions rationally. Now if he does not go over what is he? Plainly a traitor to himself, a traitor to the best and the highest and the honestest that is in him. Which of these treasons is the blackest one—and the shamefulest? Which is the real and right consistency? To be consistent to a sham and an empty name, or consistent to the law of one’s being, which is change, and in this case requires him to move forward and keep abreast of his best mental and moral progress, his highest convictions of the right and the true? Suppose this treason to the name of a church should carry him clear outside of all churches? Is that a blacker treason than to remain? So long as he is loyal to his best self, what should he care for other loyalties? It seems to me that a man should secure the Well done, faithful servant, of his own conscience first and foremost, and let all other loyalties go.
I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his political party he is a traitor—that he is so pronounced in plain language. That is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that it is true. Desertion, treason—these are the terms applied. Their military form reveals the thought in the man’s mind who uses them; to him a political party is an army. Well, is it? Are the two things identical? Do they even resemble each other? Necessarily a political party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by compulsion. Then it must be a regular army, or an army of volunteers. Is it a regular army? No, for these enlist for a specified and well-understood term and can retire without reproach when the term is up. Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? No, it is not even an army in that sense. Those fine military terms are high-sounding, empty lies—and are no more rationally applicable to a political party than they would be to an oyster bed. The volunteer soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself, and proves that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is accepted, but not until he has sworn a deep oath, or made other solemn form of promise, to march under that flag until that war is done or his term of enlistment completed. What is the process when a voter joins a party? Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? Must he prove that he knows anything—whatever—is capable of anything? Does he take an oath or make a promise of any sort?—or doesn’t he leave himself entirely free? If he were informed by the political boss that if he join it must be forever; that he must be that party’s chattel and wear its brass collar the rest of his days, would not that insult him? It goes without saying. He would say some rude, unprintable thing and turn his back on that preposterous organization. But the political boss puts no conditions upon him at all; and his volunteer makes no promises, enlists for no stated term. He has in no sense become a part of an army, he is in no way restrained of his freedom. Yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that; that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an iron-clad military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man.
There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action, which we hear so much inflated foolishness about, as being the precious possession of the Republic. Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies, and attempt to exercise one of them. If he is a preacher, half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion, and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood; if he is a mechanic, he will be discharged, promptly; if he is a lawyer, his clients will take their business elsewhere; if he is a doctor, his own dead will turn against him.
I repeat that the new party member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party has somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any motive, howsoever high and right, in his own eyes, without shame and dishonor.
Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this? Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes? What slave is so degraded as the slave who is proud that he is a slave? What is the essential difference between a life-long Democrat and any other kind of life-long slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another?
This atrocious doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort—and doubtless for that it was borrowed—or stolen—from the monarchical system. It enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for, if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name. The wire workers, convention packers, know they are not obliged to put up the fittest man for the office, for they know that the docile party will vote for any forked thing they put up, even though it do not even strictly resemble a man.
I am persuaded—convinced—that this idea of consistency—unchanging allegiance to party—has lowered the manhood of the whole nation—pulled it down and dragged it in the mud. When Mr. Blaine was nominated for the Presidency, I knew the man; no, I judged I knew him; I don’t know him now, but at that time I judged I knew him; for my daily paper had been painting him black, and blacker, and blacker still, for a series of years, during which it had no call to speak anything but the truth about him, no call to be malicious toward him, no call to be otherwise than just simply and honestly candid about him, since he belonged to its own party and was not before the nation as a detectable candidate for anything. But within thirty days after the nomination that paper had him all painted up white again. That is not allegiance to one’s best self, one’s straitest convictions; it is allegiance to party. Nobody likes to eat a ton of black paint, and none but the master can make the slave do it. Was this paper alone at this singular feast? No; ten thousand other Republican newspapers sat down at the same table and worried down their ton apiece; and not any fewer than 100,000 more-or-less-prominent politicians sat down all over this country and worried down their ton apiece; and after long, long and bitter gagging, some millions of the common serfdom of the party sat down and worried down their ton apiece. Paint? It was dirt. Enough of it was eaten by the meek Republican party to build a railroad embankment from here to Japan; and it pains me to think that a year from now they will probably have to eat it all over again.
Well, there was a lot of queer feasting done in those days. One learned in the law pondered the Mulligan letters and other frightful literature, and rendered this impressive verdict: he said the evidence would not convict Mr. Blaine in a court of law, and so he would vote for him. He did not say whether the evidences would prove him innocent or not. That wasn’t important.
Now, he knew that this verdict was absolutely inconclusive. He knew that it settled nothing, established nothing whatever, and was wholly valueless as a guide for his action, an answer to his questionings.
He knew that the merciful and righteous barriers raised up by the laws of our humane age for the shelter and protection of the possibly innocent, have often and over again protected and rescued the certainly guilty. He knew that in this way many and many a prisoner has gone unchastised from the court when judge and jury and the whole public believed with all their hearts that he was guilty. He knew—all credit not discredit to our age that it is so—that this result is so frequent, so almost commonplace, that the mere failure to satisfy the exacting forms of law and prove a man guilty in a court, is a hundred thousand miles from proving him innocent. You see a hiccoughing man wallowing in the gutter at two o’clock in the morning; you think the thing all over and weigh the details of it in your mind as you walk home, and with immeasurable wisdom arrive at the verdict that you don’t know he wasn’t a Prohibitionist. Of course you don’t, and if you stop and think a minute you would realize that you don’t know he was, either.
Well, a good clergyman who read the Mulligan and other published evidences was not able to make up his mind, but concluded to take refuge in the verdict rendered by the citizen learned in the law; take his intellectual and moral food at second-hand, though he doesn’t rank as an intellectual infant, unable to chew his own moral and mental nourishment; he decided that an apparently colored person who couldn’t be proven to be black in the baffling crosslights of a court of law was white enough for him, he being a little color blind, anyway, in matters where the party is concerned, and so he came reluctantly to the polls, with his redeeming blush on his countenance, and put in his vote.
I met a certain other clergyman on the corner the day after the nomination. He was very uncompromising. He said: “I know Blaine to the core; I have known him from boyhood up; and I know him to be utterly unprincipled and unscrupulous.” Within six weeks after that, this clergyman was at a Republican mass meeting in the Opera House, and I think he presided. At any rate, he made a speech. If you did not know that the character depicted in it meant Mr. Blaine, you would suppose it meant—well, there isn’t anybody down here on the earth that you can use as a comparison. It is praise, praise, praise; laudation, laudation, laudation; glorification, glorification, canonization. Conceive of the general crash and upheaval and ripping and tearing and readjustment of things that must have been going on in that man’s moral and mental chaos for six weeks! What is any combination of inflammatory rheumatism and St. Vitus’s dance to this? When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man’s moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides? Oh, no! you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that, in spite of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do, when drunk, but most men will do them, just the same, and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter; we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things.
This is a funny business, all round. The same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his Church, or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful—apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is Consistency with a capital C.
With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the Independent—or, as he calls him, with cutting irony, the Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. But—the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back, stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains, of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory. And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world—and never will.
To return to the starting point: I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency—and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around, and is proud to be “consistent,” unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation that he is so.
December 2, 1887