Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/448

 43 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

singing his baby to sleep, and stopped to lay it in its cradle before he rushed down-stairs into his father's saloon, to scatter the gang of boys who were teasing the old man by giving him orders in English which he could not understand, and refusing to pay for the drinks which they had consumed, but technically had not ordered.

For one short moment I saw the situation from the point of view of humbler people, who sin often through weakness and passion, but seldom through hardness of heart; and I felt that such sweeping condemnations and conclusions as the speaker was pouring forth could never be accounted for righteousness in a democratic community.

The policeman who makes terms with vice, and almost inevitably slides into making gain from vice, merely represents the type of politician who is living off the weakness of his fellows, as the overzealous reformer, who exaggerates vice until the public is scared and awestruck, represents the type of politician who is living off the timidity of his fellows. With the lack of civic machinery for simple democratic expression, for a direct dealing with human nature as it is, we seem doomed to one type or the other corruptionists or anti-crime committees. And one sort or the other we shall continue to have so long as we distrust the very energy of existence, the craving for enjoyment, the pushing of vital forces, the very right of every citizen to be what he is, without pretense or assumption of virtues which he does not really admire himself, but which he imagines to have been set up as a standard somewhere else by the virtuous whom he does not know. That old Frankenstein, that ideal man of the eighteenth century, is still haunting us, although he never existed save in the brain of the doctrinaire.

This dramatic and feverish triumph of the self-seeker, see- sawing with that of the interested reformer, does more than anything else, perhaps, to keep the American citizen away from the ideals of genuine evolutionary democracy. Whereas repress- ive government, from the nature of the case, has to do with the wicked, who are happily always in a minority in the community a normal government would have to do with the great majority of the population in their normal relations to each other.