REALIZABLE IDEALS

When I was first asked to deliver this course of lectures I refused just because what I wanted to preach was action. I did not feel sure that I could preach action in five lectures. I finally accepted, because it seemed to me so admirable a thing for the Seminary to have started this kind of a lecture course and so admirable a thing for the founder of the course to have provided for it that I did not feel quite at liberty to refuse.

All our extraordinary material development, our wonderful industrial growth will go for nothing unless with that growth goes hand in hand the moral, the spiritual growth that will enable us to use aright the other as an instrument. I hesitated some time as to exactly what title to give to the lectures I was to deliver because I wanted to use the two titles of Applied Ethics and Realizable Ideals. I chose these titles because they seemed to me to put into words the only spirit which I think counts for anything in preaching, whether by a professional or by an amateur; the spirit which regards preaching as worthless unless transmuted into action. If we treat the study of ethics as a mere intellectual diversion then we probably do ourselves little harm and certainly do ourselves no good. If we consciously or carelessly preach ideals which cannot be realized and which we do not intend to have realized, then so far from accomplishing a worthy purpose we actually tend to weaken the morality we ostensibly preach. Now, anything I have to say to you during these lectures will derive its whole value from the spirit in me as I say it and the spirit in you as you listen to it. If I preach to you anything which I do not strive, with whatever haltings and shortcomings, myself to realize then I am unworthy for you to listen to; and if, on the other hand, you come to listen to me from mere curiosity, or to get a little temporary enjoyment, then you would better have stayed at home.

I chose as the opening lecture this address on realizable ideals, because the longer I have lived the more strongly I have felt the harm done by the practice among so many men of keeping their consciences in separate compartments; sometimes a Sunday conscience and a weekday conscience; sometimes a conscience as to what they say or what they like other people to say, and another conscience as to what they do and like other people to do; sometimes a conscience for their private affairs and a totally different conscience for their business relations. Or again, there may be one compartment in which the man keeps his conscience not only for his domestic affairs but for his business affairs and a totally different compartment in which he keeps his conscience when he deals with public men and public measures.

It has always irritated me when, in whatever capacity, I have attended Sunday School celebrations, to listen to some of the speeches made, and especially when I knew some of the men making them. I have always felt most strongly that it was mischievous and wrong for a man to get up before a number of boys and girls and preach to them to “take no thought of things of the body,” not “to regard their own interests in any way,” to think of “nothing whatever but others,” when they knew that he did not follow any such course of action himself, and when they knew that they themselves could not act and were not expected to act, literally on his words. That kind of a speech does harm, because harm is always done by preaching an ideal which the preacher and the hearer know cannot be followed, which they know it is not intended to have followed; for then the hearer confounds all ideals with the false ideal to which he is listening; and because he finds that he is not expected to live up to the doctrine to which he has listened he concludes that it is needless to live up to any doctrine at all.

Now I do not mean for a moment that the ideal preached should be a low one; I do not mean for a moment that it is ever possible entirely to realize even for the very best man or woman the loftiest ideal; but I do mean that the ideal should not be preached except with sincerity, and that it should be preached in such a fashion as to make it possible measurably to approach it.

Take the Sunday School address of the type to which I object and of which I have just spoken: If you tell a number of boys who are about to become men and go out to earn their own living—if you tell them to despise the things of the body, to care nothing for material success, you are telling them what you would not want your own boys actually to do; you are telling them what they cannot do unless they are willing to become public charges, and what it is not desirable that they should try to do. To tell them such things in the name of morality is to invite them to despise morality. What is necessary is to tell them that their first duty is to earn their own livelihood, to support themselves and those dependent upon them; but that when that first duty has been performed there yet remains a very large additional duty, in the way of service to their neighbor, of service to the rest of mankind.

Again, I have heard men, whose lives have been passed chiefly in amassing money, preach to boys that money was of no real consequence, that they ought to disregard it, that it was really entirely unimportant. Well, those men did not in practice believe what they preached. Curiously enough some of them had for so many years schooled themselves to utter that kind of a sentence when they got on a platform, and to act in such diametrically opposite fashion when they were in their business offices, that they had ceased to become conscious of any incongruity; when they got up to speak they naturally fell into the very vice that represented the negation of the other vice into which they equally naturally fell as soon as they sat down before their counting-desk. Now, it is a false statement, and therefore it is a disservice to the cause of morality, to tell any man that money does not count. If he has not got it he will find that it does count tremendously. If he is worth his salt and is desirous of caring for mother and sisters, wife and children, he will not only find that it counts but he will realize that he has acted with infamy and with baseness if he has not appreciated the fact that it does count. And of course, when I speak of money I mean what money stands for. It counts tremendously. No man has any right to the respect of his fellows if through any fault of his own he has failed to keep those dependent upon him in reasonable comfort. It is his duty not to despise money. It is his duty to regard money, up to the point where his wife and children and any other people dependent upon him have food, clothing, shelter, decent surroundings, the chance for the children to get a decent education, the chance for the children to train themselves to do their life work aright, a chance for wife and children to get reasonable relaxation. Now practically, as regards his or her own family, I doubt if there is anyone here who would deny that proposition. It is so obvious that it seems needless to put it before you; and yet how often do we listen to a man on a platform like this, saying, because it is the conventional thing to say, “pay no heed to money.” Now, of course, when such a preacher says “pay no heed to money” his hearers at once accept what he is about to say further as insincere; and, whether they pay heed to money or not, they pay no further heed to what he says about it.

It is not a realizable ideal, to “pay no heed to money.” You must pay heed up to the point I have indicated. But it is a realizable ideal, after you have once reached that point, to understand that money is merely a means to an end, and that if you make it the end instead of a means you do little good to yourself and are a curse to everybody else. It is a realizable ideal, to make people understand that while it is their first duty to pull their own weight in the world, yet that after they have achieved a certain amount of prosperity both their capacity for usefulness toward others and their capacity for enjoyment depends infinitely more on other things than upon possessing additional money.

Now, the very fact that I grant in the fullest degree the need of having enough money, which means the need of sufficient material achievement to enable you and those dependent upon you to lead your lives healthily and under decent conditions—the very fact that I grant this as the essential first need to meet, entitles me to have you accept what I say at its face value when I add that this represents only the beginning, and that after you have reached this point your worth as a unit in the commonwealth, your worth to others and your worth to yourself, depends infinitely less upon having additional money than it depends upon your possessing certain other things, things of the soul and the spirit.

I could not overstate the grinding misery, the heart-breaking misery, I have seen come to a family where the man is unable quite to do what he ought to for those dependent upon him. But after the man and the woman have reached the point where they have a home in which the elemental needs are met and where in addition they have accumulated a comparatively small amount of money necessary to meet the primal needs of the spirit and of the intellect—after this point is reached it is my deliberate judgment that money, instead of being the prime factor, is one of the minor factors, both in usefulness and in happiness. Always keep in mind my first proviso—I am not going to repeat it to you—as to the necessity of having enough money. But go beyond that; for beyond that, the difference between the multi-millionaire and the man of very moderate fortune is in the vast majority of cases really a difference of appearance and not of reality as regards both usefulness and happiness. The chief harm that the multi-millionaire does in my mind comes not in his joining with others to make a trust—although when he does that I will try to regulate him—and it is not in the fact that in him as in other men there is, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “a deal of human nature,” so that he is sometimes very good and sometimes not good at all; it is that he is apt to give to the rest of us a thoroughly false ideal. The worst ill that can befall us is to have our own souls corrupted, and it is a debasing thing for a nation to choose as its heroes the men of mere wealth.

I remember a number of years ago seeing a pleasant and very happy little community very nearly ruined—and as regards many of the families completely ruined—because an entirely amiable multi-millionaire moved into the neighborhood. I really think that his amiability and his perfectly sincere desire to be pleasant with everyone was one of the causes of the mischief. I know, for instance, a very nice woman there, with a charming little house, who, having been asked to dinner at the very gorgeous mansion of this worthy soul of many millions, naturally wished to entertain him and his wife in return. But, alas, she was perfectly wretched when it actually came to entertaining them in her house; she was not willing to have the hired girl wait on the table; she had to have a butler, and then she had to live up to the butler. And the funny thing was instead of giving the multi-millionaire a perfectly pleasant time in her own fashion, which she could have done, she merely gave him a dreary tenth-rate imitation of his own feasts. Instead of putting herself in a totally different class, so that there could be no competition between them at all, she insisted on competing in a class where she was certain to get the worst of it. After two or three years of the millionaire’s residence in the neighborhood there were not a few families who had suffered either some permanent damage or grave temporary discomfort, not from any fault of the millionaire, but because they themselves had been foolish. Now, I don’t want to preach against the millionaire; but I do want to preach against us if we let him make us spoil ourselves—that’s all.

I wish us to understand better than we now do what are the real things and what are the artificial things of life. I wish us to get a better perspective. Take even the average educational institution; if a very wealthy man visits it altogether too many of the boys look at him with eager interest, as a man that has had just the career that they intend to emulate; and altogether too many of the girls think that they would like to marry into his class! Now, in that case, I don’t blame him at all; I think it merely adds to our sin, to our iniquity, if we blame him instead of ourselves for the feelings, not that he has about us, but that we have about him. But I do blame ourselves; I blame us if we do not have a proper sense of perspective, if we fail to pay honor to the people who are entitled to it. I do not wonder that a great many men make of money-getting their one ideal when so many of their fellow countrymen treat success in making money as the chief kind of success.

When America’s history is written, when the history of the last century in America is written a hundred years hence, the name of no multi-millionaire, who is nothing but a multi-millionaire, will appear in that history, unless it appears in some foot-note to illustrate some queer vagary or extravagance. The men who will loom large in our history are the men of real achievement of the kind that counts. You can go over them—statesmen, soldiers, wise philanthropists—I wish to underscore the word “wise,” for the philanthropist who is really worth calling such is the man who tries to make such use of his philanthropy as to provide against the need of philanthropy in the future, just as the real worker in charity is the worker who does his best to bring about conditions in which charity shall not be necessary. The statesman, the writer, the man of science, of letters, of art, these are the men who will leave their mark on history.

When you look back and think of the Civil War, what lives of those who then lived would you, if you had a chance, like yourselves to have lived? Not the lives of the sordid souls who stayed at home and made money out of the Civil War; not even the lives of those men who were not sordid, who acted honorably in their private business at home, but who did not have the opportunity and privilege of going to the front. The lives that you respect, the lives that you wish your fathers or forefathers to have led, are those of the men who in the time of the Nation’s trial each endeavored to render all the service that could possibly be rendered to the nation. Those are the men of the past to whose memory we look up, of whose fame we as Americans are jealous, whose good deeds we would like to emulate. Now, that is our attitude toward the past; I ask that we make it also our attitude in the present.

I wish it distinctly to be understood that I have not the smallest prejudice against multi-millionaires. I like them. But I always feel this way when I meet one of them: You have made millions—good; that shows you must have something in you, I wish you would show it.

I do regard it as a realizable ideal for our people as a whole to demand, not of the millionaire—not at all—but of their own children and of themselves, that they shall get the millionaire in his proper perspective, and when they once do that ninety-five per cent of what is undesirable in the power of the millionaire will disappear. I shall speak of the other five per cent in a minute or two; but I am speaking now of much the larger part of what makes him undesirable; and much of that larger part is not in him at all, it is in us; it is in the emotions we permit the sight of him to produce in us.

Now, a word to my fellow reformers. If they permit themselves to adopt an attitude of hate and envy toward the millionaire they are just about as badly off as if they adopt an attitude of mean subservience to him. It is just as much a confession of inferiority to feel mean hatred and defiance of a man as it is to feel a mean desire to please him overmuch. In each case it means that the man having the emotion is not confident in himself, that he lacks self-confidence, self-reliance, that he does not stand on his own feet; and, therefore, in each case it is an admission that the man is not as good as the man whom he hates and envies, or before whom he truckles.

So that I shall preach as an ideal neither to truckle to nor to hate the man of mere wealth, because if you do either you admit your inferiority in reference to him; and if you admit that you are inferior as compared to him you are no good American, you have no place in this Republic. So that from our standpoint toward the millionaire ninety-five per cent of the damage he can do us is subjective and not objective; that is to say, it rests with us and not with him.

There remains the five per cent of harm that he can do us for which we are not responsible. Up to this point I have been preaching to us about him. Now I want to say a word or two to him, to the man of great wealth. The mere acquisition of wealth in and by itself, beyond a certain point, speaks very little indeed for the man compared with success in most other lines of endeavor. I want you to weigh the words that I have used—the mere acquisition of wealth in itself. I know that there are many men who have made great fortunes where the making of the great fortune has been an incident to the doing of a great task, where the man has really been at least as much interested in the task as in the fortune. It is a great epic feat to drive a railroad across a continent; it is a great epic feat to build up a business worth building. For the man who performs that feat I have a genuine regard. For the man who makes a great fortune as an incident to rendering a great service I have nothing but admiration—although unfortunately the men who are entitled to our regard, and a little more—to our admiration—for the feats that they have thus done, have too often forfeited all right to that regard and admiration and more than forfeited it by the course that they have afterwards, or coincidently, pursued in regard to money making or in other matters. Furthermore the wealthy men who make money which does not represent service are public enemies; we are bound to make war against every form of special privilege.

We have now definitely accepted as axiomatic the fact that in this country we have to control the use of enormous aggregations of wealth in business. But no great industrial chief should be content to do only so much as is necessary to keep within the law. He may be “law honest,” and yet be a sinister enemy of the commonwealth.

One great realizable ideal for our people is to discourage mere law honesty. It is necessary to have good laws and to have them well enforced. But the best laws and the most rigid enforcement will not by themselves produce a really healthy type of morals in the community. In addition to the law and its enforcement we must have the public opinion which frowns on the man who violates the spirit of the law even although he keeps just within the letter. I cannot tell you any one way in which that feeling can be made to carry weight. I think it must find expression in a dozen different ways. Later in one of these lectures I shall discuss the organs of public opinion and public expression—the press and the magazines. When they more measurably reach the ideal they ought to, we shall be able to grapple more effectually with the man of wealth who fails in his duty than we do at present. But without waiting for that day, we should strive to create in the community the sense of proportion which will make us respect the decent man who does well, and condemn the man who does not act decently and who does wrong.

The other day a sentence was uttered in the Senate by a certain Senator which I thought was fraught—quite unconsciously fraught—with a lesson for all of us. The Senator in question had been engaged in an impassioned speech on behalf of Mr. Lorimer, and in speaking of some of the unsavory creatures who had testified in the case he said in answer to a question, “Yes, they were fools as well as knaves,” and that in his experience all knaves were fools.

That is not so. This Senator was giving expression to a very unhealthy attitude of the public mind, the tendency to treat as a knave only the foolish knave, and to pardon the wise knave who managed to succeed in his villainy. We shall never come near realizing the very realizable ideal of honesty in business and public life until we make it evident that the scoundrel whom we hate most is not the scoundrel who fails but the scoundrel who succeeds. The scoundrel who fails is condemned by everyone and is laughed at by his fellow-knaves. It is the scoundrel who wins out that is the menace to this Republic, the menace to this great commonwealth of ours. Let us so shape our laws as to make it difficult for the scoundrel to succeed, and to give us at least a reasonable chance of punishing him after he succeeds. In addition to this, let us also, each of us individually and all of us collectively, strive to create the kind of public opinion which will make the success of such a scoundrel hardly worth having. The dullest man, the man with the thickest skin, does not enjoy very much a success which brings on him the scorn of his fellows. The old Greek proverb was that “contempt would pierce the shell of a tortoise,” and whatever our people really scorn, really despise, really condemn, is something that the knaves among us rarely care to have. When we can create the public opinion which will mean that the average honest man turns away from the successful knave one of the prime incentives for being a successful knave will have vanished.

To that end, friends, I again wish to say that we must hold up an ideal that can be realized. If we use language which would go to show that we regard success and failure in the business world as of indifference, then we shall merely convince every man in that world that we are speaking insincerely. You do not regard success and failure with indifference. You do not regard the man who fails and the man who succeeds as standing on the same plane; and as long as you do not so regard it, tell the truth about it. No man ever permanently helped a reform by lying on behalf of the reform. Tell the truth about it; and then you can expect to be believed when you tell further truths; the truth that business success, though an admirable thing, up to a certain point an absolutely necessary thing, is beyond that point not as admirable as some other things; and the truth that business success obtained, not by serving your fellows but by swindling your fellows, is an infamy and is to be so regarded by all honest men.

Realizable ideals; we must have them in private and in public life both. I have already told you of one type of sermon to which I strongly object. There is another type to which I object almost as strongly, and that is the sermon which in its condemnation of innocent pleasure tends to make men confound vice and pleasure. I heartily abhor the man who practices vice because he regards it as the only kind of enjoyment. I do not abhor quite as much, but I at least as much despise, the clergyman who makes ready the path for such a man by condemning indiscriminately innocent enjoyment and vice. It is not only harmless, but it is eminently desirable, that young people should have a good time.

What we wish for ourselves, and have a right to wish for ourselves I want to see us preach towards others. If you persuade the average boy that it is wicked to have a good time, it may have either one of two results: if he is a very sensitive boy it may prevent him from ever having a good time, in which case I will guarantee that he makes all those intimately associated with him have a very bad time; or else, you may persuade him that inasmuch as he thoroughly intends to have a good time, and as a good time is wicked—why, in for a lamb, in for a sheep, and he will be wicked to some purpose. I ask here again that not only every clergyman but every teacher of morals—and that ought to include every father who is worth being called father—endeavor to help the boy in getting a good time; and then hold him to a rigid accountability if he turns that good time into a bad time.

This illustrates just what I mean by a realizable ideal. Don’t preach the impossible. Don’t preach what makes your hearers think you are insincere. But have ideals and insist on their realization. If this nation has not the right kind of ideal in every walk of life, if we have not in our souls the capacity for idealism, the power to strive after ideals, then we are gone. No nation ever amounted to anything if it did not have within its soul the power of fealty to a lofty ideal. For that very reason it is our duty to avoid preaching false ideals, and with almost equal scrupulousness to avoid preaching, as desirable, ideals which cannot be measurably attained.

I am to deliver four more lectures, and I wish in these lectures to speak of applied ethics, of realizable ideals; in the first place in the family, because that is the foundation of everything; in the next place in public life—which means in the collective life of all of us, in the life lived on behalf of all of us; and finally as regards the expression of public opinion, as regards the instruments that should do most to shape public opinion—the press, the magazines. In each of those four lectures I shall endeavor to show you why I believe we should change certain of the ideals we now have, and why I believe we should in every way, and, above all, by the force of public opinion, insist that the realizable ideal be actually realized in practice.