Passages from Democracy and Social Ethics

The bill for a corrupt city is addressed to everyone who lives in it.

We are all involved in this political corruption, and as members of the community stand indicted. This is the penalty of a democracy—that we are bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can stand aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air.

Doing good to people is a way of never having to ask them anything.

By the very exigencies of business demands, the employer is too often cut off from the social ethics developing in regard to our larger social relationships, and from the great moral life springing from our common experiences. This is sure to happen when he is good “to” people rather than “with” them, when he allows himself to decide what is best for them instead of consulting them. He thus misses the rectifying influence of that fellowship which is so big that it leaves no room for sensitiveness or gratitude. Without this fellowship we may never know how great the divergence between ourselves and others may become, nor how cruel the misunderstandings.

What a child finds thrilling is a map of the world it lives in.

In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents took fifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by their apathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with an omnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to find them galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by. Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning: “Was it a man or a woman?” “How many policemen inside?” and eager little tongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes had witnessed.

Goodness has a dress code, and it has been keeping people away.

The wide divergence of experience makes it difficult for the good citizen to understand this point of view, and many things conspire to make it hard for him to act upon it. He is more or less a victim to that curious feeling so often possessed by the good man, that the righteous do not need to be agreeable, that their goodness alone is sufficient, and that they can leave the arts and wiles of securing popular favor to the self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonly regarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible for the fatal mistake of making the surroundings of “good influences” singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimand quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the surroundings of “evil influences” so beguiling.

We preserve old buildings and forget who built the machines inside them.

We apparently believe that the workingman has no chance to realize life through his vocation. We easily recognize the historic association in regard to ancient buildings. We say that “generation after generation have stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them, until they have become the property of all.” And yet this is even more true of the instruments of labor, which have constantly been held in human hands. A machine really represents the “seasoned life of man” preserved and treasured up within itself, quite as much as an ancient building does. At present, workmen are brought in contact with the machinery with which they work as abruptly as if the present set of industrial implements had been newly created. They handle the machinery day by day, without any notion of its gradual evolution and growth.

Cleanliness, it turns out, can be a form of taking rather than giving.

The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little house made untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is no longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained only through status.

What the rich display in public decides what the poor must own.

The charity visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar to spend much money upon clothes, to care so much for “appearances.” She realizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one’s home or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she is silenced by its obvious need. She also catches a glimpse of the fact that the disproportionate expenditure of the poor in the matter of clothes is largely due to the exclusiveness of the rich who hide from them the interior of their houses, and their more subtle pleasures, while of necessity exhibiting their street clothes and their street manners. Everyone who goes shopping at the same time may see the clothes of the richest women in town, but only those invited to her receptions see the Corot on her walls or the bindings in her library.

One man's den of horrors is another man's lender of last resort.

Because of this diversity in experience, the visitor is continually surprised to find that the safest platitude may be challenged. She refers quite naturally to the “horrors of the saloon,” and discovers that the head of her visited family does not connect them with “horrors” at all. He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the free lunch and treating which goes on, even when a man is out of work and not able to pay up; the loan of five dollars he got there when the charity visitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction. He may listen politely to her reference to “horrors,” but considers it only “temperance talk.”

The place where people actually lose their sense of isolation is not the museum.

If we agree with a recent definition of Art, as that which causes the spectator to lose his sense of isolation, there is no doubt that the popular theatre, with all its faults, more nearly fulfils the function of art for the multitude of working people than all the “free galleries” and picture exhibits combined.