Christmas and the Spirit of Democracy - Samuel McChord Crothers

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Christmas and the Spirit of Democracy by Samuel mc cord
Cruthers from By the Christmas Fire, November nineteen o eight.
Times have changed, said old Scrooge as he sat by
my fireside on Christmas Eve. The Christmas Carol had been

(00:20):
read as our custom was, and the children had gone
to bed, so that only Scrooge and I remained to
watch the dying embers. Times have changed, and I am
not appreciated as I was in the middle of the
last century. People don't seem to be having so good
a time. You remember the Christmas when I was converted,

(00:44):
what larks. Up to that time, I had been a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,
covetous old sinner. Those were the very words that described me.
Then the Christmas spirit took possession of me, and presto
change all at once. I became a new creature. I

(01:08):
began to hurry about, giving all sorts of things to
all sorts of people. You remember how I scattered turkeys
over the neighborhood, shouting, here's the turkey, hallo, whoop, how
are you merry Christmas? And then I sat down and
chuckled over my generosity till I cried. I was having

(01:28):
the time of my life. You see, I hadn't been
used to that sort of thing, and it went to
my head. And how grateful everybody was. They took everything
in the spirit in which it was offered and asked
no questions. Everywhere there was an outstretched hand and a

(01:49):
fervent God, bless you for every gift. Nobody twitted me
about my past. I was all at once elevated to
the position of an earthly providence hum talk of fun.
Was there ever such a practical joke as to scare
Bob Cratchett within an inch of his life and then
raise his salary before he could say, Jack Robinson? You

(02:12):
should have seen him jump? How the little Cratchetts shouted
for joy? And when the thing was written up, all
Anglo Saxondom was smiling through its tears and saying, that's
just like us, God bless us everyone. But it's different now.
Something has got into the Christmas spirit. Doing good doesn't

(02:35):
seem such a jolly thing as it once was, and
you can't carry it off with a whoop and a hello.
People are getting critical in these days. A charitable shilling
doesn't go so far as it used to. It doesn't
buy nearly so many God, bless yous. You complain of
the rise in the price of the necessaries of life,

(02:58):
it isn't a circumstance to the increase in the cost
of the luxuries. Like benevolence, almost everyone looks forward to
the time when he can afford to be generous, and
when he is generous, he likes to feel generous and
to have other people sympathize with him. It's only human nature.
A man can't be thinking about himself all the time.

(03:21):
He gets that tired feeling that your scientific people in
these days call altruism. It is an inability to concentrate
his mind on his own concerns in spite of himself,
his thoughts wander off to other people's affairs, and he
has an impulse to do them good. Now in my day,

(03:41):
it was the easiest thing in the world to do
them good. The only thing necessary was to feel good natured,
and there you were. Nowadays, the way of the benefactor
is hard. It's so difficult that I understand you actually
have schools of philanthropy. Huge shrugged his shoulders and seemed

(04:02):
to shrivel at the thought of these horrible institutions just fancy.
He continued. How I should have felt on that blessed
Christmas night if, instead of starting off as an amateur angel,
feeling my wings growing every moment, I had been compelled
to prepare for an entrance examination, I suppose I should

(04:27):
have been put with the backward pupils whose early education
had been neglected, and should have had to learn the A. B.
C's of charity school of philanthropy. Ugh, And in the
holidays too, I have been visiting some elderly gentlemen who
have had something of my experience with the spirit of Christmas.

(04:50):
Like me, they were converted somewhat late in life. They
never were in as bad a way as I was.
For I did business, you may remember, in a narrow
street with quite sordid surroundings, while they were financiers in
a large way. Yet I suppose that they too were squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,

(05:14):
covetous old sinners, though nobody had the courage to tell
them so. Then they got tired of clutching, and their
hearts warmed and their hands relaxed, and they began to give.
Never was such giving known before. It was a perfect
deluge of beneficence. A mere catalog of the gifts would

(05:36):
make a Christmas Carol of itself. But would you believe it?
They never have got the fun out of it that
I got when I filled the cab full of turkeys
and set out for Camden Town. The old Christmas feeling
seems to have been chilled. The public has grown critical.

(05:56):
Instead of dancing for joy, it looks suspiciously at the
gifts and asks where did they get them? It has
been so impressed by the germ theory of disease that
it foolishly fears that even money may be tainted. It's
a preposterous situation. Generosity is a drug on the market,

(06:17):
and gratitude can't be had at any reasonable price. Yes,
I said, you are quite right. Public sentiment has changed.
Gratitude is not so easily won as it was in
your day, and it takes longer to transform a clutching,
covetous old sinner into a serviceable philanthropist. But I do

(06:37):
not think Scrooge that the Christmas spirit has really vanished.
He is only a little chastened and subdued by the
spirit of democracy. I don't see what democracy has to
do with it, said Scrooge. I'm sure that nobody ever
accused me of being an aristocrat. What I am troubled
about is the decay of gratitude. If I give a

(07:00):
poor fellow a shilling, I ought to be allowed the
satisfaction of having him remove his hat and say, thankye sir,
and he ought to say it is if he meant it.
The heartiness of his thanksgiving is half the fun. It
makes one feel good all over. But I answered, if
that fellow happens to have a good memory, he may

(07:23):
recall the fact that yesterday you took two shillings from him,
and he may think that the proper response to your
sudden act of generosity is where's that other shilling? That's
what the spirit of democracy puts him up to. It's
not so polite, but you must admit that it goes
right to the point. I don't like it, said Scrooge.

(07:45):
I thought you wouldn't. There are a great many people
who don't like it. It's a twitting on facts that
takes away a good deal of the pleasure of being generous.
I should say it did, grumbled Scrooge. It makes you
feel mean, just when you are most sensitive. Just think

(08:05):
how I should have felt if, when I gave Bob
Cratchit a dig in the waistcoat and told him that
I had raised his salary, he had taken the opportunity
to ask for back pay. It would have been most inopportune.
You owed it to him, didn't you. Yes, I suppose

(08:27):
I did, if you choose to put it that way.
But Bob wouldn't have put it that way. He wouldn't
take such liberties. He took what I gave him, and
when I gave him more than he expected, he was
all the happier, and so was I. That's what made
it all seem so nice and christmasy. We were not
thinking about rights and duties. It was all free grace. Now, Scrooge,

(08:53):
you are getting at the point. There is no concealing
the fact that the spirit of democracy makes himself unpleasant.
So he breaks up the old pleasant relations existing not
only between the lords and the commons, but between you
and Bob Cratchett. Man is naturally a superstitious creature, and
is prone to worship the first thing that comes in

(09:15):
his way. When a poor fellow sees a person who
is better off than himself. He jumps to the conclusion
that he is a better man, and bows down before
him as before a wonder working providence. When this providence
smiles upon him, he is glad and receives the bounty
with devout thankfulness. It is what the theologians used to

(09:37):
call an uncovenanted mercy. All this is very pleasant to
one who can sign himself by the grace of God,
king or president of a coal company, or some such
thing as that the gratification extends to all the minor
grades of greatness as well. The great man is ordained

(09:57):
to give as it pleaseth him, and the little man
to receive with due meekness. The great man is always
the man who has something. I suppose Scrooge, that in
your busy life, first scraping money together and then dispensing
it in your joyous christmasy way, you have not had
much time for general reading, or even for listening to sermons.

(10:21):
I have always attended divine service since my conversion, answered
Scrooge piously. As for listening. What I was going to
say was that if you had attended to such matters,
you must have noticed how much of the literature of
goodwill is devoted to the praise of the blessed inequalities.

(10:42):
How the changes are wrong on the strong and the weak,
the wise and the ignorant, the rich and the poor,
especially the poor, who formed the hub of the philanthropic universe.
Nobody seems to meet another on the level. Everybody is
either looking up or looking down, and they are taught

(11:02):
how to do it. I remember attending the annual meeting
of the Society for the Relief of Indigent Children. The
indigent children were first fed and then insulted by a
plethoric gentleman who addressed to them a long discourse on
indigence and the various duties that it entailed. And no

(11:23):
one of the children was allowed to throw things at
the speaker. They had all been taught to look grateful.
Now these inequalities do exist, and so long as they exist,
all sorts of helpful offices have their place. The trouble
is that good people are all the time doing their
best to make these inequalities permanent. You have heard how

(11:47):
divines have interpreted the text The Poor Ye have always
with you. The good old doctrine has been that the
relation between those who have not, and those who have
should be that of one side dependence. The ignorant must
depend upon the wise, the weak upon the strong, the
poor upon the rich. As for the black, yellow, and

(12:09):
various party colored races, they must depend upon the white man,
who gaily walks off with their burdens without so much
as saying, by your leave. Now. It is against this
whole theory, however beautifully or piously expressed, that the protest
has come. The spirit of Democracy is a bold iconoclast,

(12:30):
and goes about smashing our idols. He laughs at the
pretensions of the strong, and the wise and the rich
to have created the things they possess. They are not
the masters of the feast. They are only those of
us who have got to the head of the line,
sometimes by unmannerly pushing, and have secured a place at

(12:50):
the first table. We are not here by their leave,
and we may go directly to the source of supplies.
They are not benefactors, but beneficiaries. The Spirit of Democracy
insists that they shall know their place. He rebukes even
the captains of industry, and when they answer insolently, he

(13:12):
suggests that they be reduced to the ranks, even toward
bishops and other clergy. His manner lacks that perfect reverence
that belonged to in earlier time, yet he listens to
them respectfully when they talk sense. It is this spirit
that plays the mischief with many of the merry old
ways of doing good. To scatter turkeys or colleges among

(13:35):
a multitude of gratefully dependent folks is the very poetry
of philanthropy. But to satisfy the curiosity of an independent
citizen as to your title to these things is a
very different matter. The more independent people are, the harder
it is to do good to them. They are apt
to have their own ideas of what they want. It's

(13:59):
a pity, And to have them get so independent, said Scrooge,
It spoils people to get above their proper station in life. Ah,
there you are, I answered. I feared it would come
to that. With all your exuberant goodwill, you haven't altogether
got beyond the theory that has come down from the

(14:20):
time when the first cave dweller bestowed on his neighbor
the bone he himself didn't need, and established the pleasant
relation of benefactor and beneficiary. It gave him such a
warm feeling in his heart that he naturally wanted to
make the relation permanent. First cave dweller felt a little
disappointed next day when second cave dweller, instead of coming

(14:44):
to him for another bone, preferred to take his pointed
stick and go hunting on his own account. It seemed
a little ungrateful of him, and first cave dweller felt
that it would be no more than right to arrange
legislation in the cave so that this should not happen again.
Christian charity is a very beautiful thing, but sometimes it

(15:06):
gets mixed up with these ideas of the cave dwellers.
Sometimes it perpetuates the very evils that it laments. Perhaps
you won't mind my reading a bit from a homily
of Saint Augustine on this very subject. Saint Augustine was
a man who was a good many centuries ahead of
his time. He begins his argument by saying, all love,

(15:29):
dear brethren, consists in wishing well to those who are loved.
This seems like a harmless proposition. It is the sort
of thing you might hear in a sermon and think
no more about. But Saint Augustine goes to the root
of the matter and asks what it means to wish
well to the person you are trying to help. He

(15:50):
comes to the conclusion that if you really wish him well,
you must wish him to be at least as well
off and as well able to take care of himself
as you are. The first thing, you know, you are
wishing to have him reach a point where he will
not look up to you at all. Saint Augustine continued,
there is a certain friendliness by which we desire, at

(16:12):
one time or another to do good to those we love.
But how if there be no good that we can do?
We ought not to wish men to be wretched, so
that we may be enabled to practice works of mercy.
Thou givest bread to the hungry. But better were it
that none hungered, and thou hadst none to give too.

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Thou clothest the naked, Oh, that all men were clothed,
and that this need existed. Not take away the wretched,
and the works of mercy will be at an end.
But shall the ardor of charity be quenched with a
truer touch of love? Thou lovest the happy man, to
whom there is no good office that thou canst do

(16:57):
purer will that love be and more on alloyed. For
if thou hast done a kindness to the wretched, perhaps
thou wishest him to be subject to thee he was
in need. Thou didst bestow, Thou seemest to thyself greater
because thou didst bestow than he upon whom it was bestowed.

(17:18):
Wish him to be thine equal. There, Scrooge, is the
little text for the little Christmas sermon that I should
like to preach to you and to your elderly wealthy friends,
who feel that they are not so warmly appreciated as
they once were. Wish him to be thine equal. That
is the test of charity. It is all right to

(17:41):
give a poor devil a turkey, But are you anxious
that he shall have as good a chance as you
have to buy a turkey for himself? Are you really
enthusiastic about so equalizing opportunities that by and by you
shall be surrounded by happy, self reliant people who have
no need of your benefactions? Do you know, Scrooge? I

(18:02):
sometimes think that it is time for someone to write
a new Christmas carol, a carol that will make the
world know how people are feeling, and some of the
best things they are doing in these days. It should
be founded on justice and not on mercy. We should
feed up Bob Cratchett and put some courage into him,
and he should come to you and ask a living wage,

(18:24):
not as a favor, but as a right, and you, Scrooge,
would not be offended at him, but you would sit
down like a sensible man and figure it out with him.
And when the talk was over, you wouldn't feel particularly generous,
and he wouldn't feel particularly grateful. It would be simple business,
but you would like each other better and the business

(18:46):
would seem more worth while. And then when you went
out with the spirit of Christmas, you would ask the
spirit of democracy to go with you and show you
the new things that are most worth seeing. He wouldn't
wait for the night, for the cheeriest things would be
those that go on during business hours. He would show
you some sights to make your heart glad. He would

(19:09):
show you vast numbers of persons who have got tired
of the worship of the blessed inequalities, and who are
going in for the equalities. They have a suspicion that
there is not so much difference between the great and
the small, as has been supposed, and that what difference
there is does not prevent a frank comradeship and a
perfect understanding. They think it is better to work with

(19:32):
people than to work for them. They think that one
of the inalienable rights of man is the right to
make his own mistakes and to learn the lesson from
them without too much prompting. So they are a little
shy of many of the more intrusive forms of philanthropy,
but you should see what they are up to. The
Spirit of democracy will take you to visit a school

(19:55):
that is not at all like the school you used
to go to. Scrooge the teacher forgotten his rod and
his rules and his airs of superiority. He is not
teaching at all, so far as you can see. He
is the center of a group of eager learners who
are using their own wits and not depending on his.
They are so busy observing, comparing, reasoning, and finding out

(20:19):
things for themselves that he can hardly get in a
word edgewise. And he seems to like it. Though it
is clear that if they keep on at this rate,
they will soon get ahead of their teacher, and the
spirit of democracy will take you to a children's court,
where the judge does not seem like a judge at all,
but like a big brother who shows the boys what

(20:40):
they ought to do and sees that they do it.
He will take you to a little republic where boys
and girls who have defied laws that they did not understand,
are making laws of their own and enforcing them in
a way that makes the ordinary citizen feel ashamed of himself.
They do it all so naturally that you wonder that no, no,
but he has thought of this plan before. He will

(21:03):
take you to pleasant houses in unpleasant parts of the city,
and there you will meet pleasant young people who are
having a very good time with their neighbors, and who
are getting to be rather proud of their neighborhood. After
you have had a cup of tea, they may talk
over with you the neighborhood problems. If you have any
sensible suggestion to make, these young people will listen to you.

(21:25):
But if you begin to talk condescendingly about the poor,
they will change the subject. They are not philanthropists, they
are only neighbors. I hope he may take you, Scrooge.
This spirit of democracy to some of the charity organizations
I know about. I realize that you are prejudiced against

(21:46):
that sort of thing. It seems so cold and calculating
compared with your impulsive way of doing good. And you
will probably quote the lines about organized charity scrimped and
iced in the name of a cautious, statistical Christ. Never
mind about the statistics. They only mean that these people

(22:08):
are doing business on a larger scale than did the
good people who could carry all the details in their heads.
What I want you to notice is the way in
which the scientific interest does away with the patronizing pity,
which was the hardest thing to bear in the old
time charities. These modern experts go about mending broken fortunes

(22:29):
in very much the same way in which surgeons mend
broken bones. The patient doesn't feel under any oppressive weight
of obligation. He has given them such a good opportunity
to show their skill, and the doctors have caught the
spirit too. Instead of looking wise and waiting for people
to come to them in the last extremity, they have

(22:51):
enlisted in social service. You should see them going about
opening windows and forcing people to poke their heads out
into the night air, and making landlords miserable by their
calculations about cubic feet and investigating sweat shops and analyzing
food stuffs. It's their way of bringing in a merry Christmas.

(23:14):
And the spirit of democracy will take you to workshops
where you may see the new kind of captain of
industry in friendly consultation with the new kind of labor leader.
For the new captain is not a chief of banditti,
interested only in the booty he can get for himself,
and the new leader is not a conspirator waiting for

(23:34):
a chance to plunge his knife into the more successful
bandits back. These two are responsible members of a great
industrial army, and they realize their responsibility. They have not
met to exchange compliments. They are not sentimentalists, but shrewd
men of affairs who have met to plan a campaign
for the commonwealfare. They don't take any credit for it,

(23:57):
for they do not expect to give to any man
any more more than is his due. Yet there are
a good many Christmas Dinners involved in these cool, business
like consultations. Afterward, the spirit of democracy will take you
to a church where the minister is preaching from the text.
Ye are all kings and priests as if he believed it,

(24:19):
and you will believe it too, and go on your
way wondering at the many sacred offices in the world.
You will hurry on from the church to shake hands
with a new kind of politician. He is not the
dignified statesman you have read about and admired from afar Off,
who has every qualification for high office except the ability

(24:40):
to get himself elected. This man knows the game of politics.
He is not fastidious, and likes nothing better than to
be in the thick of a scrimmage. He has not
the scholar's scorn of the aggregate mind. He thinks that
it is a very good kind of mind, if it
is only rightly interpreted. He has the idea that what

(25:00):
all of us want is better than what some few
of us want, and that when all of us make
up our minds to work together, we can get what
we want without asking anybody's leave. He thinks that what
all of us want is fair play, and so he
goes straight for that, without much regard for the special interests.
It is a simple program, but it's wonderful what a

(25:22):
difference it makes. There never was a time Scrooge. When
the message of good will was so widely interpreted in action,
or when it took hold of so many kinds of men,
perhaps you wouldn't mind my reading another little bit from
Saint Augustine. Two are those to whom thou doest alms
two hunger, one for bread, the other for righteousness. Between

(25:47):
these two famishing persons, Thou, the doer of the good work,
art set The one craves what he may eat, the
other craves what he may imitate. Thou feedest the one,
give thyself as a pattern to the other. So hast
thou given to both. The one thou hast cause to
thank THEE for satisfying his hunger. The other thou hast

(26:11):
made to imitate THEE by setting him a worthy example.
It is this hunger for simple justice that is the
great thing, and there are people who are giving their
whole lives to satisfy it. What we need is to
realize what it all means, and to get that joyous
thrill over it that came to you when you found

(26:31):
for the first time that life consisted not in getting
but in giving. It's a wonderful giving, this giving of
one's self and people do appreciate it. When you have
ministered to a person's self respect, when you have contributed
to his self reliance, when you have inspired him to
self help, you have given him something, and you are

(26:54):
conscious of it, and so is he. Though you both
find it hard to express in the old terms, all
the old Christmas cheer is in these reciprocities of friendship
that have lost every touch of condescension. We need some
genial imagination to picture to us all the happiness that
is being diffused by people who have come to look

(27:17):
upon themselves not as God's almoners, but as sharers with
others in the common good. I wish we had a
new Dickens to write it up. If you are waiting
for that, you will wait a long time, said Scrooge.
Perhaps so, But the people are here all the same,

(27:38):
and they are getting on with their work. And of
Christmas and the spirit of Democracy. By Samuel McChord Cruthers