JANE ADDAMS IN MEMORY OF HENRY LLOYD The following address was delivered at a memorial meeting for Henry D. Lloyd held in Chicago. It not only pays tribute to that leading radical but also indicates Miss Addams' own attitude toward issues of reform. Miss Addams' speech "Seconding the Nomination of Roosevelt for President, 1912" is given in Volume VIII. IN the few minutes at our disposal I should like to speak of the passion for a better social order, the hunger and thirst after social righteousness which Mr. Lloyd's life embodied beyond that, perhaps, of any of his fellow-citizens. Progress is not automatic; the world grows better because people wish that it should and because they take the right steps to make it better. Progress depends upon modification and change; if things are ever to move forward, some man must be willing to take the first steps and assume the risks. Such a man must have courage, but courage is by no means enough. That man may easily do a vast amount of harm who advocates social changes from mere blind enthusiasm for human betterment, who arouses men only to a smarting sense of wrong, or who promotes reforms which are irrational and without relation to his time. To be of value in the delicate process of social adjustment and reconstruction, a man must have a knowledge of life as it is, of the good as well as of the wrong; he must be a patient collector of facts, and furthermore he must possess a zeal for men which will inspire confidence and arouse to action. I need not tell this audience that the man whose premature death we are here to mourn possessed these qualities in an unusual degree. His search for the accomplished good was untiring. It took him again and again on journeys to England, to Australasia, to Switzerland, wherever, indeed, he detected the beginning of an attempt to "equalize welfare," as he called it, wherever he caught tidings of a successful democracy. He brought back cheering reports of the "Labor Co-partnership" in England, through which the working men own together farms, mills, factories and dairies, and run them for mutual profit; of the people's banks in Central Europe, which are at last bringing economic redemption to the hard-pressed peasants; of the old-age pensions of New Zealand; of the "Country without Strikes" because compulsory arbitration is fairly enforced; of the national railroads in New Zealand, which carry the school children free and scatter the unemployed on the new lands. His new book on "The Swiss Sovereign" is not yet completed, but we all recall his glowing accounts of Switzerland, "where they have been democrats for six hundred years and are the best democrats," where they can point to the educational results of the referendum, which makes the entire country a forum for the discussion of each new measure, so that the people not only agitate and elect, but also legislate; where the government pensions fatherless school children that they may not be crushed by premature labor. The accounts of these and many more successful social experiments are to be found in his later books. As other men collect coins and pictures, so Mr. Lloyd collected specimens of successful cooperation of brotherhood put into practice. He came at last to an unshaken belief that this round old world of ours is literally dotted over with groups of men and women who are steadily bringing in a more rational social order. To quote his own words: "We need but to do everywhere what someone is doing somewhere." "We do but all need to do what a few are doing." "We must learn to walk together in new ways." His friends admit that in these books there is an element of special pleading, but it is the special pleading of the idealist who insists that the people who dream are the only ones who accomplish, and who in proof thereof unrolls the charters of national and international associations of working men, and open accounts of municipal tramways, the records of coöperative societies, the cash balances in people's banks. Mr. Lloyd possessed a large measure of human charm. He had many gifts of mind and bearing but perhaps his chief accomplishment was his mastery of the difficult art of comradeship. Many times social charm serves merely to cover up the trivial, but Mr. Lloyd ever made his an instrument to create a new fascination for serious things. We can all recall his deep concern over the changed attitude which we, as a nation, are allowing ourselves to take toward the colored man; his foresight as to the grave consequences in permitting the rights of the humblest to be invaded; his warning that if in the press of our affairs we do not win new liberties that we cannot keep our old liberties. He was an accomplished Italian scholar, possessing a large Italian library; he had not only a keen pleasure in Dante, but a vivid interest in the struggles of New Italy; he firmly believed that the United States has a chance to work out Mazzini's hopes for Italian working men, as they sturdily build our railroads and cross the American plains with the same energy with which they have previously built the Roman roads and pierced the Alps. He saw those fine realities in humble men which easily remain hidden to dull eyes. I recall a conversation with Mr. Lloyd, held last September, during a Chicago strike, which had been marred by acts of violence and broken contracts. We spoke of the hard places into which the friends of labor unions are often brought when they sympathize with the ultimate objects of a strike, but must disapprove of nearly every step of the way taken to attain that object. Mr. Lloyd referred with regret to the disfavor with which most labor men look upon compulsory arbitration. He himself believed that as the state alone has the right to use force and has the duty of suppression toward any individual or combination of individuals who undertake to use it for themselves, so the state has the right to insist that the situation shall be submitted to an accredited court, that the state itself may only resort to force after the established machinery of government has failed. He spoke of the dangers inherent in vast combinations of labor as well |