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Title: The Soul of Democracy
The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty
Author: Edward Howard Griggs
Release Date: January 26, 2004 [EBook #10837]
Language: English
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THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD WAR
IN RELATION TO HUMAN LIBERTY
BY
EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS
Man for the State means autocracy and imperialism;
MAN FOR MANKIND is the soul of democracy.
1918
CONTENTS
I THE WORLD TRAGEDY
II THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE WAR
III THE IDEAS FOR WHICH THE ALLIED NATIONS FIGHT
IV MORAL STANDARDS AND THE MORAL ORDER
V THE PRESENT STATE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
VI THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP
VII AMERICA'S DUTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
VIII THE GOSPEL AND THE SUPERSTITION OF NON-RESISTANCE
IX PREPAREDNESS FOR SELF-DEFENSE
X RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE WAR
XI THE WAR AND EDUCATION
XII SOCIALISM AND THE WAR
XIII THE WAR AND FEMINISM
XIV THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY
XV DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
XVI MENACES OF DEMOCRACY
XVII THE DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY
XVIII PATERNALISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY
XIX THE SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY
XX TRAINING FOR MORAL LEADERSHIP
XXI DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE
XXII THE HOUR OF SACRIFICE
THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY
I
THE WORLD TRAGEDY
We are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the
history of mankind. Not even the overthrow of the old Roman empire was
so colossal a disaster as this. Inevitably we are bewildered by it.
Utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed
mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it
overwhelms our vision. Man had been going forward steadily, inventing
and discovering, until in the last hundred years his whole world had
been transformed. Suddenly the entire range of invention is turned
against Man. The machinery of comfort and progress becomes the enginery
of devastation. Under such a shock, we ask, "Has civilization
over-reached itself? Has the machine run away with its maker?" The
imagination is staggered. We are too much in the storm to see across
the storm.
When the War began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. It was the
last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to
which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of
something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as
we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days have
passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become
benumbed to the long continued disaster. It is impossible to think
deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in
the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused
to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt
the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing
ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of
it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the
most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable that
the future will look back upon them as the years determining the destiny
of mankind for ages to come.
How this terrible fact of War falls across all philosophies! Complacent
optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The
pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn
to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face
with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the
ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened,
while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one
certainty is that an entirely new world is being born--_what_ it will
be, no one knows.
Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our thinking
will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will be
impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely
hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live
to something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to
abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with
them. We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution
Christianity and the gospel of brute force. One or the other must be
rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. The effect on the thought
life of the world will be even greater--vastly greater--than that of the
French Revolution. The twentieth century will differ from the
nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. The effect on the
relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so
far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the nineteenth
century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as the Athenian
tribal system or mediaeval feudalism.
Thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. We Americans
are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to
political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise.
All across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion
--if anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. Thus we are
suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly
trusting to it to solve all problems. Legislation is no solution for
moral evils. It is possible, to some extent, to suppress vice by
legislation, but not to create virtue. Virtue can be developed only by
conduct and education. You cannot drive men into the kingdom of heaven
with the whip of legislation; and if you could, you would so change the
atmosphere of the place that one would prefer to take the other road.
If our democracy is to survive, we must think it through; carrying it
down, from these superficial political devices, into our industry and
commerce, still so largely dominated by feudal ideas of the middle age,
into our science and art, far more completely into our education, into
our social relationship, and beyond all else, into our fundamental
attitude of mind. Democracy is, at bottom, not a series of political
forms, but a way of life.
Thus the War will be the supreme test of democracy. The question it
will settle is this: can free men, by voluntary cooperation, develop an
efficiency and an endurance which will make it possible for them to
stand and protect their liberties against the machinery and aggressive
ambitions of autocratic empires where everything is done paternally from
the top? If they can, then democracy will survive and grow as the
highest form of society for ages to come; if not, then democracy will
pass and be succeeded by some other social order.
That is why this War has been our war from the beginning, though we have
entered it so late. As we look back upon the struggle of Athens and the
other free Greek cities with the overwhelming hordes of Asia, at
Marathon and Salamis, as the conflict that saved democracy for Europe
and made possible the civilization of the Occident, so it is probable
that the world will look back upon this colossal War as the same
struggle, multiplied a thousand times in the men and munitions employed,
the struggle determining the future of democracy and civilization for
generations, perhaps for all time.
II
THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE WAR
The world has been confused as to the issue in this War, because of the
multitude of its causes and of the antagonisms it involves; yet under
all the national and racial hatreds, the economic jealousies, certain
great ideas are being tested out.
Apologists for Germany have told us, even with pride, that in Germany
the supreme conception is the dedication of Man to the State. This was
not true of old Germany. Before the formation of the Prussian empire,
her spirit was intensely individualistic. She stood preeminently for
freedom of thought and action. It was this that gave her noble
spiritual heritage. Goethe is the most individualistic of world masters.
Froebel developed, in the Kindergarten, one of the purest of
democracies. Luther and German protestantism represented the
affirmation of individual conscience as against hierarchical control.
It was this spirit that gave Germany her golden age of literature, her
unmatched group of spiritual philosophers, her religious teachers, her
pre-eminence in music.
Nevertheless, the Prussian state, autocratic from its inception,
received philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating
in Hegel, who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the
state, incarnate in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. He
justified war, regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically
made might, right, in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by
its more fruitful idea in annexing the weaker, while the conquered, in
being conquered, is judged of God. Here is the philosophic
justification of that Prussian arrogance which in Nietzsche is carried
into glittering rhetoric. Thus the Prussian state from afar back was
opposed to the general spirit of old Germany.
Since 1870, it must be admitted, that spirit is gone. With the
formation of the Prussian empire and for the half century of its
existence, every force of social control--press, church, state,
education, social opinion--was deliberately employed to stamp on the
German people one idea--the subordination of the individual to the
state, as the supreme and only virtue. How far has the policy succeeded?
Apparently absolutely. To the outside observer the old spirit seems
utterly gone. How far this policy has been helped by the cultivation of
the fear of the Slav, one cannot say. Looking at the map of Europe, one
sees that the geographical relation of Germany to the great Slavic
empire is not unlike the relation of Holland to Germany. Thus the
deliberate fostering of fear of the vast empire of the East has done
much to strengthen the hands of the Prussian regime in its chosen task.
Nevertheless, when one recalls the spiritual heritage of Germany: when
one thinks of Herder, Schiller and Goethe; Tauler, Luther and
Schleiermacher; Froebel, Herbart and Richter; Kant, Fichte and Novalis;
Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner; one feels that something of the old German
heritage must survive. When the German people find out what has happened
to them and why, that heritage surely ought to show in some reaction
against the present autocratic regime, after the War closes, if not
before, perhaps even to the extent of making Germany a republic. That
would be some compensation for the waste and destruction of the War.
Meantime Germany stands now, ruthlessly, for the dedication of Man to
the State.
One can understand why a Prussian minister forbade the teaching of
Froebel's ideas in Prussia during the latter period of the educator's
life. So one understands the hatred of Goethe because he refused
allegiance to a narrow nationalism and remained cosmopolitan in his
world-view. Similarly Hegel, with his justification of absolute
monarchy and his theory of the German state as the acme of all spiritual
evolution, was the acclaimed orthodox philosopher of Prussia, while the
individualist, Schopenhauer, was neglected and despised.
One must have lived in Germany to realize the absolute control of the
State over the individual--the incessant surveillance, the petty
regulations, the constant interference with private life. It was to
escape just this vexatious control, with the arduous militarism in which
it culminates, that so vast a multitude of Germans left their native
land and came to the United States--not all of whom have shown
appreciation and loyalty to the free land that welcomed them.
III
THE IDEAS FOR WHICH THE ALLIED NATIONS FIGHT
In contrast to the idea for which Germany now stands, the Anglo-Saxon
instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of
the individual. We, of course, are no longer Anglo-Saxon. When De
Tocqueville in 1831 visited our country, surveyed our institutions and,
after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he
could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. That time is past; we are
to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of time,
struggling to be born.
Nevertheless, Anglo-American ideas still dominate and inspire our
civilization. It is, indeed, remarkable to what an extent this is true,
in the face of the mingling of heterogeneous races in our population.
As English is our speech, so Anglo-American ideas are still the soul of
our life and institutions.
This is evident in the jealousy of authority. We resent the intrusion
of the government into affairs of private life, and prefer to submit to
annoyances and even injustice on the part of other individuals, rather
than to have protection at the price of paternalistic regulation by the
state. We resent any law that we do not see is necessary to the general
welfare, and are rather lawless even then. This shows clearly in our
reaction on legislation in regard to drink. The prohibition of
intoxicating liquor is about the surest way to make an Anglo-Saxon want
to go out and get drunk, even when he has no other inclination in that
direction. In Boston, under the eleven o'clock closing law, men in
public restaurants will at times order, at ten minutes of eleven, eight
or ten glasses of beer or whiskey, for fear they might want them,
whereas, if the restriction had not been present, two or three would
have sufficed.
Not long ago we saw the very labor leaders who forced the Adamson law
through congress, threatening to disobey any legislation limiting their
own freedom of action, even though vitally necessary to the freedom of
all.
The general behavior under automobile and traffic regulation illustrates
the tendency evenmore clearly. Thinking over the list of acquaintances
who own automobiles, one finds it hard to recall one who would not break
the speed law at a convenient opportunity. Even a staid college
professor, who has walked the walled-in path all his life: let him get a
Ford runabout, and in three months he is exultant in running as close as
possible to every foot traveler and in exceeding the speed limit at any
favorable chance. These are not beautiful expressions of our national
spirit, but they serve to illustrate our instinctive individualism.
Especially are we jealous of highly centralized authority. De
Tocqueville argued that we would never be able to develop a strong
central government, and that our democracy would be menaced with failure
by that lack. That his prophecy has proved false and our federal
government has become so strong is due only to the accidents of our
history and the exigency of the tremendous problems we have had to
solve.
The same individualistic spirit is strong in England. It has been
particularly evident, during the War, in the resentment of military
authority as applied to labor conditions. The artisans and their
leaders dreaded to give up liberties for which they had struggled
through generations, for fear that those rights would not be readily
accorded them again after the War. It must be admitted that this fear is
justified. The same spirit was evident in the fight on conscription.
This attitude has been a handicap to England in successfully carrying on
the War, as it is to us; but it shows how strong is the essential spirit
of democracy in both lands.
In France, the Revolution was at bottom an affirmation of individualism
--of the right of the people, as against classes and kings, to seek life,
liberty and happiness. The great words, _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,_
that the French placed upon their public buildings in the period of the
Revolution, are the essential battle-cry of true democracy,--as it is to
be, rather than as it is at present.
Through her peculiar situation, threatened and overshadowed by potential
enemies, France has been forced to a policy of militarism, with a large
subordination of the individual to the state. The subordination,
however, is voluntary. That is touchingly evident in the beautiful
fraternization of French officers and men in the present War. With our
Anglo-Saxon reserve, we smile at the pictures of grave generals kissing
bearded soldiers, in recognition of valor, but it is a significant
expression of the voluntary equality and brotherhood of Frenchmen in
this War. The reason France has risen with such splendid courage and
unity is the consciousness of every Frenchman that complete defeat in
this War would mean that there would be no France in the future, that
Paris would be a larger Strassburg, and France a greater
Alsace-Lorraine. While the subordination has been thus voluntary,
surely the French soldiers, man for man, have proved themselves the
equal of any soldiers on earth.
The anomaly of the first two years of the War was the presence of the
vast Russian autocratic empire on the side of the allied democracies.
For Russia, however, the War was of the people, rather than of the
autocracy at the top, and one saw that Russia would emerge from the War
changed and purified. What one could not foresee was that, under the
awakening of the people, Russia could pass, in a day, through a
Revolution as profound in its character and consequences as the great
explosion in France. It would be almost a miracle if so complete a
Revolution, in such a vast, benighted empire, were not followed by
decades of recurrent chaos and anarchy. If Russia avoids this fate, she
will present a unique experience in history. The tendency to abrogate
all authority, the spectacle of regiments of soldiers becoming debating
societies to discuss whether or not they shall obey orders and fight,
are ominous signs for the next period. Emancipated Russia must learn,
if necessary through bitter suffering, that liberty is not license, that
democracy is not anarchy, but voluntary and intelligent obedience to
just laws and the chosen executors of those laws. Meantime, whatever
her immediate future may be, Russia's transformation has clarified the
issue and justified her place with the allied democracies. However long
and confused her struggle, there can be no return to the past, and, in
the end, her Revolution means democracy.
Thus, in democracy, the State exists for Man. Other forms of society
seek the interest or welfare of an individual, a group or a class,
democracy aims at the welfare, that is, the liberty, happiness, growth,
intelligence, helpfulness of _all the people_. Under all the welter of
this world struggle, it is therefore these great contrasting ideas that
are being tested out, perhaps for all time. What is their relative
value for efficiency, initiative, invention, endurance, permanence;
beneath all, what is their final value for the happiness and helpfulness
of all human beings?
IV
MORAL STANDARDS AND THE MORAL ORDER
There is only one moral order of the universe--one range of moral as of
physical law. For instance, the law of gravitation--simplest of
physical principles--holds the last star in the abyss of space, rounds
the dew-drop on the petal of a spring violet and determines the symmetry
of living organisms; but it is one and unchanging, a fundamental pull in
the nature of matter itself. So with moral laws: they are not
superadded to life by some divine or other authority. They are simply
the fundamental principles in the nature of life itself, which we must
obey to grow and be happy.
If the moral order is one and unchanging, man does change in relation to
it, and moral standards are relative to the stage of his growth.
History is filled with illustrations of this relativity of ethical
standards.
For instance: human slavery doubtless began as an act of beneficence on
the part of some philanthropist well in advance of his age. The first
man who, in the dim dawn of history, said to the captive he had made in
war, "I will not kill you and eat you; I will let you live and work for
me the rest of your life": that man instituted human slavery; but it was
distinctly a step upward, from something that had been far worse.
Homer represents Ulysses as the favorite pupil of Pallas Athena, goddess
of wisdom: why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the shrewdest and
most successful liar in classic antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in
a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their
companionship, and for the same reason that led Homer to glorify him as
the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at
one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher
recognition of the moral order.
Just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding
where it applies. In other words, if you see the light shining on your
path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not
owe obedience in the same way. If you do not obey your light, your
punishment is that you lose the light--degenerate to a lower plane, and
it is the worst punishment imaginable.
Thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the
developed, distinctly immoral. Before the instincts of personal modesty
and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something
entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. When
a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another
tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a
man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day.
This gradual elevation of moral standards, or growth in the recognition
of the sacredness of life and the obligation to other individuals, can
be traced historically as a long and confused process. There was a
time, in the remote past, when no law was recognized except that of the
strong arm. The man who wanted anything, took it, if he was strong
enough, and others submitted to his superior force. Then follows an age
when the family is the supreme social unit. Each member of the family
group feels the pain or pleasure of all the others as something like his
own, but all outside this circle are as the beasts. This is the
condition among the Veddahs of Ceylon, studied so interestingly by
Haeckel. Living in isolated family groups, scattered through the
tropical wilderness: one man, one woman and their children forming the
social unit: they as nearly represent primitive life as any other body
of people now on the earth.
Then follows a long roll of ages when the tribe is the highest social
unit. Each member of the tribe is conscious of the sacredness of life of
all the other members and of some obligation toward them; but men of
other tribes may be slain as freely as the beasts. Then comes a period
when appreciation of the sacredness of life is extended over all those
of the same race, tested generally by their speaking somewhat the same
language. That was the condition in classic antiquity: it was "Jew and
Gentile," "Greek and barbarian"--the very word "barbarous" coming from
the unintelligible sounds, to the Greeks, of those who spoke other than
the Hellenic tongue. Even Plato, with all his far-sighted humanism,
says, in the _Republic_, that in the ideal state, "Greeks should deal
with barbarians as Greeks now deal with one another." If one remembers
what occurred in the Peloponnesian war--how Greek men voted to kill all
the men of military age in a conquered Greek city and sell all the women
and children into slavery--one will see that Plato's dream of humanity
was not so very wide.
From that time on, there has been further extension of the appreciation
of the sacredness of life and of the consciousness of moral obligation
toward other human beings. We are far from the end of the path. Our
sympathies are still limited by accidents of time and place, race and
color; but we have gone far enough to see what the end would be, were we
to reach it: a sympathy so wide, an appreciation of the sacredness of
life so universal, that each of us would feel the joy or sorrow of every
other human being, alive to-day or to be alive to-morrow, as something
like his own. Moreover, in all civilized society, we have gone far
enough to renounce the right to private vengeance and adjustment of
quarrels: we live under established courts of law, with organized civil
force to carry out their judgments. This gives relative peace and
security, and a general, if imperfect, application of the moral law.
V
THE PRESENT STATE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The astounding anomaly of modern civilization is the way we have lagged
behind in applying to groups and nations of men the moral laws,
universally recognized as binding over individuals. For instance, about
twenty years ago we coined and used widely the phrase, "soulless
corporation," to designate our great combinations of capital in industry
and commerce. Why was that phrase used so widely? The answer is
illuminating: we took it for granted that an individual employer would
treat his artisans to some extent as human beings and not merely as
cog-wheels in a productive machine; but we also took it for granted that
an impersonal corporation, where no individual was dominantly
responsible, would regard its artisans merely as pieces of machinery,
with no respect whatever for their humanity.
The supreme paradox, however, is in the relation of nations: it is there
that we have most amazingly lagged behind in applying the moral laws
universally accepted in the relations of individuals. For instance,
long before this War began we heard it proclaimed, even proudly, by
certain philosophers, in more than one nation, that the state is the
supreme spiritual unit, that there is no law higher than its interest,
that the state makes the law and may break it at will. When a great
statesman in Germany, doubtless in a moment of intense anger and
irritation, used the phrase that has gone all across the earth, "_scrap
of paper_," for a sacred treaty between nations, he was only making a
pungent practical application of the philosophy in question.
Do we regard self-preservation as the highest law for the individual?
Distinctly not. Here is a crowded theater and a sudden cry of fire,
with the ensuing panic: if strong men trample down and kill women and
children, in the effort to save their own lives, we regard them with
loathing and contempt. On the other hand, it is just this plea of
national self-preservation that the German regime has used in cynical
justification of its every atrocity--the initial violation of Belgium,
the making war ruthlessly on civil populations, the atrocious spying and
plotting in the bosom of neutral and friendly nations, the destruction
of monuments of art and devastation of the cities, fields, orchards and
forests of northern France, and finally the submarine warfare on the
world's shipping. No civilized human being would, for a moment, think
of using the plea of self-preservation to justify comparable conduct in
individual life.
Consider international diplomacy: much of it has been merely shrewd and
skillful lying. If you will review the list of the most famous
diplomats of Europe for the last thousand years, you will find that a
considerable portion of them won their fame and reputation by being a
little more shrewd and successful liars than the diplomats with whom
they had to deal in other lands. In other words, their conduct has been
exactly on the plane that Ulysses represented in personal life, afar
back in classic antiquity.
Take an illustration a little nearer home. If you were doing business
on one side of the street and had two competitors in the same line,
across the way, and a cyclone swept the town, destroying their
establishments and sparing yours: you, as an individual, would be
ashamed to take advantage of the disaster under which your rivals were
suffering, using the time while they were out of business to lure their
customers away from them and bind those customers to you so securely
that your competitors would never be able to get them back. You would
scorn such conduct as an individual; but when it comes to a relation of
the nations: during the first two years of the War, from the highest
government circles down to the smallest country newspaper, we were urged
to take advantage of the disaster under which our European rivals were
suffering, win their international customers away from them and bind
those customers to us so securely that Europe would never be able to get
them back. Not that we were urged to industry and enterprise--that is
always right--but actually to seek to profit by the sufferings of
others--conduct we would regard as utterly unworthy in personal life.
If your neighbor were to say, "My personal aspirations demand this
portion of your front yard," and he were to attempt to fence it in: the
situation is unimaginable; but when a nation says, "My national
aspirations demand this portion of your territory," and proceeds to
annex it: if the nation is strong enough to carry it out, a large part
of the world acquiesces.
The relations of nations are thus still largely on the plane of
primitive life among individuals, or, since nations are made up of
civilized and semi-civilized persons, it would be fairer to say that the
relations of nations are comparable to those prevailing among
individuals when a group of men goes far out from civil society, to the
frontier, beyond the reach of courts of law and their police forces:
then nearly always there is a reversion to the rule of the strong arm.
That is what Kipling meant in exclaiming,
"There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three."
That condition prevailed all across our frontier in the early days. For
instance, the cattle men came, pasturing their herds on the hills and
plains, using the great expanse of land not yet taken up by private
ownership. A little later came the sheep men, with vast flocks of
sheep, which nibbled every blade of grass and other edible plant down to
the ground, thus starving out the cattle. What followed? The cattle
men got together by night, rode down the sheep-herders, shot them or
drove them out, or were themselves driven out.
So on the frontier, in the early days, a weakling staked out an
agricultural or mining claim. A ruffian appears, who is a sure shot,
jumps the claim and drives the other out. It was the rule of the strong
arm, and it was evident on the frontier all across the country.
This is exactly the state that a considerable part of the world has
reached in international relationship to-day. Claim-jumping is still
accepted and widely practised among the nations. That is, in fact, the
way in which all empires have been built--by a succession of successful
claim-jumpings. Consider the most impressive of them all, the old Roman
empire. Rome was a city near the mouth of the Tiber. She reached out
and conquered a few neighboring cities in the Latin plain, binding them
securely to herself by domestic and economic ties. Then she extended
her power south and north, crossed into northern Africa, conquered Gaul
and Spain, swept Asia Minor, until a territory three thousand by two
thousand miles in extent was under the sway of her all-conquering arm.
What justified Rome, as far as she had justification, was the remarkable
strength and wisdom with which she established law and order and the
protections of civil society over all the conquered territory, until
often the subject populations were glad they had come under the
all-dominant sway of Rome, since their situation was so much more
peaceful and happy than before. Such justification, however, is after
the fact: it is not moral justification of the building of the empire.
That represented a succession of claim-jumpings.
For an illustration from more modern history, take the greatest
international crime of the last five hundred years, with one exception--
the partition of Poland. It is true the Polish nobles were a nuisance to
their neighbors, ever quarreling among themselves, with no central
authority powerful enough to restrain them, but that did not justify the
action taken. Three nations, or rather the autocratic sovereigns of
those nations, powerful enough to accomplish the crime, agreed to
partition Poland among themselves. They did it, with the result that
there are plenty of Poles in the world to-day, but there is no Poland.
Consider the possession of Silesia by Prussia. Silesia was an integral
part of the Austrian domain, long so recognized. Friedrich the Great
wanted it. He annexed it. The deed caused him many years of recurring,
devastating wars; again and again he was near the point of utter defeat;
but he succeeded in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, and
Silesia is part of Prussia to-day. The strong arm conquest is the only
reason.
So is it with Germany's possession of Schleswig-Holstein, with Austria
in Herzegovina and Bosnia, France in Algiers, Italy in Tripoli: they are
all instances of claim-jumping, reprehensible in varying degrees.
I suppose no thoughtful Englishman would attempt to justify, on high
moral grounds, the building up of the British empire: for instance, the
possession of Egypt and India by Britain. How does India happen to be a
part of the British realm? Every one knows the answer. The East India
Company was simply the most adventurous and enterprising trading company
then in the world. It grew rich trading with the Orient, established
the supremacy of the British merchant marine, got into difficulties with
French rivals and native rulers, fought brilliantly for its rights, as
it had every reason to do, conquered territory and consolidated its
possessions, ruling chiefly through native princes. It became so
powerful that it did not seem wise to the British government to permit a
private corporation to exercise such ever-growing political authority.
It was regulated, and in the end abolished, by act of Parliament; its
possessions were taken over by the Crown; the conquests were extended
and completed, and India today is a gem in the crown of the British
empire.
What justifies Britain, as far as she has justification, is the
remarkable wisdom and generosity with which she has extended, not
onlylaw and order and protection to life and property, but freedom and
autonomous self-government, to her colonies and subject populations,
with certain tragic exceptions, about as fast as this could safely be
done. It is that which holds the British empire together. Great
irregular empire, stretching over a large part of the globe: but for
this it would fall to pieces over night. It would be impossible for
force, administered at the top, to hold it together. The splendid
response of her colonies in this War has been purely voluntary. That
Canada has four hundred thousand trained men at the front, or ready to
go, is due wholly to her free response to the wise generosity of
England's policy, and in no degree to compulsion, which would have been
impossible. This justification of the British empire is, nevertheless,
as in the case of Rome, after the fact, and does not justify morally the
building up of the empire.
Our own hands are not entirely clean. It is true we came late on the
stage of history, and, starting as a democracy, were instinctively
opposed to empire building. Thus our brief record is cleaner than that
of the older nations. Nevertheless, there are examples of claim-jumping
in our history. The most tragic of all is a large part of our treatment
of the American Indians. It is true, with Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, we
tried to make every steal a bargain. Many an expanse of territory has
been bought with a jug of rum. The Indian knew nothing about the
ownership of land; we did. So we made the deed, and he accepted it.
Then, to his surprise, he found he had to move off from land where for
generations his ancestors had hunted and fought, with no idea of private
ownership. So we pushed him on and on. Of late decades we have become
ashamed, tried in awkward fashion to render some compensation for the
wrongs done, but the larger part of the story is sad indeed.
There is, of course, another side to all this: the more highly developed
nations do owe leadership and service in helping those below to climb
the path of civilization; but let one answer fairly how much of empire
building has been due to this altruistic spirit, and how much to
selfishness and the lust for power and possession.
VI
THE ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP
We have seen that all empires have been built up by a series of
successful aggressions, and that claim-jumping still characterizes the
relations of the nations. Nevertheless, there has been some progress in
applying to groups and nations the moral principles we recognize as
binding upon individuals. Consider again our internal life: it was
twenty years ago that we coined and used so widely the phrase "soulless
corporations" for our great combinations of capital in industry. To-day
that phrase is rarely heard. One sees it seldom even in the pages of
surviving "muck-raking" magazines. Why has a phrase, used so widely in
the past, all but disappeared? Again the answer is illuminating: there
has been tremendous growth in twenty years, on the part of our great
corporations, in treating their employees as human beings and not merely
as cog-wheels in a productive machine. When the greatest corporation in
the United States voluntarily raises the wages of all its employees in
the country ten per cent., five several times, within a few months, as
the Steel trust has recently done, something has happened. It may be
said, "they did it because it was good business": twenty years ago they
would not have recognized that it was good business. It may be said,
"they did it to avoid strikes": twenty years ago they would have
welcomed the strikes, fought them through and gained what selfish
advantage was possible. The point is, there has been vast increase in
the consciousness of moral responsibility on the part of corporations
toward their artisans. This has been due partly to legislation, but
mainly to education and the awakening of public conscience. If you wish
to find the greatest arrogance and selfishness now, you will discover
it, not among the capitalists: they are timid and submissive--strangely
so. You will find it rather in certain leaders of the labor movement,
with their consciousness of newly-gained powers.
Some growth there has been in the application of the same moral
principles even to the relations of the nations. For instance: a
hundred years ago the Napoleonic wars had just come to an end. In the
days of Napoleon men generally gloried in war; to-day most of them
bitterly regret it, and fight because they believe they are fighting for
high moral aims or for national self-preservation, whether they are
right or wrong.
When Napoleon conquered a country, often he pushed the weakling king off
the throne, and replaced him with a member of his own family--at times a
worse weakling. Think of such a thing being attempted to-day: it is
unimaginable, unless the worst tyranny on earth got the upper hand for
the next three hundred years of human history.
A more pungent illustration of progress is the feverish desire, shown by
each of the combatants in this world struggle, to prove that he did not
begin it. Now some one began it. A hundred years ago belligerents would
not have been so anxious to prove their innocence: then victory closed
all accounts and no one went behind the returns. The feverish anxiety
each combatant has shown to establish his innocence of initiating this
devastating War is conclusive proof that even the worst of them
recognizes that they all must finally stand before the moral court of
the world's conscience and be judged. The same tendency is shown in the
efforts of Germany--grotesquely and tragically sophistical as they are--
to justify her ever-expanding, freshly-invented atrocities. At least
she is aware that they require justification.
This explains why we react so bitterly even on what would have been
accepted a century ago. What was taken for granted yesterday is not
tolerated to-day, and what is taken for granted to-day will not be
tolerated in a to-morrow that maybe is not so distant as in our darker
moments we imagine.
What would be the conclusion of this process? It would be, would it
not, the complete application to the relations of the nations, of the
moral principles universally accepted as binding upon individuals? If
it is true that the moral order of the universe is one and unchanging,
then _what is right for a man is right for a nation of men, and what is
wrong for a man is wrong for a nation_; and no fallacious reasoning
should be allowed to blind us to that basic truth.
This would mean the end of all diplomacy of lying and deceit. The
relations of the nations would be placed on the same plane of relative
honesty and frankness now prevailing among individuals: not absolute
truth--few of us practice that--but that general ability to trust each
other, in word and conduct, that is the foundation of our business and
social life.
It would mean the end of empire building. Those empires that exist
would fall naturally into their component parts. If those parts
remained affiliated with the central government, it would be only
through the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling
upon the territory. Thus every people would be affiliated with the
government to which it naturally belonged and with which it wished to be
affiliated.
It would mean finally a voluntary federation of the nations, with the
establishment of a world court of justice; but no weak-kneed, spineless
arbitration court: rather a court of justice, comparable to those
established over individuals, whose judgments would be enforced by an
international military and naval police, contributed by the federated
nations.
People misunderstand this proposal. They imagine it would mean the
giving over of the entire military and naval equipment of each federated
nation to the central court. Far from it: each nation would retain, for
defense purposes, the mass of its manhood and the larger fraction of its
limited equipment, while a minor fraction would be contributed to the
world court.
When this is achieved there will be, for the first time in the history
of the world, the dawn of the longed-for era of universal and relatively
permanent peace for mankind.
It is a far-off dream, is it not? Let us admit it frankly, and it seems
further off than it did four years ago; for the approximations to it,
achieved through international law, we have seen go down in a blind
welter, through the invention of new instruments of destruction and the
willful perpetration of illegal and immoral atrocities in this horrible
War.
Nevertheless, it is not so far off as in ourdarker moments we fear. If
this world War ends justly; which means if it ends so that the people
dwelling on any territory are affiliated with the government to which
they naturally belong and with which they wish to be affiliated, the
dream will be brought appreciably nearer. If the War ends unjustly,
which means if it ends with the gratification of the ambitions of
aggressive tyranny, the dream will be put remotely far off. If a peace
is patched up meantime, with no solution, it will mean Europe sleeping
on its arms, and the breaking out of the war with multiplied devastation
within twenty years. That is why these blithely undertaken peace
missions and other efforts at peace without victory, even when not
cloaks for pro-German movements, are such preposterous absurdities or
else play directly into the hands of tyranny.
At best, however, the dream is a long way ahead. Men dislike to give up
power, nations equally. It will take a long process of international
moral education to induce the nations to renounce their arbitrary
powers, their right to adjust all their own quarrels, and lead them to
enter voluntarily a federation under a world court of Justice. This,
nevertheless, is the hope of the world, toward which we should work with
all our might.
VII
AMERICA'S DUTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Since the world solution is, at best, so remote, our question is: what
are we to do meantime? Our entrance into the War partially answers the
question. We have before us the immediate task of aiding in
overthrowing autocracy and tyranny and of defending our liberties and
those of the nations that stand for democracy. This is the first duty,
but not the only one.
More definitely than any other nation we have thrown down to the world
the challenge of democracy. We have said, "Away with kings, we will
have no more of them! Away with castes and ruling classes, we will have
no more of them!" As a matter of fact, democracies have no rulers--the
word survives from an older order of society--they have guides, leaders
and representatives. If you wish to use the word, in a democracy every
man is the ruler--and every woman too, we hope, before long. To this
ideal we are committed and it carries certain obligations; for every
right carries a duty, and every duty, a right. Often the best way to
get a privilege is by assuming a responsibility. That is a truth it
would be well for the leaders of the feminist and labor movements to
recognize. The obligations carried by the challenge of our democracy are
clear.
We Americans should have done, once and for all time, with the diplomacy
of lying and deceit. Fortunately our recent traditions are in harmony
with this demand; but we should not depend upon the happy accident of an
administration which takes the right attitude. It should be the open
and universal demand of the American people that those who represent us
shall place the relations we sustain to other nations permanently on the
same plane of frank honesty, generally prevailing among individuals.
Incidentally, any politician or statesman who, at this heart-breaking
crisis of the world's life, dares play party politics with our
international relations, should be damned forever by the vote of the
American people.
Further, it is our duty to have done with all dream of empire building.
It is not for us: let us abandon it frankly and forever. Those
dependencies which have come to us through the accidents of our history
should be granted autonomous self-government at the earliest moment at
which they can safely take it over--which does not necessarily mean
to-morrow. If they remain affiliated with us it should be only through
the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling upon
them.
It is, moreover, our duty to lead the world in the effort to form a
federation of the nations and establish the aforesaid world court of
justice, with the international military and naval police to enforce its
judgments.
More than this is demanded: on the basis of the challenge of our
democracy, it is our duty to rise to the point of placing justice higher
than commercial interest. It is a hard demand; but, with the latent
idealism in our American life, surely we can rise to it. For instance,
the vexed puzzle of the tariff will never be justly and permanently
settled, till it is settled primarily as a problem of moral
international relationship, and not as one merely of economic interest
and advantage.
For example, a tariff wall between the United States and Canada is as
preposterous an absurdity as would be a long line of bristling
fortifications along the three thousand and more miles of international
boundary. We are not protecting ourselves from slave labor over there.
They are not protecting themselves from slave labor here. Barring a few
lines of industry, there are the same conditions of labor, production
and distribution both sides of the line. The only reason for a tariff
wall is their wish, or our wish, or the wish of each, to gain some
advantage at the expense of the other party. Now every business man
knows that any trade that benefits one and injures the other party to it
is bad business, as well as bad ethics, in the long run. Good business
benefits both traders all the time.
On the other hand, when it comes to protecting our labor from
competition with slave labor in other quarters of the earth, we have not
only the right, but the duty to do it. So when it is a matter of
protecting our industries from being swamped by the unloading of vast
quantities of goods, produced under the feverish and abnormal
conditions, sure to prevail in Europe after the War, we have again, not
only the right, but the duty to do it.
Finally, a still higher call is upon us: we must somehow rise to the
point of placing humanity above the nation. It is true, "Charity begins
at home," certainly justice should. One should educate one's own
children, before worrying over the children of the neighborhood; clean
up one's own town, before troubling about the city further away. Often
the whole is helped best by serving the part; but it is with national
patriotism as it is with family affection. The latter is a lovely
quality and the source of much that is best in the world; but when
family affection is an instrument for gaining special privilege at the
expense of the good of society, a means of attaining debauching luxury
and selfish aggrandisement, it is an abomination. The man who prays
God's blessing on himself, his wife and his children, and nobody else,
is a mean man, and he never gets blessed--not from God. Similarly, the
man who seeks the interest of his own nation, against the welfare of
mankind, who prays God's blessing only on his own people, is equally a
mean man, and his prayer, also, is never answered from the Most High.
The world has advanced too far for the spirit of a narrow nationalism.
The recrudescence of such a spirit is one of the sad consequences of
this world War. Only in a spirit of international brotherhood, in
dedication to the welfare of humanity, can democracy go towards its
goal.
These are the obligations following upon the challenge of democracy we
have proclaimed to the nations.
VIII
THE GOSPEL AND THE SUPERSTITION OF NON-RESISTANCE
The first condition of fulfilling the responsibilities imposed upon us
by the challenge of our democracy is, now and hereafter, readiness and
willingness for self-respecting self-defense, defense of our liberties
and of the principles and ideals for which we stand. There is much
nonsense talked about non-resistance to evil. It is a lovely thing in
certain high places of the moral life. It was well that Socrates
remained in the common criminal prison in Athens and drank the hemlock
poison; but nine times out of ten it would have been better to run away,
as he had an opportunity to do. It was good that Jesus healed the ear of
the servant of the high priest,--and good that St. Peter cut it off.
In other words, acts of non-resistance and self-sacrifice are fine
flowers of the moral life; but you cannot have flowers unless their
roots are below ground, otherwise they quickly wither. Thus, to have
sound value, these acts of non-resistance and self-sacrifice must rest
on a solid foundation of self-affirmation and resistance to evil.
As with the individual, so with the nation: there come high moments in a
nation's life, when a strong people might resist and deliberately
chooses not to. As an illustration, take our Mexican problem. The
announcement that under no circumstances would we intervene, may have
led to misunderstanding. Our purpose to let the Mexican people work out
their own problem may have been taken to mean that we would not justly
protect ourselves, with consequent encouragement to border raiding.
Nevertheless, if there has been any error in handling the situation, it
has been on the better side--on the side of patience, generosity,
long-suffering, giving the other fellow another chance, and another and
another, even though he does not deserve them. Now that is not the side
on which human nature usually errs. The common temptation is to
selfishness and unjust aggression. Since that is the case, if we cannot
strike the just balance, it is better to push too far on the other side
and avoid the common mistake.
Suppose, after the War, Japan, alone or in conjunction with one or
another European power, closes the door to China: one can imagine
circumstances where we, with the right to insist that the door be kept
open, and perhaps, by that time, something of the strength to enforce
that right, might deliberately say, "No, we will not resist." Not that,
with our present situation, such action is desirable, but that one can
imagine conditions arising where it might be the higher choice.
Let me repeat that, for the nation as with the individual, these high
moments must rest on something else. They are the high mountain peaks
of the moral life; but detached mountain peaks are impossible,--except
as a mirage. They must rest upon the granite foundation of the hills
and plateaus below. So these high virtues of non-resistance, magnanimity
and self-sacrifice must always rest upon the granite foundation of the
masculine virtues of self-affirmation, endurance, heroism, strong
conflict with evil. It takes strength to make magnanimity and
self-sacrifice possible, if their lesson is not lost. A weak man
cannot be magnanimous, since his generosity is mistaken for servile
cowardice. After all, the best time to forgive your enemy, for his good
and yours, is not when he has his foot on your neck: he is apt to
misunderstand and think you are afraid. It is often better to wait
until you can get on your feet and face him, man to man, and then if you
can forgive him, it is so much the better for you, for him and for all
concerned.
Thus there are two opposite lines of error in the moral life. The
philosophy of the one is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in certain
extremes of his teaching, represents the other. Nietzsche, I suppose,
should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything
important; but the ancestors of Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with
their splendid gospel of self-realization. Nietzsche, on the contrary,
with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of
slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over
forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation
apart--Nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house. It has always
seemed to me not without significance that his own life ended there.
On the other hand, when Tolstoy responded to an inquirer that, if he saw
a child being attacked by a brutal ruffian, he would not use force to
intervene and protect the child: that, too, is non-resistance fit for
the insane asylum. One of these is just as far from sane, balanced human
morality as the other.
It is a terrible thing to suffer injustice; it is far worse to
perpetrate it. If one had to choose between being victim or tyrant, one
would always choose to be victim: it is safer for the moral life and
there is more recovery afterward. If, however, it is better to suffer
injustice than to perpetrate it, better than either is to resist it,
fight it and, if possible, overthrow it.
It has been said so many times by extreme pacifists that even sane human
beings sometimes take it for granted, that "force never accomplished
anything permanent in human history." It is false, and the reasoning by
which it is supported involves the most sophistical of fallacies. All
depends on who uses the force and the purpose for which it is used. The
force employed by tyranny and injustice accomplishes nothing permanent
in history. Why? Because tyranny and injustice are in their very nature
transient, they are opposed to the moral order of the universe and, in
the end, must pass. On the other hand, the force employed on the part of
liberty and justice has attained most of the ends of civilization we
cherish to-day. The force of the million of mercenaries, collected
through Asia and Africa by Darius and Xerxes, to overwhelm a few Greek
cities, accomplished nothing permanent in history; but the force of the
ten thousand Athenians who fought at Marathon and of the other thousands
at Salamis, saved democracy for Europe and made possible the
civilization of the Occident. The force employed by King Louis of
France to support a tottering throne and continue the exploitation of
the people by an idle and selfish aristocratic caste, accomplished
nothing permanent in history; but the force of those Frenchmen who
marched upon Paris, singing the Marseillaise, made possible the freedom
and culture of the last hundred years. The force employed by King
George of England, to wring taxes without representation from reluctant
colonies, accomplished nothing permanent in history, but the force
which, at Bunker Hill and Concord Bridge, "fired the shot heard round
the world," achieved the liberty and democracy of the American
continent.
It may be freely admitted that all use of force is a confession of
failure to find a better way. If you use force in the education of a
child, it is such a confession of failure. So is it if force is used in
controlling defectives and criminals, or in adjusting the relations of
the nations; but note that the failure may be one for which the
individual parent, teacher, society, state or nation is in no degree
responsible. Force is a tragic weapon--and the ultimate one.
IX
PREPAREDNESS FOR SELF-DEFENSE
Since force is still the weapon of international justice, readiness and
willingness to use it for defense, when necessary, is then the first
condition of fulfilling the aims and serving the causes for which
America stands. In other words, since the relations of the nations are
still so largely those of individuals under the conditions of frontier
life, as with the honest man on the frontier, so for the
self-respecting, peace-loving nation to-day, it is well to carry a gun
and know how to shoot.
Carrying a gun is a dangerous practice, for two reasons: it may go off
in your pocket; you may get drunk and shoot when you ought not. Those
are the only two rational arguments against national preparation for
defense, in the present state of the world. Let us see. The gun may go
off in your pocket: that is, if a strong armament for defense is built
up, there is always danger that it may be used internally, against the
people, unjustly. That, indeed, has been one of the curses of Europe
for a thousand years. It is a grave danger, but recognizing it is partly
forestalling it; moreover, we would better face that danger than one far
worse. So with the other menace: you may get drunk and shoot when you
ought not. Nations get drunk: they get drunk with pride, arrogance,
aggressive ambition, revenge, even with panic terror, and so shoot when
they should not. This, also, is a grave danger; but here, as well,
recognizing it is part way forestalling it, and this danger, too, we
would better face than one far more terrible. Moreover, it is armament
for the gratification of aggressive ambition, and under the control of
the arbitrary authority of a despotic individual or group, that tends to
initiate war, not armament solely to defend the liberties of a people.
Thus, under the conditions cited, it is well to be armed and prepared.
If a wolf is at large, if a mad dog is loose, if a madman is abroad with
an ax, it is the part of wisdom to have an adequate weapon and be
prepared to use it. If the Athenians had not resisted the hordes of
Asia, what would have been the history of Europe? If the French had not
resisted tyranny and injustice in the Revolution, what would have been
the civilization of the last hundred years? If the English colonists
had not resisted taxation without representation, what would be the
present status of America? If the artisan groups had not united and
fought economic exploitation, what would be their life to-day? If
Belgium had not resisted Germany, what would be the future of democracy
in Europe? Thus, now and after the War, the need is for all necessary
armament for self-respecting self-defense and not an atom to gratify
aggressive ambition. This does not mean that, once involved in war, the
military tactics of democracy should be merely defensive. As has often
and wisely been said, in war the best defense is a swift and hard
attack.
It is widely argued, however, since our aim is peace and a world-court
of justice to settle the disputes among the nations, making general
disarmament possible, should not one great nation, fortunately free from
the quarrels of Europe, occupying the major portion of a continent, its
shores washed by two great oceans, with peaceful friendship on the north
and weak anarchy on the south--should not such a nation take the lead,
disarm and set an example to mankind? It is a beautiful dream! Would
that those who really believe in non-resistance to evil would be
logical, and apply it to internal as well as external policy. What is a
police force? It is a body of men, trained, employed and paid to use
force in resisting evil. If you wish to try out non-resistance, why not
let some city apply it? Let Chicago do it: abolish its police force and
set the example to the rest of the benighted cities of the country.
What would happen? As long as there are criminals in all cities of the
land, how they would flock to that fat pasturage. What devastation of
property, destruction of life, injury to innocent women and children!
Until the best men of Chicago would get together, form a vigilance
committee, shoot some of the criminals, hang others, drive the rest out;
and Chicago would get back to law and order, with courts of justice and
a regular police body, composed of men trained, employed and paid to use
force in resisting evil.
The example of Canada and the United States is cited, and a noble
example it is: three thousand and more miles of international boundary,
with never a shining gun or bristling fortress on the entire frontier.
A glorious example, prophetic of what is coming all over the world,
perhaps more quickly than we dare hope to-day; but what made it
possible? Agreement in advance, and that at a time when one of the
parties was too weak to be feared. Canada is getting strong: she has at
present four hundred thousand trained men at the front or ready to go.
Before the War closes she will have over a half million. Now suppose
Canada fortified: we would be compelled to, there would be no other way.
Thus one nation cannot disarm while the others are strongly armed, and
among them are those whose autocratic rulers and imperialistic castes
are watching for signs of weakness in order to perpetrate international
claim-jumping.
It is true that, on the frontier, in the early days, there were
individuals who went about unarmed among the gun men, did it
successfully, and some of them died peacefully in their beds: Christian
ministers--sky-pilots, they were called. Please note, however, that the
sky-pilot never had any money. He had no claims to be jumped.
We are not sky-pilots--far from it. As to money: the wealth of the
world has been flowing into our coffers in a golden stream, to the
embarrassment of our financial institutions, to the exaltation of the
cost of living to such a point that, with more money than we ever
dreamed of having, we find it more difficult to buy enough to eat and
wear. As for claims to be jumped: they are on every hand: Panama Canal,
Hawaiian Islands, Philippine Islands, ports of New York and San
Francisco, vast reaches of unprotected coast. No, we are not
sky-pilots, we cannot claim exemption on that ground.
Suppose, after the War, we attempted to disarm, without the protection
of a world court and international police, while the other nations
retained war armament. They, the victors and perhaps the defeated,
would possess a great army and navy, manned with seasoned veterans, and
be burdened with an intolerable debt; for the War has gone too far for
any one to be able to pay adequate indemnity. We, rich, young,
heedless, sure that no one on earth could ever whip us, chiefly because
no one worth while has ever seriously tried: suppose we were completely
disarmed. It would require only a little meddling with Mexico or
Brazil, and we should have to give up the Monroe Doctrine or fight.
Well, perhaps we shall give it up: it has even been suggested in the
halls of Congress that we should--to the shame of the suggester, be it
said. People do not understand the Monroe Doctrine: they talk of it as
if it were a law. It is in no sense a law, but is merely a rather
arrogant expression of our desires. We said to the other nations: "We
desire that none of you henceforth shall fence in any part of our front
or back yard, or the front or back yard of any of our neighbors,
dwelling on the North and South American continents." That is the
Monroe Doctrine, and that is all that it is: an expression of our
wishes. All very well if others choose to respect them, but suppose
some one does not? Perhaps, as stated, we may abandon the Monroe
Doctrine: that is the easiest way, and the easiest way, for a nation or
an individual, is usually the way of damnation. Even so, suppose the
nation in question to say, "My national aspirations demand the Panama
Canal, the Philippine Islands, or Long Island and the Port of New York."
Why not? The Atlantic Ocean is only a mill-pond. It is not half so wide
as Lake Erie was fifty years ago, in relation to modern means of
transportation and communication. People say, "Do we want to give up
our traditional isolation?" They are too late in asking the question:
that isolation is irrecoverably gone. That should be now evident even
to people dwelling in fatuously fancied security between the Alleghenies
and the Rockies. We are inevitably drawn into relation with the rest of
mankind. The question is no longer, "Shall we take a part in world
problems?", but "What part shall we take?"
The point is, that if, under the circumstances cited, any one wished to
do so, we could quickly be driven to such a condition of abject
humiliation that we should be compelled to fight. Now suppose,
disarmed, we should enter the conflict utterly unprepared? The result
would be, hundreds of thousands of young men, going out bravely in
obedience to an ideal--untrained and half equipped--to be butchered, a
humiliating peace, and an indemnity of many billions to be groaned under
for fifty years.
On the other hand, if we were adequately armed for defense, there would
be much less temptation to any one to trouble us; and if we were
compelled to fight, would it not be better to fight reasonably prepared?
There is a story, going the rounds of the press, about the bandit, Jesse
James: telling how, on one occasion, he went to a lonely farm house to
commandeer a meal. Entering, he found one woman, a widow, alone and
weeping bitterly. He asked her what was the matter, and she replied
that, in one hour, the landlord was coming, and if she did not have her
mortgage money, she would lose her little farm and home and be out in
the world, shelterless. The heart of the bandit was touched. He gave
her the money to pay off the mortgage, hid in the brush and held up the
landlord on the way back.
Need the moral be pointed? We have been getting the mortgage money.
During the first years of the War it rolled in, an ever-increasing
golden stream, until we held a mortgage on numerous European nations.
We have the mortgage money, but _beware of the way back!_
Thus the agitation, in one nation, for disarmament, unpreparedness and a
patched up peace, while the other nations are armed and embittered, not
only renders the situation of the one people critically perilous, but
actually cripples its power to serve the cause of world peace and
humanity. If only the peace-at-any-price people had to pay the price,
one would be willing to wait and see what happened; but they never pay
it, they take to cover. It is those hundreds of thousands of splendid
young men, going out blithely in obedience to duty, to be butchered, it
is the millions of women and children, who cannot escape from a
devastated area, who pay that price.
Every people in the past that turned to money and mercenaries for
defense has gone down. No people ever survived that was unable and
unwilling to fight for its liberties and spend, if necessary, the last
drop of its blood for the principles it believed.
X
RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE WAR
We have seen how impossible it is to forecast the new world that will
follow the War, we know merely that it will be utterly new.
Nevertheless, the great tendencies already at work we can partly discern
and recognize something of what they promise. It is well to try to see
them, that we may be not too unready to welcome the opportunity and
accept the burden of the world that is being born in pain.
Peace and prosperity produce a peculiar type of conservatism. People
are then relatively free in action and expression, things are going well
with them, and they are instinctively inclined to let well enough alone.
Thus in thought they tend to a conservative inertia.
On the other hand, in periods of great strain and suffering, as in war
time, thought is stimulated, all ordinary views are broken down and the
most radical notions are widely disseminated and even taken for granted
by those who, shortly before, would have been scandalized by them.
Action and certain phases of free speech are, in such a period, much
more widely restrained by authority. There is a swift and strong
development of social control, urged by necessity.
Thus, in war time, there is the curious paradox of ever widening
radicalism in thought, with constantly decreasing freedom in action and
expression. When the discrepancy becomes too great, you have the
explosion--Revolution. This cause hastened and made more extreme the
Russian Revolution, which had been simmering for a century. It has not
yet appeared in Germany because of the forty years of successful work in
drilling the mind of the German people to march in goose-step; yet the
increasing signs of questioning the infallibility of the existing regime
and system in Germany give evidence that there, too, the conflict is at
work.
With ourselves, the opposition appears, as yet, only in minor degree.
Nevertheless, it is here. On the one hand, are the registration,
conscription and espionage measures, the effort to control news, the
governmental supervision of food supplies, transportation, production
and corporation earnings, the war taxes. On the other hand, thought is
so stimulated that everything is questioned: our political system, our
social institutions--marriage, the family, education. As some one says,
"Nothing is radical now." We probably shall escape a sudden revolution,
but the conflict must produce profound readjustment in every aspect of
our life; for thought and action must come measurably together, since
they are related as soul and body.
There are singular eddies in the main current both ways. For instance,
the exigencies and sufferings of war produce a reaction toward narrower,
orthodox forms of religion and a harsher spirit of nationalism; while in
fields of action apart from the struggle, freedom and even license may
increase, as in sex-relations. Nevertheless these cross-currents, while
they may obscure, do not alter the main tendencies, which move swiftly
and increasingly toward the essential conflict.
Even before our actual entrance into the War, its profound influence
upon both our thinking and our conduct and institutions was evident.
Now that we are in the conflict that influence is multiplied. We are
aroused to new seriousness of thought. The frivolity and selfish
pleasure-seeking that have marked our life for recent decades are
decreasing. We may reasonably hope that the literature of superficial
cleverness and smart cynicism, which has been in vogue for the last
period, will have had its day, that the perpetrators of such literature
will be, measurably speaking, without audience at the conclusion of the
War.
The philosophy of complacency, at least, will be at an end, and the
world will face with new earnestness the problem of life. This
generation will be tired, perhaps exhausted, by the titanic struggle;
but youth comes on, fresh and eager, with exhaustless vital energy, and
the generations to come will take the heritage and work out the new
philosophy. As Nature quickly and quietly covers the worst scars we
make in her breast, so Man has a power of recovery, beyond all that we
could dream. It is to that we must look, across the time of demoniac
destruction.
We may even dare to hope that the next half-century will see a great
development of noble literature in our own land. War for liberty,
justice and humanity always tends to create such a productive period in
literature and the other fine arts. The struggle with Persia was behind
the Periclean age in Athens. It was the conflict of England with the
overshadowing might of Spain that so vitalized the Elizabethan period.
The Revolution was behind the one important school of literature our own
country has produced hitherto.
Since this War is waged on a scale far more colossal than any other in
human history, and since liberty and democracy are at stake, not only in
one land, but throughout the world and for the entire future of
humanity, it is reasonable to expect that the stimulation to the
creation of art and literature will be far greater than that following
any previous struggle. Where the sacrifice for high aims has been
greatest, the inspiration should be greatest, as in France. The
literature currently produced, as in the books of Loti, Maeterlinck and
Rolland, is scrappy and disappointing, it is true; but that is to be
expected when the whole nation is strained to its last energy and
gasping for breath, under the titanic struggle, and is no test of what
will be. In spite of the destruction of so large a fraction of her
manhood, France will surely rise from the ashes of this world
conflagration regenerated and reinspired. The pessimism of her late
decades will be gone. The literature and other art she will produce
will be instinct with new earnestness and exalted vision, and she may
excel even her own great past.
We too are awakening. Since the War began, all over the United States,
men and women have been thinking more earnestly and have been more
willing to listen to the expression of serious thought than ever before
for the last quarter century. Now that the hour of sacrifice has
struck, this earnestness must greatly deepen. Perhaps we, too, may have
our golden age of art.
The same inspiration carries naturally into the religious life. It is
true, as we have seen, that there is a cross-current of reversion to
narrower orthodoxy, caused by the War. The Gods of War are all national
and tribal divinities. While they rule, the face of the God of Humanity
is veiled. The Kaiser's possessive attitude toward the Divine is but the
extreme case of what War does to the religious life. Even among
ourselves the tendency shows in such phenomena as the current popular
evangelism--an eloquent, if artfully calculated and vulgarized preaching
of the purely personal virtues, with an ignorance that there is a social
problem in modern civilization, profound as that displayed by a
mediaeval churchman. The evangelist's list of inmates, whom he relegates
to the kingdom of the lost, makes the place singularly attractive to the
lover of good intellectual society.
Nevertheless, the reversion to narrower creeds but indicates the newly
awakened hunger of the religious life. Men who sacrifice live with
graver earnestness than those who are carelessly prosperous. Cynicism
and pessimism are children of idleness and frivolity, never of heroic
sacrifice and nobly accepted pain. These latter foster faith in life
and its infinite and eternal meaning. Thus, with all the tragic
submerging of our spiritual heritage the War involves, we may hope that
it will cause a revival, not of emotional hysteria, but of deepened
faith in the spirit, in the supreme worth of life, until at last we may
see the dawn of the religion of humanity.
XI
THE WAR AND EDUCATION
Equally far-reaching are the changes the War must produce in our
education. Temporarily, our higher institutions will be crippled by the
drawing off of the youth of the land for war. This is one of the
unfortunate sacrifices such a struggle involves. We must see to it that
it is not carried too far. One still hears old men in the South
pathetically say, "I missed my education because of the Civil War." Let
us strive to keep open our educational institutions and continue all our
cultural activities, in spite of the drain and strain of the War. For
never was intellectual guidance and leadership more needed than in the
present crisis.
The paramount effect of the War on education is, however, in the
multiplied demand for efficiency. This is the cry all across the
country to-day, and, in the main, it is just. Our education has been
too academic, too much molded by tradition. It must be more closely
related to life and to the changed conditions of industry and commerce.
Each boy and girl, youth and maiden, must leave the school able to take
hold somewhere and make a significant contribution to the society of
which he or she is an integral part. Vocational training must be
greatly increased. The problems of the school must be increasingly
practical problems, and thought and judgment must be trained to the
solution of those problems. This is all a part of that socialization of
democracy which must be achieved if democracy is to survive in the new
world following the War.
There is, nevertheless, an element of emotional hysteria in the demand
for efficiency and only efficiency. Efficiency is too narrow a standard
by which to estimate anything concerning human conduct and character.
In the effort to meet and conquer Germany, let us beware of the mistake
of Germany. One of the world tragedies of this epoch is the way in which
Germany has sacrificed her spiritual heritage, first for economic, then
for purely military efficiency. When we recall that spiritual heritage,
as previously described, when we think of Schiller, Herder and Goethe,
Froebel, Herbart and Richter, Tauler, Luther and Schleiermacher, Kant,
Fichte and Schopenhauer, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, we stand aghast
at the way in which she has plunged it all into the abyss,--for what?
Shall it profit a people, more than a man, if it gain the whole world
and lose its own soul?
In such a time, then, all of us who believe in the spirit must hold high
the torch of humanistic culture. Education is for life and not merely
for efficiency. Of what worth is life, if one is only a cog-wheel in
the economic machine? It is to save the spiritual heritage of humanity
that we are fighting, and it is that heritage that education must bring
to every child and youth, if it fulfills its supreme trust. Education
for the purposes of autocratic imperialism seeks to make a people a
perfect economically productive and militarily aggressive machine.
Education for democracy means the development of each individual to the
most intelligent, self-directed and governed, unselfish and devoted,
sane, balanced and effective humanity.
XII
SOCIALISM AND THE WAR
One of the surprises of the War was the complete breakdown of
international socialism. Not only socialists, but those of us who had
been thoughtfully watching the movement from without, had come to
believe that the measure of consciousness of international brotherhood
it had developed in the artisan groups of many lands, would be a
powerful lever against war. We were wrong: the superficial
international sympathy evaporated like mist under the rays of a revived
nationalism. The socialists fell in line, almost as completely as any
other group, with the purely nationalist aims in each land.
This must have gratified certain despots; for one cause of the War, not
the cause, was undoubtedly the preference on the part of various
autocrats, to face an external war rather than the rising tide of
democracy within the nation. Temporarily, they have been successful,
but surely only for a brief time. The victory of democracy will vastly
accelerate the growth of the spirit of brotherhood throughout the world.
The terrible waste of the War must of itself produce a reaction of the
people on kings and castes in all lands. The suffering that will follow
the War, in the period of economic readjustment, will accentuate this.
Surely the _people_, in England, France, America, Italy, Russia, and
among the neutral nations, will strive that no such war may come again.
Even in Germany, when the people find out what they have paid and why,
inevitably they must struggle so to reform their institutions that no
ruler or class may again plunge them into such disaster for the selfish
benefit or ambitions of that ruler or class. How our hearts have warmed
to Liebknecht!
The realignment of nations must work to the same end. War, like
politics, makes strange bed-fellows. Germany and Austria, for centuries
rivals, and, at times, enemies, we behold united so completely that it
is difficult to imagine them disentangled after the War.
France and England, long regarding each other as natural enemies, are
fused heart and soul. Strangest of all, we have seen England struggling
to win for Russia that prize of Constantinople, which for generations it
has been a main object of British diplomacy to keep from Russian grasp.
Most impressive of all, has been the new consciousness of unity and
common cause among the nations of the earth, and the groups within all
nations, standing for democracy.
Thus the tide, checked for a time, will inevitably break forth with
renewed force. It is probable that the next fifty years will be a
period of great change--even of revolutions, peaceful or otherwise,
throughout the earth.
To understand the effect on the whole socialist movement, one must
distinguish clearly the two contrasting types of socialism. It is the
curse of the orthodox, or Marxian, type of socialism, that it was "made
in Germany." Its economic state is modeled directly on the Prussian
bureaucratic and paternalistic state. Its dream realized, would mean
Prussian efficiency carried to the _nth_ power, in a society of as
merciless slavery as that prevailing among the ants and the bees. It is
doubtless this characteristic that has made so many bureaucratic or
orthodox socialists instinctively Pro-German in sentiment and sympathy
during the War.
The contrasting type of socialism is that which is really the full
development of democracy, its movement from a narrow individualism to
ever wider voluntary co-operation. It moves, not toward government
ownership, but toward ownership by the people, of natural monopolies.
It means, not the turning over to a bureaucratic government, of plants
and instruments of production, but the progressive cooperative ownership
of them by the workers themselves. It will end, not in the overthrow of
the capitalist regime, but in all workers becoming co-operative
capitalists, and all capitalists, productive workers, since no idle
rich--or poor, will be tolerated. Such socialism, if it be so called,
will depend upon the highest individual initiative, the most voluntary
co-operation and will include the individualism which is the cherished
boon of democracy. It is significant that those who represent this type
of socialism and who think for themselves, are breaking away from the
orthodox party, under the courageous leadership and example of John
Spargo, in increasing numbers, since our entrance into the War. They
are as instinctively American and democratic in sympathy, as those of
the opposite type are Pro-German.
Even in the most democratic countries, however, the War has caused a
vast increase of the undesirable type of socialism: that is one of its
temporary penalties. To carry on such a war successfully, it is
necessary to multiply the authority of the central government. That has
been the experience of England, now being repeated here. Men, who were
_citizens_ of a democracy, become, as soldiers, and in part as workers,
_subjects_ of the government in war. To some extent we are forced to
imitate the tendencies we deplore and seek to overthrow in Germany, to
be able to meet and defeat Germany.
Even so, the difference is profound. The subordination to the
government is, for the people as a whole, voluntary, achieved through
laws passed by chosen representatives of the people, and not by the
arbitrary will of a kaiser and ruling caste. Thus the freedom,
voluntarily relinquished for a time, can be quickly regained when the
crisis is past. Subjects will become citizens again, when soldiers
return to civil life.
Nevertheless, there will be no return to the old, selfishly
individualistic regime. The lesson of organized action will have been
learned, and a vast increase of voluntary co-operation, that is, of the
socialism that is true democracy may be anticipated as a beneficent
result of the War. This will be one of the great compensations for the
waste of our heritage, spiritual and material, through the War. _The
voluntary socialization of previously individualistic democracy will be
the next great forward movement of the human spirit_.
XIII
THE WAR AND FEMINISM
Of all consequences of the War, perhaps none is more significant than
its effect upon the position of women. Militarism and feminism are
counter currents in the tide of history. All recrudescence of brute
force carries the subjugation of women. In the degree to which
professional militarism prevails in any society, women are forced into
hard industrial activities, despised because fulfilled by women. On the
other hand, a group of carefully protected women is held apart as a fine
adornment of life. Both ways militarism accentuates the property idea in
reference to women: the one type, useful, the other, adorning, property.
The one shows in marriage by purchase, the other in the dowry system.
It is hard to say which is more dishonoring to women. It would,
perhaps, seem preferable and less offensive to be bought as useful,
rather than accepted with a money payment, as an adorning but expensive
possession, where, as with the automobile, "it is the upkeep that
counts." Surely, however, either attitude is degrading enough.
The accentuation, in the present War, of the notion of women as
property, is evident in more brutal form in the horrors of rape, in the
deliberate and organized use of women as breeders, with the same
efficiency with which Germany breeds her swine.
Nevertheless, here, too, strong counter currents are at work. As this
is a war of nations, not of armies, it is the whole people that, in each
instance, has had to be mobilized and organized. In all the democracies
women have voluntarily risen to this need, just as citizens have
voluntarily become soldiers. Thus women, by the legion, are working in
munition factories, on the farms, in productive plants of every kind, in
public service and commerce organizations. The noble way in which women
have accepted the double burden has created a wave of reverent
admiration throughout the world. Thus where professional militarism
tends to despise the industrial activities into which it forces women,
war for defense and justice causes reverence for the same socially
necessary activities and for the women who so courageously undertake
them for the sake of all.
Moreover, the increased freedom of action for women will outlast its
temporary cause. Once so admitted to new fields of industrial, business
and professional activity, women can never be generally excluded from
them again. Thus when the soldiers become citizens, many of the women
will remain producers, working beside men under new conditions of
equality.
The result, with the general stimulation of radical thinking that the
War involves, will be a profound acceleration of the feminist movement
throughout, at least, the democracies of the world. Already it is being
recognized that all valid principles of democracy apply to women equally
with men. Regenerated, if chaotic, Russia takes for granted the farthest
reaches of feminism. The regime in England, that bitterly opposed
suffrage for women, is now voluntarily granting it before the close of
the War.
Thus the victory of the allied nations will mean the fruition of much of
the feminism that is a phase of humanism. It will mean freeing women
from outgrown custom and tradition, from unjust limitations in
industrial, social and political life. It will mean men and women
working together, on a plane of moral equality, with free initiative and
voluntary co-operation, for the fruition of democracy. Just as that
fruition will see the end of idle rich and poor, so there will be no
more women slaves or parasites, none regarded or possessed as property,
but only free human beings, each self-directed and self-controlled, and
responsible for his or her own personality and conduct.
XIV
THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY
The nineteenth century was the period of rapid growth in adhesion to
those ideals of democracy for which the War is being fought. It is not
so well recognized that during the same hundred years democracy was so
transformed as to be to-day a new thing under the sun.
Up to the time of the French and American revolutions democracy rested
largely upon certain abstract ideas of human nature. Rousseau could
argue that in primitive times men sat down together to form a state,
each giving up a part of his natural right to a central authority, and
thus justifying it. We now know that nothing of the kind ever happened,
that society had undergone a long process of development before men
began to think about it at all. We continue to repeat the splendid at
all. I refer, of course, to the women of antiquity. Where respectable,
these were the head of the household slaves, scarcely removed from the
condition of the latter. The few women who did achieve freedom of
thought and action, and became the companions of cultivated men--the
Aspasias of antiquity--bought their freedom at a sad price.
So Rome is called a republic, and it is true that, during the first half
of her long history, freedom gradually broadened down from the patrician
class to the plebeian multitude. When Rome reached out, however, to the
mastery of the most impressive empire the world has seen, she never
dreamed of extending that freedom to the conquered populations. If she
did grant Roman citizenship to an occasional community, to enjoy the
rights and exercise the privileges of that citizenship, it was necessary
to journey to Rome. It was the city and the world: the city ruling the
world as subject.
The same principle holds with the republics developing at the close of
the middle age, in Italy, in the towns of the Hanseatic League and
elsewhere. Always the freedom achieved was for a city, a group or a
class, never for all the people. Our dream, on the contrary, is to take
all the men and women in the land, ultimately in the world, and help
them, through the free and cooperative activity of each with all the
rest, on toward life, liberty, happiness, intelligence--all the ends of
life that are worth while. If we demand life for ourselves, we ask it
only in harmony with the best life for all. We want no special
privilege, no benefit apart, bought at the price of the best welfare of
humanity. "We," unfortunately, does not yet mean all of us, but it does
signify an increasing multitude, rallying to this that is the standard
of to-morrow.
A third transformation, at least equally important with these, is in the
invention, for it is no less, of representative government. Political
thinkers, such as John Fiske, have tried to make us understand what this
invention means: we do not yet realize it. The development of
representative government is the cause, first of all, of the tremendous
expansion of the area over which we apply democracy. Plato, in the
_Laws_, limits the size of the ideal state--the one realizable in this
world--to 5040 citizens. Why? Well, the exact number has a certain
mystical significance, but the main reason is, Plato could not imagine a
much larger body of citizens than 5000 meeting together in public
assembly and fulfilling the functions of citizenship.
We have extended democracy over a hundred millions of population,
dwelling on the larger part of a continent; and if one travels North,
South, East, West, to-day, one is impressed that, in spite of
unassimilated elements, everywhere men and women are proud, first of
all, of being American citizens, and only in subordinate ways devoted to
the section or community to which they belong. This has been made
possible by the invention and development of representative government.
That is not all: it is representative government that takes the sting
out of all the older criticisms of democracy. Plato devotes one of the
saddest portions of his _Republic_ to showing how in a brief time,
democracy must inevitably fall and be replaced by tyranny. With the
democracy Plato knew this was true. It was impossible for Athens to
protect and make permanent her constitution. She might pass a law
declaring the penalty of death on any one proposing a change in the
constitution. It did no good. Let some demagogue arise, sure of the
suffrage of a majority of the citizens: he could call them into public
assembly, cause a repeal of the law, and make any change in the
constitution he desired. There was no way to prevent it.
It is the invention and development of representative government that
has changed all that. We chafe under the slow-moving character of our
democracy--over the time it takes to get laws enacted and the longer
time to get them executed. We may well be patient: this slow-moving
character of democracy is the other side of its greatest safe-guard. It
is because we cannot immediately express in action the popular will and
opinion, but must think two, three, many times, working through chosen
and responsible representatives of the people, that our democracy is not
subject to the perils and criticisms of those of antiquity.
The voice of the people in the day and hour, under the impulse of sudden
caprice or passion, is anything but the voice of God: it is much more
apt to be the voice of all the powers of darkness. It is common
thought, sifted through uncommon thought, that approaches as near the
voice of God as we can hope to get in this world. It is not the surface
whim of public opinion, it is its _greatest common denominator_ that
approximates the truth.
It behooves us to remember this at a time when changes are coming with
such swiftness. Our life has developed so rapidly that the old
political forms proved inadequate to the solution of the new problems.
As a practical people, we therefore quickly adopted or invented new
forms. Doubtless this is, in the main, right, but we should understand
clearly what we are doing.
For instance, one of the great changes, recently inaugurated, is the
election of national senators by popular vote. Our forefathers planned
that the national upper house should represent a double sifting of
popular opinion. We elected state legislatures; they, in turn, chose the
national senators: thus these were twice removed from the popular will.
It proved easy to corrupt state legislatures; the national senate came
to represent too much the moneyed interests; and so, through an
amendment to the constitution, we changed the process, and now elect our
senators by direct vote of the people. This makes them more immediately
representative of the popular will, and perhaps the change was wise; but
we should recognize that we have removed one more safe-guard of
democracy.
A story, told for a generation, and fixed upon various British
statesmen, will illustrate my meaning. The last repetition attributed
it to John Burns. On one occasion, while he was a member of Parliament,
it is said he was at a tea-party in the West End of London. The
hostess, pouring his cup of tea, anxious to make talk and show her deep
interest in politics, said, "Mr. Burns, what is the use of the house of
Lords anyway?" The statesman, without replying, poured his tea from the
cup into the saucer. The hostess, surprised at the breach of etiquette,
waited, and then said, "but Mr. Burns, you didn't answer my question."
He pointed to the tea, cooling in the saucer: that was the function, to
cool the tea of legislation. That was the function intended for our
national senate. The trouble was, the tea of legislation often became
so stone cold in the process that it was fit only for the political
slop-pail, and that was not what we wanted. So we have changed it all,
but one more safe-guard of democracy is gone.
So with other reforms, loudly acclaimed, as the initiative and
referendum. With the new problems and complications of an
extraordinarily developed life, it is doubtless wise that the people
should be able to initiate legislation and should have the final word as
to what legislation shall stand. On the other hand, if we are not to
suffer under a mass of hasty and ill-considered legislation, if laws are
to stand, they must always be formulated by a body of trained
legislators, and not by the changing whim of popular opinion.
So with the recall, now so widely demanded in many sections of the
country. In the old days, our candidates were most obsequious and
profuse in promises to their constituents _before_ election; but once
elected, only too often they turned their backs on their constituents,
went merrily their own way, making deals and bargains, in the spirit
that "to the victor belong the spoils." Therefore we justly demanded
some control of them, after, as before, election: hence the recall.
Again the movement is right; but if the fundamentals of democracy are to
be permanent, that body of men, concerned with the interpretation of the
constitution and the fundamental law of the land, must not be subject to
the immediate whim of mob mind, and the power to recall those judges
occupied with this task would be a graver danger than advantage. They
will make mistakes, at times they will be ultra conservative and
servants of special interests, but that is one of the incidental prices
we have to pay for the permanence of free institutions. The problem is
to keep the basic principles of democracy unchanged, the forms on the
surface as fluid and adjustable as possible.
It is these three transformations--the abandonment of the old abstract
notions and the testing of democracy by its results, the expansion of
its application over the entire population, and the invention and
development of representative government--it is these three changes that
make our democracy a new order of society, new in its problems, its
menaces, its solutions.
XV
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
All just government is a transient device to make ordered progress
possible. In the kingdom of heaven there would be no government, for if
all human beings saw the best, loved the best and willed the best, the
function of government would be at an end. Obviously there is no hope
or fear that we shall get into the kingdom of heaven soon, and the
necessity for government will exist for an indefinitely long time.
Nevertheless, government is due to the imperfection of human nature and,
as stated, its aim is ordered progress. Progress without order is
anarchy; order without progress is stagnation and death.
It must frankly be admitted, moreover, that democracy is not the
shortest road to good government nor to economic efficiency. That we
recognize this as a people is proved by the drift of our opinion and of
the changes in our lesser institutions. Take, for instance, our city
government. A few decades ago our cities were so notoriously misgoverned
that they were the scandal of the world. Our boards of aldermen or
councilmen, representing ward constituencies, with all sorts of local
strings tied to them, were clumsy and unwieldy and easily subject to
corruption.
So, about twenty years ago, all across the country went the cry, "Get a
good mayor, and give him a free hand." That is the way our great
industries are conducted: a wise captain of industry is secured and
given full control. Being a practical people, and imagining ourselves to
be much more practical than really we are, we said, let us conduct our
city business in the same way. Why not? Plato showed long ago that you
can get the best government in the shortest time by getting a good
tyrant, and giving him a free hand.
There arc just two objections. The first is incidental: it is
exceedingly difficult to keep your tyrant good. Arbitrary authority
over one's fellows is about the most corrupting influence known to man.
No one is great and good enough to be entrusted with it. Responsible
power sobers and educates, irresponsible power corrupts. Nevertheless
we pay the price of this error and learn the lesson.
The other objection is more significant. It is the effect on the rank
and file of the citizenship, for the meaning of democracy is not
immediate results in government, but the education of the citizen, and
that education can come only by fulfilling the functions of citizenship.
Thus it is better to be the free citizen of a democracy, with all the
waste and temporary inefficiency democracy involves, than to be the
inert slave of the most perfect paternal despotism ever devised by man.
Thus the movement away from democratic city government is gravely to be
questioned, no matter what economic results it secures.
The same argument applies to more recent changes, as the commission form
of city government. As in the previous case, reacting upon the
scandalous situation, we said, "Let us choose the three to five best men
in the community, and let them run the city's business for us." Nearly
every time this change has been made, the result has been an immediate
cleaning up of the city government; but why? Chiefly because "a new
broom sweeps clean,"--not so much for the reason that it is new, as
because you are interested in the instrument. You can get a dirty room
remarkably clean with an old broom, if you will sweep hard enough. The
cleaning up is due, not primarily to the instrument, but to the hand
that wields it.
To speak less figuratively: the cleaning up of the city government with
the inauguration of the commission system, came because the change was
made by an awakening of the good people of the community. Good people
have a habit, however, of going to sleep in an astoundingly short time;
but _the gang never sleeps_. Now suppose, while the good people are
dozing in semi-somnolence, assured that the new broom will sweep of
itself, the gang gets together and elects the three to five worst
gangsters in the city to be the commission? Is it not evident that the
very added efficiency of the instrument means greater graft and
corruption?
Equally the argument applies to the most recent device suggested--the
city manager plan. As we have largely taken our schools out of
politics, and have a non-partisan educational expert as superintendent,
so it is suggested we should conduct our city business. Again, suppose
the gang appoints the city manager: he will be an expert in graft,
rather than in government.
The moment a people gets to trusting to a device it is headed for
danger. There is just one safeguard of democracy, and that is _to keep
the good people awake and at the task all the time_. Some instruments
are better and some are worse, but the instrument never does the work,
it is the hand and brain that wield it.
If there is one field where we could reasonably expect to find pure
democracy, it is in our higher educational institutions. In a college
or university, where a group of young men and women, and a group of
older men and women are gathered apart, out of the severer economic
struggle, dedicated to ideal ends: there, surely, we could expect pure
democracy in organization and relationship; yet the tendency has been
steadily toward autocracy. One can count the fingers of both hands and
not cover the list of college and university presidents who have taken
office during the last fifteen years, only on condition that they have
complete authority over the educational policy of the institution, and
often over its financial policy as well. The reason is obvious: we run
a railroad efficiently by getting a good president and giving him
arbitrary control; why not a university?
There are just the two objections cited above: even in a university, it
is difficult to keep your tyrant good. This, again, is the minor
objection. The real evil is in the effect upon the rank and file of
those governed by the autocrat. There are men in university faculties
to-day who say, privately, that if they could get any other opportunity,
they would resign to-morrow, for they feel like clerks in a department
store, with no opportunity to help determine the educational policy of
the institutions of which they are integral parts.
The German university, under all the autocracy and bureaucracy of the
German state, is more democratic in its organization than our own. Its
faculty is a self-governing body, electing to its own membership. The
Rectorship is an honor conferred for the year on some faculty member for
superior worth and scholarship. Each member of the faculty may thus
feel the self-respect and dignity, resulting from the power and
initiative he possesses as a free citizen of the institution.
Let me suggest what would be the ideal democratic organization of a
college or university. Why not apply the same division of functions of
government that has proved so successful in the state? The board of
Trustees is the natural judiciary; the President, the executive. The
faculty is the legislative body, with the student body as a sort of
lower house, cooperating in enacting the legislation for its own
government. Where has such a plan been tried?
If the primary purpose of democracy is thus, not immediate results in
government, but the education of the citizen, on the other hand,
democracy rests, for its safety and progress, on the ever better
education of the citizen. Under the older forms of human society, laws
may be passed and executed that are far in advance of public opinion.
That cannot be done in a democracy. The law may be a slight step in
advance, and so perhaps educate public opinion to its level; but if it
goes beyond that step, after the first flurry of interest in the law is
past, it remains a dead letter on the statute books--worse than useless,
because cultivating that dangerous disrespect for all law, which we have
seen growing upon us as a people.
Thus from either side, the problem of democracy is a problem of
education. It rests upon education, its aim is education. In a
democracy, the supreme function of the state is, not to establish a
military system for defense, or a police system for protection, it is
not the enforcement of public and private contract: it is to take the
children and youth of each generation and develop them into men and
women able to fulfill the responsibility and enjoy the opportunity of
free citizenship in a free society.
XVI
MENACES OF DEMOCRACY
Since modern democracy is a new thing under the sun, so its menaces are
new, or, if old, they take misleadingly new forms. For instance, the
greatest danger in the path of our democracy is the world-old evil of
selfishness, but it does take surprisingly new form. It is not
aggressive selfishness that we have primarily to dread. There are
those, it is true, who believe we may soon be endangered by the
ambitions of some arrogant leader in the nation. The fear is
unwarranted, for our people are still so devoted to the fundamental
principles of democracy, that if any leader were to take one clear step
toward over-riding the constitution and making himself despot, that step
would be his political death-blow. No, we are not yet endangered by the
aggressive ambitions of those at the front, but we are in grave danger
from the negative selfishness of indifference, shown in its worst form
by just those people who imagine they are good because they are
respectable, whereas they may be merely good--for nothing.
Plato argued that society could never have patriotism in full measure
until the family was abolished. A singular notion that any school boy
to-day can readily answer, yet here is the curious situation. Family
life, among ourselves, in its better aspects, has reached a higher plane
than ever before in any people. More marriages are made on the only
decent basts of any marriage. This is the woman's land. Children have
their rights and privileges, even to their physical, mental and moral
detriment. It is here that men most willingly sacrifice for their
families, slaving through the hot summer in the cities, to send wife and
children to the seashore or the mountains; yet it is just here that men
most readily unhinge their consciences when they turn from private to
public life.
Some cynic has said that there is not an American citizen who would not
smuggle to please his wife. Of course the statement is not true, but if
you have ever crossed the ocean on a transatlantic liner, and watched
the devices to which ordinarily decent men--men who would be ashamed to
steal your pocket handkerchief or to lie to you as an individual--will
resort, in order to lie to the government or steal from the government,
you begin to wonder if the cynic was not right. The law, obviously, may
be unjust: if so, protest against it and seek to have it changed, but
while it is the law, does it not deserve your respectful obedience,
unless you would add to the dangerously growing disrespect for all law?
Next to the menace of selfishness is that of ignorance, and this, too,
takes confusingly new form. It is not ignorance of scientific fact and
law, dangerous as that is, that threatens, but ignorance of what our
institutions mean, of what they have cost, of the ideal for which we
stand among the nations. The celerity with which, even during the past
two decades, the younger generation has abandoned old standards and
ideals, is an ominous illustration. It is true:
"New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient goods uncouth; 'They
must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth."
Those words of Lowell's are as fully applicable to the present crisis,
as to that for which Lowell wrote them; but to give up the past, without
knowing that you are letting go, is surely not the part of wisdom.
A third menace shows in that fickleness of temper and false standard of
life that cause us to admire the wrong type of leader. Probably one
half of all the attacks on men of unusual wealth and success come from
other men, who would like to be in the same situation with those they
attack, and have failed of their ambition. Part of the attack is
sincere, no doubt, but if you assumed that all the abuse heaped upon
conspicuous men came from moral conviction, you would utterly misread
the situation.
On the other hand, men of moral excellence make us ashamed. Now it
takes a rarely magnanimous spirit to be shamed and not resent it. We
are apt to feel that, if we can pull another down, we raise ourselves.
To realize this, consider the growl of joy that comes from the worse
sort of citizen and newspaper when some public leader is caught in a
private scandal. As if pulling him down, raised us! We are all tarred
with his disgrace. There are, indeed, two ways of stating the ideal of
democracy: you can say, "I am just as good as any one else," which in
the first place, is not true, and, in the second, would be unlovely of
you to express, were it true. You can say, on the contrary, "Every
other human being ought to have just as good a chance as I have," which
is right; and yet you will hear the ideal of democracy phrased a dozen
times the first way, where it is expressed once in the second form.
That democracies are fickle is one of the oldest criticisms upon them.
We had thought that we were not subject to that criticism, and in the
old days we were not. We had the country debating club and the village
lyceum. We were an agricultural people, sober and slow-moving. We had
few books, they were good books and we read them many times. We had few
newspapers, we knew the men who wrote in them, and when we read an
editorial, our mind was actively challenged by the sincere thinking of
another mind.
To-day, everywhere, we have moved into the cities. The strength of the
country-side is sobriety and slow incubation of the forces of life. Its
vice is stupidity. The strength of the city is keen wittedness,
versatility, quick response. Its vice is fickleness, morbidity,
exhaustion. We have our great blanket sheet newspapers, representing a
party, a clique, a financial interest, with writers lending their brains
out, for money, to write editorials for causes in which they do not
believe. We have the multitude of books, incessantly and hastily
produced; we read much, and scarcely think at all. We have got rid of
the old "three decker" novel, reduced it to a single volume, and then
taken out the climax of the story, publishing it in the corner of the
daily newspaper, as the short story of the day, so that he who runs may
read. If he is a wise man he will run as fast as he can and not read
that stuff at all. We have our ever increasing "movies," with their
incessant titillation of the mind with swift passing impressions, as
disintegrating to intellectual concentration, as they are injurious to
the eyes. The result of it all is an increasing fickleness of temper,
so that the same people who shout most loudly when the popular hero goes
by, the next week cover his very name with vituperation and abuse, if he
offends their slightest whim.
This evil breeds another: fickleness in the people means demagoguery in
the leader, inevitably. We have said to our public men--not in words,
but by the far more impressive language of our conduct--"get money,
power, success, and we will give you more money, power and success, and
not ask you how you got them nor what ends you serve in using them."
That so many have refused the bribe is to their credit, not ours; we
have done what we could to corrupt them.
Finally, we are the most irreverent people in the world. We believe in
youth, we scorn age. We have splendid enthusiasm, we do not know what
wisdom means. One hears college presidents say--half jokingly, of
course--that there is no use appointing a man over thirty to the faculty
these days. So one hears Christian ministers, in those denominations
where the minister is called by the particular church, say there is no
use trying to get another call after one is fifty! Of course, it is not
true, but it is true enough to be a serious criticism upon us. For what
other vocation is there where the mellowness that comes only from time
and long experience, from presiding at weddings and standing beside open
graves, sharing the joys and sorrows of innumerable persons, is so
indispensable, as in the pastor, the physician of the spirit? Still, we
will turn out some wise, shy, mellow old man, just ripened to the point
of being the true minister to the souls of others, and replace him with
a recent graduate of a theological school, because the latter can talk
the language of the higher criticism or whatever else happens to
interest us for the moment. Obviously, we pay the price, but think what
it indicates of our civilization.
XVII
THE DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY
We have seen that the gravest menaces of democracy are the faults in
mind and character in the multitude. Selfishness, fickleness,
ignorance, irreverence in the people, with demagoguery in the leader--
these are the menaces of American democracy. How then can the people be
trusted, since democracy depends upon trusting them? This is an old
indictment, searching to the very heart of democracy. Plato made it of
ancient Athens, while, more recently and trenchantly, Ibsen has made it
for all modern society.
The argument runs thus: democracy means the rule of the majority. Well,
there are more fools than wise men in the world, more ignorant than
intelligent. Thus the rule of the majority must mean the rule of the
fools over the wise men, of the ignorant over the intelligent. Such is
the significant indictment, and we are compelled to admit that our
political life is filled with illustrations that would seem to
substantiate it. The ward bosses, the demagogues and grafters who are
given power by the multitude, one campaign after another, would seem to
justify the pessimism of Plato and Ibsen.
Is there not, however, a subtle fallacy in the very phrasing of the
indictment? The majority does not "rule": it elects representatives who
guide. That is something entirely different. When the worst is said of
them those representatives of the people are distinctly above the
average of the majorities electing them. Take the roll of our
presidents, for instance. With all the corruption and vulgarity of our
national politics, that list, from Washington, through such altitudes as
Jefferson and Lincoln, to the present occupant of the White House, is
superior to any roster of kings or emperors in the history of mankind.
What does this mean? It means that _the hope of democracy is the
instinctive power in the breast of common humanity to recognize the
highest when it appears_. Were this not true, democracy would be the
most hopeless of mistakes, and the sooner we abandoned it, with its
vulgarity and waste, the better it would be for us. The instinctive
power is there, however: to recognize, not to live, the highest.
How many have followed the example of Socrates, remaining in prison and
accepting the hemlock poison for the sake of truth? Yet all who know of
him thrill to his sacrifice. Of all who have borne the name, Christian,
how many have followed consistently the footsteps of Jesus and obeyed
literally and unvaryingly the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount? Of
the millions, perhaps ten or twenty individuals--to be generous in our
view; but _all the world recognizes him_.
Here, then, is the hope that takes the sting from the indictment of
Plato, Ibsen and how many other critics of democracy. Plato said,
"Until philosophers are kings, . . . cities will never have rest from
their evils,--no, nor the human race, as I believe." Once, perhaps once
only, Plato's dream was realized: in that noblest of philosopher
emperors, wholly dedicated to the welfare of the world he ruled with
autocratic power; yet the soul of Marcus Aurelius was burdened with an
impossible task. It is one of the tragic ironies of history that, in
this one realization of Plato's lofty dream, the noble emperor could
postpone, he could not avert, the colossal doom that threatened the
world he ruled. So he wrapped his Roman cloak about him and lay down to
sleep, with stoic consciousness that he had done his part in the place
where Zeus had put him, but relieved that he might not see the disaster
he knew must swiftly come.
How different our dream: it is no illusion of a happy accident of
philosopher kings. We want no arbitrary monarchs, wise or brutal: from
the noblest of emperors to the butcher of Berlin, we would sweep them
all aside, to the ash-heap of outworn tools. Our dream is the awakening
and education of the multitude, so that the majority will be able and
glad to choose, as its guides, leaders and representatives, the noblest
and best. When that day comes, there will be, for the first time in the
history of mankind, the dawn of a true _aristocracy_ or rule of the
best; and it will come through the fulfillment of democracy. A long and
troubled path, with many faults and evils meantime? Yes, but not so
hopelessly long, when one considers the ages of slow struggle up the
mountain and the swiftly multiplying power of education over the mind of
all.
XVIII
PATERNALISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY
The contrast between paternalism and democracy in aim and method is thus
extreme. Paternalism seeks directly organization, order, production and
efficiency, incidentally and occasionally the welfare of the subject
population. Democracy seeks directly the highest development of all men
and women, their freedom, happiness and culture, in the end it hopes
this will give social order, good government and productive power. It
is willing, meantime, to sacrifice some measure of order for freedom, of
good government for individual initiative, of efficiency for life.
Paternalism seeks to achieve its aims, quickly and effectively, through
the boss's whip of social control. Democracy works by the slower, but
more permanently hopeful path of education, never sacrificing life to
material ends. Paternalism ends in a social hierarchy, materially
prosperous, but caste-ridden and without soul. Democracy ends in the
abolishment of castes, equality of opportunity, with the freest
individual initiative and finest flowering of the personal spirit. Which
shall it be: God or Mammon, Men or Machines?
There is no doubt that efficiency can be achieved most quickly under a
well-wielded boss's whip, but at the sacrifice of initiative and
invention. Moreover, remove the whip, and the efficiency quickly goes to
pieces. On the other hand, the efficiency achieved by voluntary effort
and free cooperation comes much more slowly, but it lasts. Moreover, it
develops, hand in hand, with initiative and invention.
The negro, doubtless, has never been so generally efficient as before
the civil war, in the South, under the overseer's whip; yet every negro
who, to-day, has character enough to save up and buy a mule and an acre
of ground, tills it with a consistent and permanent effectiveness of
which slave labor is never capable. In the one case, moreover, there is
the average economic result, in the other, the gradual development of
manhood.
Organize a factory on the feudal lines so prevalent in current industry.
Get a strong, dominating superintendent and give him autocratic
authority. Quickly he will show results. Always, however, there is the
danger of strikes, and if the strong hand falters, the organization
disintegrates. On the other hand, let a corporation take its artisans
into its confidence, give each a small proportionate share in the annual
earnings. Each worker will feel increasingly that the business is his
business. He will take pride in his accomplishment. Gradually he will
attain efficiency, and work permanently, without oversight, with a
consistent earnestness no boss's whip ever attained,
The experience of the National Cash Register Company at Dayton, Ohio,
proves this. The experiments of Henry Ford are a step toward the same
solution. So, in lesser measure, is the plan of the Steel trust to
permit and encourage its employees to purchase annually its stock,
somewhat below the current market price, giving a substantial bonus if
the stock is held over ten years.
If you wish an illustration on a larger scale, consider the mass
formation tactics of the German soldiers, in contrast to the individual
courage, initiative and action of the French. There are the two types
of efficiency in sheerest contrast, but beyond is always the question of
their effect on manhood. France has saved and regenerated her soul; but
Germany--?
Further, the breakdown of paternalistically achieved efficiency has been
evident in Germany's utter failure to understand the mind of other
peoples, particularly of democracies. She had voluminous data, gathered
by the most atrociously efficient spy system ever developed, yet she
utterly misread the mind of France, England and the United States. The
same break-down is evident in Germany's failure in colonization in
contrast to England's success.
For offensive war, it must be admitted, the efficiency under the boss's
whip will go further. For defensive war, or war for high moral aims, it
is desirable that the individual soldier should think for himself,
respond to the high appeal. Thus for such warfare the efficiency of
voluntary effort and cooperation is superior. An autocracy would better
rule its soldiers by a military caste; there can be no excuse for such
in a democracy. Thus, the utmost possible fraternization of officers
and men is desirable, and social snobbery, the snubbing of officers who
come up from the ranks, and other anachronistic survivals, should be
stamped out, as utterly foreign to what should be the spirit of the
military arm of democracy.
Further, in estimating the two types, one must remember that paternalism
may exercise its power in secret and that it accomplishes much in the
dark. Democracy, on the other hand, is afflicted and blessed with
pitiless publicity. Thus its evils are all exposed, it washes all its
dirty linen in public; but the main thing is to get it clean.
When it comes to invention and initiative, as already indicated,
democracy has the advantage, immediately, as in the long run. We are
the most inventive people on earth, and that quality is a direct result
of our democratic individualism. It is a significant fact that most of
the startling inventions used in this War were made in America--but
_developed and applied in Germany._ There, again, are evident the
contrasting results of the two types of social organization. The
indefatigably industrious and docile German mind can work out and apply
the inventions furnished it, with marvelous persistency and
effectiveness, under paternal control. We have the problem of achieving
by voluntary effort and cooperation a persistent thoroughness in working
out the ideas and inventions that come to us in such abundant measure.
The path of democracy is education.
XIX
THE SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY
When we say that the path of democracy is education, we do not mean that
there is an easy solution of its problem. There is no patent medicine
we can feed the American people and cure it of its diseases. There is
no specific for the menaces that threaten. Eternal vigilance and effort
are the price, not only of liberty, but of every good of man. Let
things alone, and they get bad; to keep them good, we must struggle
everlastingly to make them better. Leave the pool of politics unstirred
by putting into it ever new individual thought and ideal, and how
quickly it becomes a stagnant, ill-smelling pond. Leave a church
unvitalized, by ever fresh personal consecration, and how quickly it
becomes a dead form, hampering the life of the spirit. Leave a
university uninfluenced by ever new earnestness and devotion on the part
of student and teacher, and how soon it becomes a scholastic machine,
positively oppressing the mind and spirit.
There is a true sense in which the universe exists momentarily by the
grace of God. Take light away, and you have darkness. Take darkness
away, and you have not necessarily light; you might have chaos. Take
health away, and you have disease. Take disease away, and you have not
necessarily health; you may have death. Take virtue away, and you have
vice. Take vice away, and you have not necessarily virtue; you might
have negative respectability. Thus it is the continual affirmation of
the good that keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the step toward
to-morrow.
Nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of the problem, there are
certain big lines of attack. If we are right in our diagnosis, that the
problem of democracy is a problem of education, then our whole system of
education, for child, youth and adult, should be reconstructed to focus
upon the building of positive and effective moral personality.
American education began as a subsidiary process. Children got organic
education in the home, on the farm, in the work shop. They went to
school to get certain formal disciplines, to learn to read, write and
cipher and to acquire formal grammar. With the moving into the cities,
the industrial revolution and the entire transformation of our life, the
school has had to take over more and more of the process of organic
education. If children fail to get such education in the school, they
are apt to miss it altogether.
With this entire change in the meaning of the school, old notions of its
purpose still survive. Probably no one is so benighted to-day as to
imagine that the chief function of the school is to fill the mind with
information; but there are many who still hold to the tradition that the
chief purpose of education is to sharpen the intellectual tools of the
individual for the sake of his personal success. This notion is a
misleading survival, for tools are of value only in terms of the
character using them. The same equipment may serve, equally, good or
bad ends. Only as education focusses on the development of positive and
effective moral character can it aid in solving the problem of
democracy.
Need it be added that this does not mean teaching morals and manners to
children, thirty minutes a day, three times a week? That is a minor
fragment of moral education. It means that all phases of the process--
the relation of pupil and teacher, school and home, the government and
discipline, the lessons taught in every subject, the environment, the
proportioning of the curriculum, of physical, emotional and intellectual
culture--all shall be focussed and organized upon the one significant
aim of the whole--_character_.
Further, if education is to overcome the menaces and solve the dilemma
of democracy, it must be carried beyond childhood and youth and outside
the walls of academic institutions. The ever wider education of adult
citizenship is indispensable to the progress and safety of democracy. It
is one of the glaring illustrations of the inefficiency of our democracy
that there are still communities where school boards build school houses
with public money, open them five or six hours, five days in the week,
and refuse to allow them to be opened any other hour of the day or
night, for a civic forum, parents' meeting, public lecture or other
activity of adult education; and yet we call ourselves a practical
people! Surely, in a democracy, the state is as vitally interested in
the education of the adult citizen as of the child.
Herein is the significance of those various extensions of education,
developing and spreading so widely to-day. University-extension and
Chautauqua movements, civic forums, free lectures to the people by
boards of education and public libraries, summer schools, night schools
for adults--all are illustrations of this movement, so vital to the
progress of democracy. Through these instrumentalities the popular
ideal may be elevated, the public mind may be trained to more logical
and earnest thought, citizenship may be made more serious and
intelligent, and finally a most helpful influence may be exerted on the
academic institutions themselves. It is an easily verifiable truth that
any academic institution that builds around itself an enclosing
scholastic wall, refuses to go outside and serve and learn in the larger
world of humanity, in the long run inevitably dies of academic dry rot.
In the endeavor to solve the problem of democracy cannot we do more than
we have done hitherto in cultivating reverence for moral leadership--the
quality so much needed in democracy at the present hour? This may be
achieved through many aspects of education, but especially through
contact with noble souls in literature and history. History, above all,
is the great opportunity, and, from this point of view, is it not
necessary to rewrite our histories: instead of portraying solely
statesmen and warriors, to fill them with lofty examples of leadership
in all walks of life?
Women as well as men: for surely ideals of both should be fostered. A
colleague, interested in this problem, recently took one of the most
widely used text-books of American history, and counted the pages on
which a woman was mentioned. Of the five hundred pages, there were
four: not four pages devoted to women; but four mentioning a woman.
What does it mean: that women have contributed less than one part in a
hundred and five to the development of American life? Surely no one
would think that. What, then, are the reasons for the discrepancy?
There are several, but one may be mentioned: men have written the
histories, and they have written chiefly of the two fields of action
where men have been most important and women least, war and
statesmanship. Surely, however, if American history is to reveal the
American spirit, exercise the contagion of noble ideals and develop
reverence for true moral leadership, it must present types of both
manhood and womanhood in all fields of action and endeavor.
One who has stood with Socrates in the common criminal prison in Athens
and watched him drink the hemlock poison, saying "No evil can happen to
a good man in life or after death," who has heard the oration of Paul on
Mars Hill or that of Pericles over the Athenian dead, who has thrilled
to the heroism of Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell, the noble service of
Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, the high appeal of Helen Hunt
Jackson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who has heard Giordano Bruno
exclaim as the flames crept up about him, "I die a martyr, and
willingly," who has responded to the calm elevation of Marcus Aurelius,
the cosmopolitan wisdom of Goethe, the sweet gentleness of Maeterlinck's
spirit and the titan dreams of Ibsen, can scarcely fail to appreciate
the brotherhood of all men and to learn that reverence for the true
moral leader, that dignifies alike giver and recipient.
XX
TRAINING FOR MORAL LEADERSHIP
Since the path of democracy is education, moral leadership is more
necessary to it, than in any other form of society; yet there are
exceptional obstacles to its development. We speak of "the white light
that beats upon a throne": it is nothing compared to the search light
played upon every leader of democracy. With our lack of reverence, we
delight in pulling to pieces the personalities of those who lead us.
Thus it is increasingly difficult to get men of sensitive spirit to pay
the price of leadership for democracy.
Is it not possible to do more than we have done, consciously to develop
such leadership? Where is it trained? In life, the college and
university, the normal school, the schools of law, medicine and
theology. Yes, but if not one boy and girl in ten graduates from the
high school, surely we want one man and woman in ten to fulfill some
measure of moral leadership, and the high school is directly concerned
with the task of furnishing such leadership for American democracy.
If that is true, is it not a pity that the high school is so largely
dominated from above by the demand of the college upon the entering
freshman? It is not to be taken for granted that the particular regimen
of studies, best fitting the student to pass the entrance examinations
of a college or university, is the best possible for the nine out of ten
students, who go directly from the high school into the world, and must
fulfill some measure of moral leadership for American democracy. The
presumption is to the contrary. College professors are human--some of
them. They want students prepared to enter as smoothly as possible into
the somewhat artificial curricula of academic studies they have
arranged. The Latin professor wishes not to go back and start with the
rudiments of his subject, as the professor of mathematics with the
beginnings of Algebra and Geometry. The result is they demand of the
high school what fits most smoothly into their scheme.
Now if it is not possible to serve equally the needs of both groups,
would it not be better to neglect the one tenth of the students, going
on to college, even assuming they are the pick of the flock, which they
are not always? They have four more years to correct their mistakes and
round out their culture. If any one must be subordinated, it would be
better to neglect them, and focus upon the needs of the nine out of ten,
who go directly from the high school into life and have not another
chance; yet there are states in the Union, where it is possible for a
committee of the state university at the top to say to every high school
teacher in the state, "Conform to our requirements, or leave the state,
or get out of the profession." The threat, moreover, has been carried
out more than once.
That situation is utterly wrong. We want organization of the
educational system, with each unit cooperating with the next higher, but
if education is to solve the problem of democracy and furnish moral
leadership for American life, we want each unit to be free, first of
all, to serve its own constituency to the best of its power. The
problem is not serious for the big city high school, with its multiplied
elective courses, but for the small rural or town high school, with its
limited corps of teachers and its necessarily fixed courses, the burden
is onerous indeed.
Is the American college and university doing all that it might do in
cultivating moral leadership for American democracy? The last decades
have seen an astounding and unparalleled development of higher education
in America. In the old days, the college was usually on a
denominational foundation. It was supported by the dollars and pennies
of earnest religionists who believed that education was necessary to
religion and morality. The president was generally a clergyman of the
denomination; he taught the ethics course, and all students were
required to take it. There was compulsory chapel attendance, and once a
day the entire student body gathered together to listen to some moral
and religious thought.
Then came the immense expansion of higher education. Courses were
multiplied and diversified. Universities were established or endowed by
the state. Academies became colleges, and colleges, universities.
Institutions were generally secularized. Compulsory chapel attendance
was rightly abandoned. Each department served its own interest apart.
Until to-day certain of our great universities are not unlike vast
intellectual department stores, with each professor calling his goods
across the counter, and the president, a sort of superior floorwalker,
to see that no one clerk gets too many customers. It is an impressive
illustration of what has happened to our higher institutions that, in
certain of them, the one regular meeting place of the entire student
body in a common interest, is the bleachers by the athletic field. One
continues to believe in college athletics, in spite of the frequent
absurdities and worse, done in their name; only if the numbers of those
playing the game and those exercising only their lungs and throats from
the bleachers, were reversed, better all-round athletic education would
result. Is it not, however, a trenchant criticism on the situation in
our higher education, that so often the one common interest should be in
something that is, at least, aside from the main business of the
institution?
Moreover, no institution can rightly serve democracy, unless it is
itself democratic. Thus the growth of an aristocratic spirit in our
colleges and universities is an ominous sign. For instance, it is still
true that any boy or girl, with a sound body and a good mind and no
family to support, can get a college education. Money is not
indispensable: it is possible to work one's way through. Will this
always be true? One wonders. It is significant that it is easiest to
work your way through college, and keep your self-respect and the
respect of your fellows, in the small, meagerly endowed college on the
frontier. It is most difficult, with a few exceptions one gladly
recognizes, in the great, rich universities of the East. What does that
mean?
Straws show the tide: it was announced some time ago by the president of
one of our richest and oldest universities that henceforth scholarships
in that institution would be given solely on the basis of intellectual
scholarship, as tested by examination; and applause went up from the
alumni all across the country; yet what does it mean? It means that the
boy who has to work on a threshing machine, sell books to an
unsuspecting public, or do some other semi-honorable work all summer to
get back into college in the Fall, cannot pass those examinations
equally with a rich man's son of equal mind, who can take a tutor to the
seashore or the mountains and coach up all summer. Thus foundations,
established by well-meaning people to help poor boys self-respectingly
through college, become intellectual prizes for those who do not need
them. That is all wrong.
Take the special student problem. When a college or university is
founded, it needs students: they are the life-blood of the institution.
Really all that is needed to make a college is a teacher and some
students: buildings are not indispensable, but students the school must
have. Thus it is apt to keep its bars down and its entrance
requirements flexible. Special students, often mature men and women,
who are not prepared to pass the freshman examinations, are admitted on
the recommendation of heads of d epartments, to special courses they are
well fitted to take. Students are admitted freely, and then sifted out
afterward, if they prove unworthy of their opportunity: not a bad
method, by the way.
A dozen years pass, and the institution wants to become respectable.
It is just as with the individual: the man, at first, is absorbed in
money-getting, and when he has it, yearns for respectability. Now
getting respectable, for a college or university, is called "raising the
standard of scholarship." Let this not be misunderstood: painstaking,
infinitely laborious, accurate scholarship is a noble aim, well worth
the consistent effort of a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising
the standard of scholarship. Does an educational institution exist for
the sake of its reputation, or to serve its constituency? If it seeks
to advance its reputation at the expense of its fullest and best service
to those who need its help, is it not recreant to its duty and
opportunity?
Well, in the mood cited, the institution raises and standardizes its
entrance-requirements and generally excludes special students. One
readily sees why: it is much easier to work with the regularly prepared
freshman, he fits much more smoothly and comfortably into the machinery
of the institution. Many a wise teacher will admit, nevertheless, that
the best students he ever taught and the ones whose lives he is proudest
of having influenced, were often men and women, thirty, forty, fifty
years of age--teachers who suddenly realized that the ruts of their
calling had become so deep they could no longer see over them, ministers
awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a
new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action--
working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman
cannot imagine--he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to
exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and
often for them useless, work of preparing to pass the examinations for
entrance to the freshman class. That, too, is all wrong.
The American college and university stands to-day at the parting of the
ways: this generation will largely determine its future. If the
American college and university ever becomes a social club for the sons
and daughters of the rich, an institution making it easy for them to
secure business and professional opportunity and advancement, to the
exclusion of their poorer fellows, it may be as necessary to
disestablish the foundations of our great universities, as statesmen in
Europe thought it necessary to disestablish the monastic foundations at
the close of the middle age. They, too, began as educational
institutions. If, on the other hand, the American college and university
remains true to its task, if it keeps its doors open and its spirit
democratic, if it seeks to render ever larger service to the great
public and to develop moral leadership for American democracy, then,
indeed, it will go ever forward upon its noble path.
XXI
DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE
We have seen the conflict of ideas in the War: the German philosophy
that man exists for the state, the contrasting idea of democracy that
the state exists for man. We may well ask why any institution should be
regarded as sacred, except as it has the adventitious sacredness, coming
from time, convention and hoary tradition. It was said long ago that
"the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath," and the
statement may be universalized. Every institution on earth--marriage,
the family, education, the church, the state--was made for man and not
man for the institution. Humanity must always be the end. Why should
we perpetuate any institution that does not serve life? Kant voiced the
principle in his second imperative of duty: "Always treat humanity,
whether in thine own person or that of any other, as an end withal, and
never as a means only." Kant was a Prussian philosopher: one wonders
what he would have thought of the "Kanonen-Futter" theory of manhood!
An organization or institution is only a machine, an instrument for a
purpose. Thus always it is a means, never an end: its value lies in
serving its purpose--the end of human life. So the whole existing order
must justify itself. Where it rests on forms of injustice, it must be
broken or destroyed, and there is no reason to fear the breaking.
Thus there is no "divine right" of kings. They represent a vested
interest, surviving from the past. They must justify themselves by the
service of those under them, or pass.
Similarly, there is no divine right of a class or caste, enjoying
supremacy or special privilege. It also is a surviving vested interest,
that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an incubus.
The same test applies to an empire. It, too, is a vested interest,
developed out of conditions prevailing in the past. If it does not
justify itself by the largest service of all within it, then it, too, is
an anachronistic survival, no longer to be tolerated.
The principle is universal: the institution of private property, the
controlling power of captains of industry, the capitalistic system,
finally, the state itself, in every form: all are vested interests that
may be permitted to continue in the exercise of power only as they prove
their superiority to any other form of organization in serving the good
of all.
This does not mean that, under democracy, the individual shall fail of
sacrifice and the dedication to something higher than himself. That is
the glory of life, transfiguring human nature, and without it, life
sinks to sordid selfishness. Your life is worth, not what you have, but
what you are, and what you are is determined by that to which you
dedicate yourself. Is it creature comforts, pleasure, selfish
privilege, or the largest life and the fullest service of humanity? What
you have is merely the condition, the important question is, what do you
do with it? Is it wealth, prosperity: do you sit down comfortably on
the fact of it, to secure all the selfish pleasures possible; or do you
regard your fortunate circumstances as so much more opportunity and
obligation of leadership and service? Is it poverty, even starvation:
do you whine and grovel, or stand erect, with shut teeth, andwring
heroic manhood from the breast of suffering?
That is why peace can never be an end: it, too, is merely a condition or
means. The question is, what do you do with your peace, for peace may
mean merely sloth and cowardly ease, where war may mean unselfish
heroism. That is what the peace promoters forget. War has its
brutalities, and terrible indeed they are: unleashed hate, lust, cruelty
and revenge; but war has its heroisms. It calls out the devotion to
something higher than the individual from even the commonest of men.
To-day all over the earth, ordinary men are quietly going out to
probable death or mutilation in its most horrible forms, and going for
the sake of an ideal larger than themselves. Women are doing even more
than that. For it is not so hard to die, but to send out those you love,
dearer than life itself, to almost certain death--that, indeed, is
difficult, and women are doing it everywhere with a smile on their lips
and choked-back tears.
Peace, on the other hand, has its virtues: the softening and refining of
life, gradual development of sympathy, achievement of comfort and
beauty; but peace has its vices. In times of peace and prosperity there
seems to be no great cause at stake. Of course, always it is there, but
we do not see it. We become increasingly absorbed in selfish interests,
in the good of our immediate family. Thus petty, time-serving
selfishness is the vice peculiarly characteristic of times of peace and
prosperity. Consider, for instance, the spirit of France during the
closing years of the nineteenth century, and at the present dark, but
pregnant, hour of destiny.
Thus the question is not whether you have peace or war, but what you do
with your peace or war. It is not whether you are rich or poor, but
what you do with your riches or poverty.
Suppose we were able to reconstruct our entire social and industrial
world, so that every human being would have plenty to eat, plenty to
wear and a comfortable house to live in: would we have the kingdom of
heaven? Not necessarily: we might have merely a comfortable,
well-decorated pig-sty, if men lived to nothing higher than pigs. "Man
cannot live by bread alone," important as bread is, but by dedication to
the things of the spirit.
Thus there must ever be the capacity for self-forgetfulness,
self-sacrifice, the dedication of life to supreme aims, but that does
not mean the dedication of man to the institution. Rather it is the
consecration to the welfare of humanity. Man for the State means
autocracy and imperialism; Man for Mankind is the soul of democracy.
That is the ideal to which we must rise, if democracy is to prove itself
worthy to be the form of human society for the great future.
This ideal is realized through many lesser forms and instruments, but
always with the same final test. The family, for instance, is one of
these lesser forms, and the subordination of the individual to the
family unit is just. Thus there is a measure of right in seeking first
the interest of the family group; but when this is sought to the end of
special privilege and debauching luxury, against the welfare of all, it
becomes, as we have seen, an evil.
There is, similarly, a certain justice in the subordination of the
individual to the social class or group interest. It is right that
artisans should unite in trade unions, that employers should get
together in associations for common benefit. One need only contrast the
conditions where each workman had to bid in competition against all
others, and each manufacturer, the same, to realize the advance made
through group union and cooperation. When either group, however, seeks
to further its own interest at the expense of the welfare of the whole
society, as in securing class legislation, achieving monopolies, holding
efficient workers to the level of production of the slowest and least
capable of the group, then the class or group spirit becomes an evil
that must be fought for the good of all.
It is exactly the same with the nation. Its interest is justly served
only in harmony with the welfare of humanity. Any current problem will
illustrate the principle, as, for instance, that of immigration.
Certainly the nation has the right to prohibit immigration which
produces unassimilated plague-spots and threatens to cause racial
deterioration, as in phases of Oriental immigration to the Pacific
coast. Similarly, it is right to restrict immigration that would
further economic prosperity, at the expense of the manhood of the
nation. We must answer the question, whether we want factories or men.
It is desirable to have some of both, of course, but when one is to be
obtained at the expense of the other, it is manhood that must be the
deciding end.
On the other hand, when it comes to refusing a refuge to the poor and
oppressed, who are physically and morally acceptable, but lack a small
amount of money, or are unable to respond to a literary test, then the
welfare of humanity demands the opposite decision. Better give them the
fifty dollars--a healthy slave was worth more than that in the old days.
So teach them to read and write. The nation, can readily pay the small
economic price and accept the incidental difficulties for the sake of
the larger end.
Thus the deciding principle must always be the welfare, happiness,
growth, intelligence, helpfulness of each individual in harmony with all
others. Humanity is incarnatein each man. While, therefore, the
individual must dedicate and, at times, sacrifice himself, it is for the
sake, not of the state, church or other institution, but for the welfare
of all--_Man for Mankind_.
From so many sources the view finds expression that modern life has been
"weakened by humanitarianism." If there is truth in the view, we would
better take account of it and radically revise our ethical philosophy.
If it is false, it is a damning error, the reiteration of which tends to
undermine all that has been achieved for the spirit.
An interesting comment on the view is the fact that, in spite of all its
horrors, this War has given _no attested instance of arrant cowardice on
any front_. Cruelty, lust, brutality, hate: these have appeared in
unspeakable guise, but apparently no cowardice or weak timidity; yet the
mail clad heroes of ancient wars, who met their adversaries face to
face, were subjected to no such strain as the men standing in trenches
waiting momentarily death or mutilation from an unseen foe. No, modern
life has not lost strong fiber and is capable of supreme heroism.
The old society secured its leadership through _noblesse oblige_--the
obligation of nobility. Men of aristocratic family and rank felt that,
because they stood above the people, they owed a certain leadership and
service, and they gave it, often in abundant measure, but always
condescendingly from above.
We have lost "noblesse oblige": we may even be glad it is gone, if we
can substitute for it something larger and better. It is not the
obligation of nobility, but the obligation of humanity that is the need:
to realize that all power is obligation. As you can, you owe; and as
you know, you owe. If you have money, it is so much obligation of
leadership and service. If you have talent, education, social or
political influence, it is all so much obligation of leadership and
service. If, as individuals, we can generally realize that and act upon
it, then indeed we may hope to carry to successful completion the
experiment of democracy and see our beloved country fulfill the measure
of moral leadership to which we believe she is called among the nations
of the earth, but fulfilling it not as master over slave, nor as one
empire among others, but as a more experienced brother toward others
following the same open path.
XXII
THE HOUR OF SACRIFICE
The supreme world crisis is on. We have entered the War in the purest
spirit of democracy. We state frankly in advance that we want no
indemnity, no extension of territory. We war with no people, except as
that people identifies itself with aggressive autocracy and imperialism,
imperilling our safety, as of all democracies, and seeking to ride
tyrannically and unjustly over the rights and liberties of other
peoples. Thus we enter the War solely for the cause of democracy and
humanity.
The hour of sacrifice has struck for the American people: will it rise
to the test? When one considers the characteristics of our surface life
for recent decades--the devotion to money-getting, the rapid increase of
senseless and debauching luxury, the reckless frivolity, the unthinking
haste and selfish pleasure-seeking--one questions. Underneath, however,
is a tremendous latent idealism. We are young, enthusiastic, capable of
glorious consecration. Cynical disillusionment is all upon the surface
--the cult of the clique of cleverness, uprooted from the soil of common
life and the deeps of the eternal verities. Beneath in the great mass
of the people is profound faith in life, deep trust in the ideal, belief
in the great future of humanity. Democracy will justify itself. We
shall rise to the test; but how we need to hear and heed the call!
"Awake America" means Americans awake! For in democracy the individual
is the soul. On each person rests the responsibility. Let us accept
the bitter burden and meet the supreme test, giving time, money,
service, life and those we love better than life, for the sake of the
safer, freer, nobler world that is to be. Since we stood apart so long
and entered the horrible devastation so late, it is our privilege to do
all we can to save the spiritual heritage of humanity, to keep our
hearts clean from the corrosive acid of national and racial hatred, to
do all in our power to remove it from the breasts of others. Injustice
in high places is possible only because there is injustice in the hearts
of men. To overthrow tyranny is but the initial step of emancipation:
unless the tyrant hate in the heart is dethroned, the external tyrant,
in some form of social injustice will surely return. He who conquers
hate and the lust for revenge in his own breast is spiritually free and
master of the tyrant that wrongs him. Thus it is our privilege and duty
to hate no one; but to hate injustice, greed, tyranny, aggressive
selfishness, the wicked ambitions of autocratic imperialism, to resist
and help to overthrow them, and so do our part in bringing in the free
brotherhood of the nations and peoples in one humanity, that will be the
dawn of the longed-for era of universal and permanent peace for mankind.
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