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THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE
(abridged)

BY HERBERT CROLY

Published November, 1909

Abridged and formatted by Neil Jumonville, 2006

CHAPTER I
WHAT IS THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE?

CHAPTER II
THE FEDERALISTS AND THE REPUBLICANS

CHAPTER III
THE DEMOCRATS AND THE WHIGS

CHAPTER IV
SLAVERY AND AMERICAN NATIONALITY

CHAPTER V
THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION

CHAPTER VI
REFORM AND THE REFORMERS

CHAPTER VII
RECONSTRUCTION; ITS CONDITIONS AND PURPOSES

CHAPTER VIII
NATIONALITY AND DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER IX
THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS NATIONAL PRINCIPLES

CHAPTER X
A NATIONAL FOREIGN POLICY

CHAPTER XI
PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION--PART I

CHAPTER XII
PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION--PART II

CHAPTER XIII
CONCLUSIONS--THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATIONAL PURPOSE

INDEX

CHAPTER ONE

I

WHAT IS THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE?

The average American is nothing if not patriotic. "The Americans are
filled," says Mr. Emil Reich in his "Success among the Nations," "with
such an implicit and absolute confidence in their Union and in their
future success that any remark other than laudatory is inacceptable to
the majority of them. We have had many opportunities of hearing public
speakers in America cast doubts upon the very existence of God and of
Providence, question the historic nature or veracity of the whole fabric
of Christianity; but never has it been our fortune to catch the
slightest whisper of doubt, the slightest want of faith, in the chief
God of America--unlimited belief in the future of America." Mr. Reich's
method of emphasis may not be very happy, but the substance of what he
says is true. The faith of Americans in their own country is religious,
if not in its intensity, at any rate in its almost absolute and
universal authority. It pervades the air we breathe. As children we hear
it asserted or implied in the conversation of our elders. Every new
stage of our educational training provides some additional testimony on
its behalf. Newspapers and novelists, orators and playwrights, even if
they are little else, are at least loyal preachers of the Truth. The
skeptic is not controverted; he is overlooked. It constitutes the kind
of faith which is the implication, rather than the object, of thought,
and consciously or unconsciously it enters largely into our personal
lives as a formative influence. We may distrust and dislike much that is
done in the name of our country by our fellow-countrymen; but our
country itself, its democratic system, and its prosperous future are
above suspicion.

Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good
faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born
anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in
comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France
is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a
man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social
estate does not seem enviable to his foreign contemporaries, secretes a
vision of a mystically glorified Russia, which condemns to comparative
insipidity the figures of the "Pax Britannica" and of "La Belle France"
enlightening the world. Every nation, in proportion as its nationality
is thoroughly alive, must be leavened by the ferment of some such faith.
But there are significant differences between the faith of, say, an
Englishman in the British Empire and that of an American in the Land of
Democracy. The contents of an Englishman's national idea tends to be
more exclusive. His patriotism is anchored to the historical
achievements of Great Britain and restricted thereby. As a good patriot
he is bound to be more preoccupied with the inherited fabric of national
institutions and traditions than he is with the ideal and more than
national possibilities of the future. This very loyalty to the national
fabric does, indeed, imply an important ideal content; but the national
idealism of an Englishman, a German, or even a Frenchman, is heavily
mortgaged to his own national history and cannot honestly escape the
debt. The good patriot is obliged to offer faithful allegiance to a
network of somewhat arbitrary institutions, social forms, and
intellectual habits--on the ground that his country is exposed to more
serious dangers from premature emancipation than it is from stubborn
conservatism. France is the only European country which has sought to
make headway towards a better future by means of a revolutionary break
with its past; and the results of the French experiment have served for
other European countries more as a warning than as an example.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to
historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an
ideal national Promise. The Land of Democracy has always appealed to its
more enthusiastic children chiefly as a land of wonderful and more than
national possibilities. "Neither race nor tradition," says Professor
Hugo Münsterberg in his volume on "The Americans," "nor the actual past,
binds the American to his countrymen, but rather the future which
together they are building." This vision of a better future is not,
perhaps, as unclouded for the present generation of Americans as it was
for certain former generations; but in spite of a more friendly
acquaintance with all sorts of obstacles and pitfalls, our country is
still figured in the imagination of its citizens as the Land of Promise.
They still believe that somehow and sometime something better will
happen to good Americans than has happened to men in any other country;
and this belief, vague, innocent, and uninformed though it be, is the
expression of an essential constituent in our national ideal. The past
should mean less to a European than it does to an American, and the
future should mean more. To be sure, American life cannot with impunity
be wrenched violently from its moorings any more than the life of a
European country can; but our American past, compared to that of any
European country, has a character all its own. Its peculiarity consists,
not merely in its brevity, but in the fact that from the beginning it
has been informed by an idea. From the beginning Americans have been
anticipating and projecting a better future. From the beginning the Land
of Democracy has been figured as the Land of Promise. Thus the
American's loyalty to the national tradition rather affirms than denies
the imaginative projection of a better future. An America which was not
the Land of Promise, which was not informed by a prophetic outlook and a
more or less constructive ideal, would not be the America bequeathed to
us by our forefathers. In cherishing the Promise of a better national
future the American is fulfilling rather than imperiling the substance
of the national tradition.

When, however, Americans talk of their country as the Land of Promise, a
question may well be raised as to precisely what they mean. They mean,
of course, in general, that the future will have something better in
store for them individually and collectively than has the past or the
present; but a very superficial analysis of this meaning discloses
certain ambiguities. What are the particular benefits which this better
future will give to Americans either individually or as a nation? And
how is this Promise to be fulfilled? Will it fulfill itself, or does it
imply certain responsibilities? If so, what responsibilities? When we
speak of a young man's career as promising, we mean that his abilities
and opportunities are such that he is likely to become rich or famous or
powerful; and this judgment does not of course imply, so far as we are
concerned, any responsibility. It is merely a prophecy based upon past
performances and proved qualities. But the career, which from the
standpoint of an outsider is merely an anticipation, becomes for the
young man himself a serious task. For him, at all events, the better
future will not merely happen. He will have to do something to deserve
it. It may be wrecked by unforeseen obstacles, by unsuspected
infirmities, or by some critical error of judgment. So it is with the
Promise of American life. From the point of view of an immigrant this
Promise may consist of the anticipation of a better future, which he can
share merely by taking up his residence on American soil; but once he
has become an American, the Promise can no longer remain merely an
anticipation. It becomes in that case a responsibility, which requires
for its fulfillment a certain kind of behavior on the part of himself
and his fellow-Americans. And when we attempt to define the Promise of
American life, we are obliged, also, to describe the kind of behavior
which the fulfillment of the Promise demands.

The distinction between the two aspects of America as a Land of Promise
made in the preceding paragraph is sufficiently obvious, but it is
usually slurred by the average good American patriot. The better future,
which is promised for himself, his children, and for other Americans, is
chiefly a matter of confident anticipation. He looks upon it very much
as a friendly outsider might look on some promising individual career.
The better future is understood by him as something which fulfills
itself. He calls his country, not only the Land of Promise, but the Land
of Destiny. It is fairly launched on a brilliant and successful career,
the continued prosperity of which is prophesied by the very momentum of
its advance. As Mr. H.G. Wells says in "The Future in America," "When
one talks to an American of his national purpose, he seems a little at a
loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with alacrity."
The great majority of Americans would expect a book written about "The
Promise of American Life" to contain chiefly a fanciful description of
the glorious American future--a sort of Utopia up-to-date, situated in
the land of Good-Enough, and flying the Stars and Stripes. They might
admit in words that the achievement of this glorious future implied
certain responsibilities, but they would not regard the admission either
as startling or novel. Such responsibilities were met by our
predecessors; they will be met by our followers. Inasmuch as it is the
honorable American past which prophesies on behalf of the better
American future, our national responsibility consists fundamentally in
remaining true to traditional ways of behavior, standards, and ideals.
What we Americans have to do in order to fulfill our national Promise is
to keep up the good work--to continue resolutely and cheerfully along
the appointed path.

The reader who expects this book to contain a collection of patriotic
prophecies will be disappointed. I am not a prophet in any sense of the
word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing
mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism. To conceive the better
American future as a consummation which will take care of itself,--as
the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and
ideas,--persistence in such a conception is admirably designed to
deprive American life of any promise at all. The better future which
Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in
certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American
history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much
matter for regret and humiliation. On the whole, it is a past of which
the loyal American has no reason to feel ashamed, chiefly because it has
throughout been made better than it was by the vision of a better
future; and the American of to-day and to-morrow must remain true to
that traditional vision. He must be prepared to sacrifice to that
traditional vision even the traditional American ways of realizing it.
Such a sacrifice is, I believe, coming to be demanded; and unless it is
made, American life will gradually cease to have any specific Promise.

The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any
nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal. Such a
promise is to be fulfilled, not by sanguine anticipations, not by a
conservative imitation of past achievements, but by laborious,
single-minded, clear-sighted, and fearless work. If the promising career
of any individual is not determined by a specific and worthy purpose, it
rapidly drifts into a mere pursuit of success; and even if such a
pursuit is successful, whatever promise it may have had, is buried in
the grave of its triumph. So it is with a nation. If its promise is
anything more than a vision of power and success, that addition must
derive its value from a purpose; because in the moral world the future
exists only as a workshop in which a purpose is to be realized. Each of
the several leading European nations is possessed of a specific purpose
determined for the most part by the pressure of historical
circumstances; but the American nation is committed to a purpose which
is not merely of historical manufacture. It is committed to the
realization of the democratic ideal; and if its Promise is to be
fulfilled, it must be prepared to follow whithersoever that ideal may
lead.

No doubt Americans have in some measure always conceived their national
future as an ideal to be fulfilled. Their anticipations have been
uplifting as well as confident and vainglorious. They have been
prophesying not merely a safe and triumphant, but also a better, future.
The ideal demand for some sort of individual and social amelioration has
always accompanied even their vainest flights of patriotic prophecy.
They may never have sufficiently realized that this better future, just
in so far as it is better, will have to be planned and constructed
rather than fulfilled of its own momentum; but at any rate, in seeking
to disentangle and emphasize the ideal implications of the American
national Promise, I am not wholly false to the accepted American
tradition. Even if Americans have neglected these ideal implications,
even if they have conceived the better future as containing chiefly a
larger portion of familiar benefits, the ideal demand, nevertheless, has
always been palpably present; and if it can be established as the
dominant aspect of the American tradition, that tradition may be
transformed, but it will not be violated.

Furthermore, much as we may dislike the American disposition to take the
fulfillment of our national Promise for granted, the fact that such a
disposition exists in its present volume and vigor demands respectful
consideration. It has its roots in the salient conditions of American
life, and in the actual experience of the American people. The national
Promise, as it is popularly understood, has in a way been fulfilling
itself. If the underlying conditions were to remain much as they have
been, the prevalent mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism
might retain a formidable measure of justification; and the changes
which are taking place in the underlying conditions and in the scope of
American national experience afford the most reasonable expectation that
this state of mind will undergo a radical alteration. It is new
conditions which are forcing Americans to choose between the conception
of their national Promise as a process and an ideal. Before, however,
the nature of these novel conditions and their significance can be
considered, we must examine with more care the relation between the
earlier American economic and social conditions and the ideas and
institutions associated with them. Only by a better understanding of the
popular tradition, only by an analysis of its merits and its
difficulties, can we reach a more consistent and edifying conception of
the Promise of American life.

II

HOW THE PROMISE HAS BEEN REALIZED

All the conditions of American life have tended to encourage an easy,
generous, and irresponsible optimism. As compared to Europeans,
Americans have been very much favored by circumstances. Had it not been
for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States
would never have been the Land of Promise. The European Powers have been
obliged from the very conditions of their existence to be more
circumspect and less confident of the future. They are always by way of
fighting for their national security and integrity. With possible or
actual enemies on their several frontiers, and with their land fully
occupied by their own population, they need above all to be strong, to
be cautious, to be united, and to be opportune in their policy and
behavior. The case of France shows the danger of neglecting the sources
of internal strength, while at the same time philandering with ideas
and projects of human amelioration. Bismarck and Cavour seized the
opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the
irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the
third Napoleon. Great Britain has occupied in this respect a better
situation than has the Continental Powers. Her insular security made her
more independent of the menaces and complications of foreign politics,
and left her free to be measurably liberal at home and immeasurably
imperial abroad. Yet she has made only a circumspect use of her freedom.
British liberalism was forged almost exclusively for the British people,
and the British peace for colonial subjects. Great Britain could have
afforded better than France to tie its national life to an over-national
idea, but the only idea in which Britons have really believed was that
of British security, prosperity, and power. In the case of our own
country the advantages possessed by England have been amplified and
extended. The United States was divided from the mainland of Europe not
by a channel but by an ocean. Its dimensions were continental rather
than insular. We were for the most part freed from alien interference,
and could, so far as we dared, experiment with political and social
ideals. The land was unoccupied, and its settlement offered an
unprecedented area and abundance of economic opportunity. After the
Revolution the whole political and social organization was renewed, and
made both more serviceable and more flexible. Under such happy
circumstances the New World was assuredly destined to become to its
inhabitants a Land of Promise,--a land in which men were offered a
fairer chance and a better future than the best which the Old World
could afford.

No more explicit expression has ever been given to the way in which the
Land of Promise was first conceived by its children than in the "Letters
of an American Farmer." This book was written by a French immigrant,
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur before the Revolution, and is informed by
an intense consciousness of the difference between conditions in the Old
and in the New World. "What, then, is an American, this new man?" asks
the Pennsylvanian farmer. "He is either a European or the descendant of
a European; hence the strange mixture of blood, which you will find in
no other country....

"He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great
_Alma Mater_. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race
of men, whose labors and prosperity will one day cause great changes in
the world. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the
progress of his labor; this labor is founded on the basis of
_self-interest_; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children,
who before in vain demanded a morsel of bread, now fat and frolicsome,
gladly help their father to clear those fields, whence exuberant crops
are to arise to feed them all; without any part being claimed either by
a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord.... The American is a
new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new
ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile
dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very
different nature rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American."

Although the foregoing is one of the first, it is also one of the most
explicit descriptions of the fundamental American; and it deserves to be
analyzed with some care. According to this French convert the American
is a man, or the descendant of a man, who has emigrated from Europe
chiefly because he expects to be better able in the New World to enjoy
the fruits of his own labor. The conception implies, consequently, an
Old World, in which the ordinary man cannot become independent and
prosperous, and, on the other hand, a New World in which economic
opportunities are much more abundant and accessible. America has been
peopled by Europeans primarily because they expected in that country to
make more money more easily. To the European immigrant--that is, to the
aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of
American life--the Promise of America has consisted largely in the
opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.
Whatever else the better future, of which Europeans anticipate the
enjoyment in America, may contain, these converts will consider
themselves cheated unless they are in a measure relieved of the curse of
poverty.

This conception of American life and its Promise is as much alive to-day
as it was in 1780. Its expression has no doubt been modified during
four generations of democratic political independence, but the
modification has consisted of an expansion and a development rather than
of a transposition. The native American, like the alien immigrant,
conceives the better future which awaits himself and other men in
America as fundamentally a future in which economic prosperity will be
still more abundant and still more accessible than it has yet been
either here or abroad. No alteration or attenuation of this demand has
been permitted. With all their professions of Christianity their
national idea remains thoroughly worldly. They do not want either for
themselves or for their descendants an indefinite future of poverty and
deprivation in this world, redeemed by beatitude in the next. The
Promise, which bulks so large in their patriotic outlook, is a promise
of comfort and prosperity for an ever increasing majority of good
Americans. At a later stage of their social development they may come to
believe that they have ordered a larger supply of prosperity than the
economic factory is capable of producing. Those who are already rich and
comfortable, and who are keenly alive to the difficulty of distributing
these benefits over a larger social area, may come to tolerate the idea
that poverty and want are an essential part of the social order. But as
yet this traditional European opinion has found few echoes in America,
even among the comfortable and the rich. The general belief still is
that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy.

Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence
and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American
mind with free political institutions. The "American Farmer" traced the
good fortune of the European immigrant in America, not merely to the
abundance of economic opportunity, but to the fact that a ruling class
of abbots and lords had no prior claim to a large share of the products
of the soil. He did not attach the name of democracy to the improved
political and social institutions of America, and when the political
differences between Great Britain and her American colonies culminated
in the Revolutionary War, the converted "American Farmer" was filled
with anguish at this violent assertion of the "New Americanism."
Nevertheless he was fully alive to the benefits which the immigrant
enjoyed from a larger dose of political and social freedom; and so, of
course, have been all the more intelligent of the European converts to
Americanism. A certain number of them, particularly during the early
years, came over less for the purpose of making money than for that of
escaping from European political and religious persecution. America has
always been conventionally conceived, not merely as a land of abundant
and accessible economic opportunities, but also as a refuge for the
oppressed; and the immigrant ships are crowded both during times of
European famine and during times of political revolution and
persecution.

Inevitably, however, this aspect of the American Promise has undergone
certain important changes since the establishment of our national
independence. When the colonists succeeded in emancipating themselves
from political allegiance to Great Britain, they were confronted by the
task of organizing a stable and efficient government without encroaching
on the freedom, which was even at that time traditionally associated
with American life. The task was by no means an easy one, and required
for its performance the application of other political principles than
that of freedom. The men who were responsible for this great work were
not, perhaps, entirely candid in recognizing the profound modifications
in their traditional ideas which their constructive political work had
implied; but they were at all events fully aware of the great importance
of their addition to the American idea. That idea, while not ceasing to
be at bottom economic, became more than ever political and social in its
meaning and contents. The Land of Freedom became in the course of time
also the Land of Equality. The special American political system, the
construction of which was predicted in the "Farmer's" assertion of the
necessary novelty of American modes of thought and action, was made
explicitly, if not uncompromisingly, democratic; and the success of this
democratic political system was indissolubly associated in the American
mind with the persistence of abundant and widely distributed economic
prosperity. Our democratic institutions became in a sense the guarantee
that prosperity would continue to be abundant and accessible. In case
the majority of good Americans were not prosperous, there would be grave
reasons for suspecting that our institutions were not doing their duty.

The more consciously democratic Americans became, however, the less they
were satisfied with a conception of the Promised Land, which went no
farther than a pervasive economic prosperity guaranteed by free
institutions. The amelioration promised to aliens and to future
Americans was to possess its moral and social aspects. The implication
was, and still is, that by virtue of the more comfortable and less
trammeled lives which Americans were enabled to lead, they would
constitute a better society and would become in general a worthier set
of men. The confidence which American institutions placed in the
American citizen was considered equivalent to a greater faith in the
excellence of human nature. In our favored land political liberty and
economic opportunity were by a process of natural education inevitably
making for individual and social amelioration. In Europe the people did
not have a fair chance. Population increased more quickly than economic
opportunities, and the opportunities which did exist were largely
monopolized by privileged classes. Power was lodged in the hands of a
few men, whose interest depended upon keeping the people in a condition
of economic and political servitude; and in this way a divorce was
created between individual interest and social stability and welfare.
The interests of the privileged rulers demanded the perpetuation of
unjust institutions. The interest of the people demanded a revolutionary
upheaval. In the absence of such a revolution they had no sufficient
inducement to seek their own material and moral improvement. The theory
was proclaimed and accepted as a justification for this system of
popular oppression that men were not to be trusted to take care of
themselves--that they could be kept socially useful only by the severest
measures of moral, religious, and political discipline. The theory of
the American democracy and its practice was proclaimed to be the
antithesis of this European theory and practice. The people were to be
trusted rather than suspected and disciplined. They must be tied to
their country by the strong bond of self-interest. Give them a fair
chance, and the natural goodness of human nature would do the rest.
Individual and public interest will, on the whole, coincide, provided no
individuals are allowed to have special privileges. Thus the American
system will be predestined to success by its own adequacy, and its
success will constitute an enormous stride towards human amelioration.
Just because our system is at bottom a thorough test of the ability of
human nature to respond admirably to a fair chance, the issue of the
experiment is bound to be of more than national importance. The American
system stands for the highest hope of an excellent worldly life that
mankind has yet ventured,--the hope that men can be improved without
being fettered, that they can be saved without even vicariously being
nailed to the cross.

Such are the claims advanced on behalf of the American system; and
within certain limits this system has made good. Americans have been
more than usually prosperous. They have been more than usually free.
They have, on the whole, made their freedom and prosperity contribute to
a higher level of individual and social excellence. Most assuredly the
average Americanized American is neither a more intelligent, a wiser,
nor a better man than the average European; but he is likely to be a
more energetic and hopeful one. Out of a million well-established
Americans, taken indiscriminately from all occupations and conditions,
compared to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, a larger proportion
of the former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives. Within a
given social area there will be a smaller amount of social wreckage and
a larger amount of wholesome and profitable achievement. The mass of the
American people is, on the whole, more deeply stirred, more thoroughly
awake, more assertive in their personal demands, and more confident of
satisfying them. In a word, they are more alive, and they must be
credited with the moral and social benefit attaching to a larger amount
of vitality.

Furthermore, this greater individual vitality, although intimately
connected with the superior agricultural and industrial opportunities of
a new country, has not been due exclusively to such advantages.
Undoubtedly the vast areas of cheap and fertile land which have been
continuously available for settlement have contributed, not only to the
abundance of American prosperity, but also to the formation of American
character and institutions; and undoubtedly many of the economic and
political evils which are now becoming offensively obtrusive are
directly or indirectly derived from the gradual monopolization of
certain important economic opportunities. Nevertheless, these
opportunities could never have been converted so quickly into
substantial benefits had it not been for our more democratic political
and social forms. A privileged class does not secure itself in the
enjoyment of its advantages merely by legal intrenchments. It depends
quite as much upon disqualifying the "lower classes" from utilizing
their opportunities by a species of social inhibition. The rail-splitter
can be so easily encouraged to believe that rail-splitting is his
vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's "Admirable
Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his conversion in
England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief, but that on
English soil he did not in his own soul want any such elevation and
distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of English life
kept him fatuously content with the mean truckling and meaner
domineering of his position of butler. On the other hand, the loyalty of
an American to the American idea would tend to make him aggressive and
self-confident. Our democratic prohibition of any but occasional social
distinctions and our democratic dislike to any suggestion of authentic
social inferiority have contributed as essentially to the fluid and
elastic substance of American life as have its abundant and accessible
economic opportunities.

The increased momentum of American life, both in its particles and its
mass, unquestionably has a considerable moral and social value. It is
the beginning, the only possible beginning, of a better life for the
people as individuals and for society. So long as the great majority of
the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope of
substantial rewards in this world, the whole associated life of that
community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order
is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great
majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion
necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of
subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery. The
only way the associated life of such a community can be radically
improved is by the leavening of the inert popular mass. Their wants must
be satisfied, and must be sharpened and increased with the habit of
satisfaction. During the past hundred years every European state has
made a great stride in the direction of arousing its poorer citizens to
be more wholesomely active, discontented, and expectant; but our own
country has succeeded in traveling farther in this direction than has
any other, and it may well be proud of its achievement. That the
American political and economic system has accomplished so much on
behalf of the ordinary man does constitute the fairest hope that men
have been justified in entertaining of a better worldly order; and any
higher social achievement, which America may hereafter reach, must
depend upon an improved perpetuation of this process. The mass of
mankind must be aroused to still greater activity by a still more
abundant satisfaction of their needs, and by a consequent increase of
their aggressive discontent.

The most discriminating appreciation, which I have ever read, of the
social value of American national achievement has been written by Mr.
John B. Crozier; and the importance of the matter is such that it will
be well to quote it at length. Says Mr. Crozier in his chapter on
"Reconstruction in America," in the third volume of his "History of
Intellectual Development": "There [in America] a natural equality of
sentiment, springing out of and resting on a broad equality of material
and social conditions, has been the heritage of the people from the
earliest times.... This broad natural equality of sentiment, rooted in
equal material opportunities, equal education, equal laws, equal
opportunities, and equal access to all positions of honor and trust, has
just sufficient inequality mixed with it--in the shape of greater or
less mental endowments, higher or lower degrees of culture, larger or
smaller material possessions, and so on--to keep it sweet and human;
while at the same time it is all so gently graded, and marked by
transitions so easy and natural, that no gap was anywhere to be
discovered on which to found an order of privilege or caste. Now an
equality like this, with the erectness, independence, energy, and
initiative it brings with it, in men, sprung from the loins of an
imperial race is a possession, not for a nation only, but for
civilization itself and for humanity. It is the distinct raising of the
entire body of a people to a higher level, and so brings civilization a
stage nearer its goal. It is the first successful attempt in recorded
history to get a healthy, natural equality which should reach down to
the foundations of the state and to the great masses of men; and in its
results corresponds to what in other lands (excepting, perhaps, in
luxury alone) has been attained only by the few,--the successful and the
ruling spirits. To lose it, therefore, to barter it or give it away,
would be in the language of Othello 'such deep damnation that nothing
else could match,' and would be an irreparable loss to the world and to
civilization."

Surely no nation can ask for a higher and more generous tribute than
that which Mr. Crozier renders to America in the foregoing quotation,
and its value is increased by the source from which it comes. It is
written by a man who, as a Canadian, has had the opportunity of knowing
American life well without being biased in its favor, and who, as the
historian of the intellectual development of our race, has made an
exhaustive study of the civilizations both of the ancient and the modern
worlds. Nothing can be soberly added to it on behalf of American
national achievement, but neither should it be diminished by any
important idea and phrase. The American economic, political, and social
organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material
prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and
this achievement is a gain, not only to Americans, but to the world and
to civilization.

III

HOW THE PROMISE IS TO BE REALIZED

In the preceding section I have been seeking to render justice to the
actual achievements of the American nation. A work of manifest
individual and social value has been wrought; and this work, not only
explains the expectant popular outlook towards the future, but it
partially determines the character as distinguished from the continued
fulfillment of the American national Promise. The better future,
whatever else it may bring, must bring at any rate a continuation of the
good things of the past. The drama of its fulfillment must find an
appropriate setting in the familiar American social and economic
scenery. No matter how remote the end may be, no matter what unfamiliar
sacrifices may eventually be required on its behalf, the substance of
the existing achievement must constitute a veritable beginning, because
on no other condition can the attribution of a peculiar Promise to
American life find a specific warrant. On no other condition would our
national Promise constitute more than an admirable but irrelevant moral
and social aspiration.

The moral and social aspiration proper to American life is, of course,
the aspiration vaguely described by the word democratic; and the actual
achievement of the American nation points towards an adequate and
fruitful definition of the democratic ideal. Americans are usually
satisfied by a most inadequate verbal description of democracy, but
their national achievement implies one which is much more comprehensive
and formative. In order to be true to their past, the increasing comfort
and economic independence of an ever increasing proportion of the
population must be secured, and it must be secured by a combination of
individual effort and proper political organization. Above all, however,
this economic and political system must be made to secure results of
moral and social value. It is the seeking of such results which converts
democracy from a political system into a constructive social ideal; and
the more the ideal significance of the American national Promise is
asserted and emphasized, the greater will become the importance of
securing these moral and social benefits.

The fault in the vision of our national future possessed by the ordinary
American does not consist in the expectation of some continuity of
achievement. It consists rather in the expectation that the familiar
benefits will continue to accumulate automatically. In his mind the
ideal Promise is identified with the processes and conditions which
hitherto have very much simplified its fulfillment, and he fails
sufficiently to realize that the conditions and processes are one thing
and the ideal Promise quite another. Moreover, these underlying social
and economic conditions are themselves changing, in such wise that
hereafter the ideal Promise, instead of being automatically fulfilled,
may well be automatically stifled. For two generations and more the
American people were, from the economic point of view, most happily
situated. They were able, in a sense, to slide down hill into the valley
of fulfillment. Economic conditions were such that, given a fair start,
they could scarcely avoid reaching a desirable goal. But such is no
longer the case. Economic conditions have been profoundly modified, and
American political and social problems have been modified with them. The
Promise of American life must depend less than it did upon the virgin
wilderness and the Atlantic Ocean, for the virgin wilderness has
disappeared, and the Atlantic Ocean has become merely a big channel. The
same results can no longer be achieved by the same easy methods. Ugly
obstacles have jumped into view, and ugly obstacles are peculiarly
dangerous to a person who is sliding down hill. The man who is
clambering up hill is in a much better position to evade or overcome
them. Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier vision of
their national Promise as soon as they give it a house on a hill-top
rather than in a valley.

The very genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism
rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous
inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have
been drawing this inference. They have been coming to see themselves
more as others see them; and as an introduction to a consideration of
this more critical frame of mind, I am going to quote another
foreigner's view of American life,--the foreigner in this case being an
Englishman and writing in 1893.

"The American note," says Mr. James Muirhead in his "Land of Contrasts,"
"includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility, an almost
childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the
present and the future, a wider realization of human brotherhood than
has yet existed, a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the
individual than by the class, a breezy indifference to authority and a
positive predilection for innovation, a marked alertness of mind, and a
manifold variety of interest--above all, an inextinguishable hopefulness
and courage. It is easy to lay one's finger in America upon almost every
one of the great defects of civilization--even those defects which are
specially characteristic of the civilization of the Old World. The
United States cannot claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic
slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak,
of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws,
of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of
economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of
want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery,
of class prejudice, of respect of persons, and of a preference of the
material over the spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or
nearly attained, perfection. But below and behind, and beyond all its
weakness and evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory
founded on reason and conscience." The reader will remark in the
foregoing quotation that Mr. Muirhead is equally emphatic in his
approval and in his disapproval. He generously recognizes almost as much
that is good about Americans and their ways as our most vivacious
patriotic orators would claim, while at the same time he has marshaled
an army of abuses and sins which sound like an echo of the pages of the
_London Saturday Review_. In the end he applies a friendly dash of
whitewash by congratulating us on the "grand fact of our noble national
theory," but to a discerning mind the consolation is not very consoling.
The trouble is that the sins with which America is charged by Mr.
Muirhead are flagrant violations of our noble national theory. So far as
his charges are true, they are a denial that the American political and
economic organization is accomplishing the results which its traditional
claims require. If, as Mr. Muirhead charges, Americans permit the
existence of economic slavery, if they grind the face of the poor, if
they exploit the weak and distribute wealth unjustly, if they allow
monopolies to prevail and laws to be unequal, if they are disgracefully
ignorant, politically corrupt, commercially unscrupulous, socially
snobbish, vulgarly boastful, and morally coarse,--if the substance of
the foregoing indictment is really true, why, the less that is said
about a noble national theory, the better. A man who is a sturdy sinner
all the week hardly improves his moral standing by attending church on
Sunday and professing a noble Christian theory of life. There must
surely be some better way of excusing our sins than by raising aloft a
noble theory of which these sins are a glaring violation.

I have quoted from Mr. Muirhead, not because his antithetic
characterization of American life is very illuminating, but because of
the precise terms of his charges against America. His indictment is
practically equivalent to the assertion that the American system is not,
or at least is no longer, achieving as much as has been claimed on its
behalf. A democratic system may permit undefiled the existence of many
sins and abuses, but it cannot permit the exploitation of the ordinary
man by means of unjust laws and institutions. Neither can this
indictment be dismissed without argument. When Mr. Muirhead's book was
written sixteen years ago, the majority of good Americans would
assuredly have read the charge with an incredulous smile; but in the
year 1909 they might behave differently. The sins of which Mr. Muirhead
accused Americans sixteen years ago are substantially the sins of which
to-day they are accusing themselves--or rather one another. A numerous
and powerful group of reformers has been collecting whose whole
political policy and action is based on the conviction that the "common
people" have not been getting the Square Deal to which they are entitled
under the American system; and these reformers are carrying with them a
constantly increasing body of public opinion. A considerable proportion
of the American people is beginning to exhibit economic and political,
as well as personal, discontent. A generation ago the implication was
that if a man remained poor and needy, his poverty was his own fault,
because the American system was giving all its citizens a fair chance.
Now, however, the discontented poor are beginning to charge their
poverty to an unjust political and economic organization, and reforming
agitators do not hesitate to support them in this contention. Manifestly
a threatened obstacle has been raised against the anticipated
realization of our national Promise. Unless the great majority of
Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the
better American future will be dangerously compromised.

The conscious recognition of grave national abuses casts a deep shadow
across the traditional American patriotic vision. The sincere and candid
reformer can no longer consider the national Promise as destined to
automatic fulfillment. The reformers themselves are, no doubt, far from
believing that whatever peril there is cannot be successfully averted.
They make a point of being as patriotically prophetic as the most
"old-fashioned Democrat." They proclaim even more loudly their
conviction of an indubitable and a beneficent national future. But they
do not and cannot believe that this future will take care of itself. As
reformers they are bound to assert that the national body requires for
the time being a good deal of medical attendance, and many of them
anticipate that even after the doctors have discontinued their daily
visits the patient will still need the supervision of a sanitary
specialist. He must be persuaded to behave so that he will not easily
fall ill again, and so that his health will be permanently improved.
Consequently, just in so far as reformers are reformers they are obliged
to abandon the traditional American patriotic fatalism. The national
Promise has been transformed into a closer equivalent of a national
purpose, the fulfillment of which is a matter of conscious work.

The transformation of the old sense of a glorious national destiny into
the sense of a serious national purpose will inevitably tend to make the
popular realization of the Promise of American life both more explicit
and more serious. As long as Americans believed they were able to
fulfill a noble national Promise merely by virtue of maintaining intact
a set of political institutions and by the vigorous individual pursuit
of private ends, their allegiance to their national fulfillment remained
more a matter of words than of deeds; but now that they are being
aroused from their patriotic slumber, the effect is inevitably to
disentangle the national idea and to give it more dignity. The
redemption of the national Promise has become a cause for which the good
American must fight, and the cause for which a man fights is a cause
which he more than ever values. The American idea is no longer to be
propagated merely by multiplying the children of the West and by
granting ignorant aliens permission to vote. Like all sacred causes, it
must be propagated by the Word and by that right arm of the Word, which
is the Sword.

The more enlightened reformers are conscious of the additional dignity
and value which the popularity of reform has bestowed upon the American
idea, but they still fail to realize the deeper implications of their
own programme. In abandoning the older conception of an automatic
fulfillment of our national destiny, they have abandoned more of the
traditional American point of view than they are aware. The traditional
American optimistic fatalism was not of accidental origin, and it cannot
be abandoned without involving in its fall some other important
ingredients in the accepted American tradition. Not only was it
dependent on economic conditions which prevailed until comparatively
recent times, but it has been associated with certain erroneous but
highly cherished political theories. It has been wrought into the fabric
of our popular economic and political ideas to such an extent that its
overthrow necessitates a partial revision of some of the most important
articles in the traditional American creed.

The extent and the character of this revision may be inferred from a
brief consideration of the effect upon the substance of our national
Promise of an alteration in its proposed method of fulfillment. The
substance of our national Promise has consisted, as we have seen, of an
improving popular economic condition, guaranteed by democratic political
institutions, and resulting in moral and social amelioration. These
manifold benefits were to be obtained merely by liberating the
enlightened self-interest of the American people. The beneficent result
followed inevitably from the action of wholly selfish motives--provided,
of course, the democratic political system of equal rights was
maintained in its integrity. The fulfillment of the American Promise was
considered inevitable because it was based upon a combination of
self-interest and the natural goodness of human nature. On the other
hand, if the fulfillment of our national Promise can no longer be
considered inevitable, if it must be considered as equivalent to a
conscious national purpose instead of an inexorable national destiny,
the implication necessarily is that the trust reposed in individual
self-interest has been in some measure betrayed. No preëstablished
harmony can then exist between the free and abundant satisfaction of
private needs and the accomplishment of a morally and socially desirable
result. The Promise of American life is to be fulfilled--not merely by a
maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of
discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual
desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and
self-denial. And this necessity of subordinating the satisfaction of
individual desires to the fulfillment of a national purpose is attached
particularly to the absorbing occupation of the American people,--the
occupation, viz.: of accumulating wealth. The automatic fulfillment of
the American national Promise is to be abandoned, if at all, precisely
because the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has
resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.

In making the concluding statement of the last paragraph I am venturing,
of course, upon very debatable ground. Neither can I attempt in this
immediate connection to offer any justification for the statement which
might or should be sufficient to satisfy a stubborn skeptic. I must be
content for the present with the bare assertion that the prevailing
abuses and sins, which have made reform necessary, are all of them
associated with the prodigious concentration of wealth, and of the power
exercised by wealth, in the hands of a few men. I am far from believing
that this concentration of economic power is wholly an undesirable
thing, and I am also far from believing that the men in whose hands this
power is concentrated deserve, on the whole, any exceptional moral
reprobation for the manner in which it has been used. In certain
respects they have served their country well, and in almost every
respect their moral or immoral standards are those of the great majority
of their fellow-countrymen. But it is none the less true that the
political corruption, the unwise economic organization, and the legal
support afforded to certain economic privileges are all under existing
conditions due to the malevolent social influence of individual and
incorporated American wealth; and it is equally true that these abuses,
and the excessive "money power" with which they are associated, have
originated in the peculiar freedom which the American tradition and
organization have granted to the individual. Up to a certain point that
freedom has been and still is beneficial. Beyond that point it is not
merely harmful; it is by way of being fatal. Efficient regulation there
must be; and it must be regulation which will strike, not at the
symptoms of the evil, but at its roots. The existing concentration of
wealth and financial power in the hands of a few irresponsible men is
the inevitable outcome of the chaotic individualism of our political and
economic organization, while at the same time it is inimical to
democracy, because it tends to erect political abuses and social
inequalities into a system. The inference which follows may be
disagreeable, but it is not to be escaped. In becoming responsible for
the subordination of the individual to the demand of a dominant and
constructive national purpose, the American state will in effect be
making itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable
distribution of wealth.

The consequences, then, of converting our American national destiny into
a national purpose are beginning to be revolutionary. When the Promise
of American life is conceived as a national ideal, whose fulfillment is
a matter of artful and laborious work, the effect thereof is
substantially to identify the national purpose with the social problem.
What the American people of the present and the future have really been
promised by our patriotic prophecies is an attempt to solve that
problem. They have been promised on American soil comfort, prosperity,
and the opportunity for self-improvement; and the lesson of the existing
crisis is that such a Promise can never be redeemed by an indiscriminate
individual scramble for wealth. The individual competition, even when it
starts under fair conditions and rules, results, not only, as it should,
in the triumph of the strongest, but in the attempt to perpetuate the
victory; and it is this attempt which must be recognized and forestalled
in the interest of the American national purpose. The way to realize a
purpose is, not to leave it to chance, but to keep it loyally in mind,
and adopt means proper to the importance and the difficulty of the task.
No voluntary association of individuals, resourceful and disinterested
though they be, is competent to assume the responsibility. The problem
belongs to the American national democracy, and its solution must be
attempted chiefly by means of official national action.

Neither can its attempted solution be escaped. When they are confronted
by the individual sacrifices which the fulfillment of their national
Promise demands, American political leaders will find many excuses for
ignoring the responsibility thereby implied; but the difficulty of such
an attempted evasion will consist in the reënforcement of the historical
tradition by a logical and a practical necessity. The American problem
is the social problem partly because the social problem is the
democratic problem. American political and social leaders will find that
in a democracy the problem cannot be evaded. The American people have no
irremediable political grievances. No good American denies the
desirability of popular sovereignty and of a government which should
somehow represent the popular will. While our national institutions may
not be a perfect embodiment of these doctrines, a decisive and a
resolute popular majority has the power to alter American institutions
and give them a more immediately representative character. Existing
political evils and abuses are serious enough; but inasmuch as they have
come into being, not against the will, but with the connivance of the
American people, the latter are responsible for their persistence. In
the long run, consequently, the ordinary American will have nothing
irremediable to complain about except economic and social inequalities.
In Europe such will not be the case. The several European peoples have,
and will continue to have, political grievances, because such grievances
are the inevitable consequence of their national history and their
international situation; and as long as these grievances remain, the
more difficult social problem will be subordinated to an agitation for
political emancipation. But the American people, having achieved
democratic institutions, have nothing to do but to turn them to good
account. In so far as the social problem is a real problem and the
economic grievance a real grievance, they are bound under the American
political system to come eventually to the surface and to demand express
and intelligent consideration. A democratic ideal makes the social
problem inevitable and its attempted solution indispensable.

I am fully aware, as already intimated, that the forgoing interpretation
of the Promise of American life will seem fantastic and obnoxious to the
great majority of Americans, and I am far from claiming that any reasons
as yet alleged afford a sufficient justification for such a radical
transformation of the traditional national policy and democratic creed.
All that can be claimed is that if a democratic ideal makes an express
consideration of the social problem inevitable, it is of the first
importance for Americans to realize this truth and to understand the
reasons for it. Furthermore, the assumption is worth making, in case the
traditional American system is breaking down, because a more highly
socialized democracy is the only practical substitute on the part of
convinced democrats for an excessively individualized democracy. Of
course, it will be claimed that the traditional system is not breaking
down, and again no absolute proof of the breakdown has been or can be
alleged. Nevertheless, the serious nature of contemporary American
political and economic symptoms at least pointedly suggests the
existence of some radical disease, and when one assumes such to be the
case, one cannot be accused of borrowing trouble, I shall, consequently,
start from such an assumption, and make an attempt to explain
contemporary American problems as in part the result of the practice of
an erroneous democratic theory. The attempt will necessarily involve a
brief review of our political and economic history, undertaken for the
purpose of tracing the traditional ideas of their origin and testing
them by their performances. There will follow a detailed examination of
current political and economic problems and conditions--considered in
relation both to the American democratic tradition and to the proposed
revision thereof. In view of the increasing ferment of American
political and economic thought, no apology is necessary for submitting
our traditional ideas and practices to an examination from an
untraditional point of view. I need scarcely add that the untraditional
point of view will contain little or no original matter. The only
novelty such an inquiry can claim is the novelty of applying ideas, long
familiar to foreign political thinkers, to the subject-matter of
American life. When applied to American life, this group of ideas
assumes a somewhat new complexion and significance; and the promise of
such a small amount of novelty will, I trust, tempt even a disapproving
reader to follow somewhat farther the course of the argument.

CHAPTER IX

I

THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS NATIONAL PRINCIPLE

The foregoing review of the relation which has come to subsist in Europe
between nationality and democracy should help us to understand the
peculiar bond which unites the American democratic and national
principles. The net result of that review was encouraging but not
decisive. As a consequence of their development as nations, the European
peoples have been unable to get along without a certain infusion of
democracy; but it was for the most part essential to their national
interest that such an infusion should be strictly limited. In Europe the
two ideals have never been allowed a frank and unconstrained relation
one to the other other. They have been unable to live apart; but their
marriage has usually been one of convenience, which was very far from
implying complete mutual dependence and confidence. No doubt the
collective interests of the German or British people suffer because such
a lack of dependence and confidence exists; but their collective
interests would suffer more from a sudden or violent attempt to destroy
the barriers. The nature and the history of the different democratic and
national movements in the several European countries at once tie them
together and keep them apart.

The peoples of Europe can only escape gradually from the large infusion
of arbitrary and irrational material in their national composition.
Monarchical and aristocratic traditions and a certain measure of
political and social privilege have remained an essential part of their
national lives; and no less essential was an element of defiance in
their attitude toward their European neighbors. Hence, when the
principle of national Sovereignty was proclaimed as a substitute for the
principal of royal Sovereignty, that principle really did not mean the
sudden bestowal upon the people of unlimited Sovereign power. "The true
people," said Bismarck, in 1847, then a country squire, "is an invisible
multitude of spirits. It is the living nation--the nation organized for
its historical mission--the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow." A
nation, that is, is a people in so far as they are united by traditions
and purposes; and national Sovereignty implies an attachment to national
history and traditions which permits only the very gradual alteration of
these traditions in the direction of increasing democracy. The mistake
which France made at the time of the French Revolution was precisely
that of interpreting the phrase "souvreneté nationale" as equivalent to
immediate, complete, and (in respect to the past) irresponsible popular
sovereignty.

The European nations are, consequently, not in a position to make their
national ideals frankly and loyally democratic. Their national integrity
depends upon fidelity to traditional ideas and forms quite as much as it
does upon the gradual modification of those ideas and forms in a
democratic direction. The orderly unfolding of their national lives
calls for a series of compromises which carry the fundamental democratic
implication of the national principle as far as it can under the
circumstances be safely carried; and in no other way does a people
exhibit its political common sense so clearly as in its ability to be
contemporary and progressive without breaking away from its historical
anchorage. A comparatively definite national mission and purpose clearly
emerge at some particular phase of the indefinite process of internal
and external readjustment; but such a mission and such purposes
necessarily possess a limited significance and a special character.
Restricted as they are by the facts of national history, they lack the
ultimate moral significance of the democratic ideal, which permits the
transformation of patriotic fidelity into devotion to the highest and
most comprehensive interests of humanity and civilization.

That an analogous condition exists in our own country, it would be vain
to deny. The American people possessed a collective character even
before they possessed a national organization; and both before and after
the foundation of a national government, these common traditions were by
no means wholly democratic. Furthermore, as we have frequently had
occasion to observe, the American democracy in its traditional form has
more often than not been anti-national in instinct and idea. Our own
country has, consequently, a problem to solve, similar in certain
respects to that of the European nations. Its national cohesion is a
matter of historical association, and the facts of its historical
association have resulted in a partial division and a misunderstanding
between its two fundamental principles--the principles of nationality
and democracy.

In the case of the United States there is, however, to be observed an
essential difference. A nation, and particularly a European nation,
cannot afford to become too complete a democracy all at once, because it
would thereby be uprooting traditions upon which its national cohesion
depends. But there is no reason why a democracy cannot trust its
interests absolutely to the care of the national interest, and there is
in particular every reason why the American democracy should become in
sentiment and conviction frankly, unscrupulously, and loyally
nationalist. This, of course, is a heresy from the point of view of the
American democratic tradition; but it is much less of a heresy from the
point of view of American political practice, and, whether heretical or
not, it indicates the road whereby alone the American people can obtain
political salvation.

The American democracy can trust its interest to the national interest,
because American national cohesion is dependent, not only upon certain
forms of historical association, but upon fidelity to a democratic
principle. A nation is a very complex political, social, and economic
product--so complex that political thinkers in emphasizing one aspect of
it are apt to forget other and equally essential aspects. Its habits and
traditions of historical association constitute an indispensable bond;
but they do not constitute the only bond. A specific national character
is more than a group of traditions and institutions. It tends to be a
formative idea, which defines the situation of a country in reference to
its neighbors, and which is constantly seeking a better articulation and
understanding among the various parts of its domestic life. The English
national idea is chiefly a matter of freedom, but the principle of
freedom is associated with a certain in measure of responsibility. The
German national idea is more difficult of precise description, but it
turns upon the principle of efficient and expert official leadership
toward what is as yet a hazy goal of national greatness. The French
national idea is democratic, but its democracy is rendered difficult by
French national insecurity, and its value is limited by its equalitarian
bias. The French, like the American, democracy needs above all to be
thoroughly nationalized; and a condition of such a result is the loyal
adoption of democracy as the national idea. Both French and American
national cohesion depend upon the fidelity of the national organization
to the democratic idea, and the gradual but intentional transformation
of the substance of the national life in obedience to a democratic
interest.

Let us seek for this complicated formula a specific application. How can
it be translated into terms of contemporary American conditions? Well,
in the first place, Americans are tied together by certain political,
social, and economic habits, institutions, and traditions. From the
political point of view these forms of association are at once
constitutional, Federal, and democratic. They are accustomed to some
measure of political centralization, to a larger measure of local
governmental responsibility, to a still larger measure of individual
economic freedom. This group of political institutions and habits has
been gradually pieced together under the influence of varying political
ideas and conditions. It contains many contradictory ingredients, and
not a few that are positively dangerous to the public health. Such as it
is, however, the American people are attached to this national
tradition; and no part of it could be suddenly or violently transformed
or mutilated without wounding large and important classes among the
American people, both in their interests and feelings. They have been
accustomed to associate under certain conditions and on certain terms;
and to alter in any important way those conditions and terms of
association without fair notice, full discussion, a demonstrable need
and a sufficient consent of public opinion, would be to drive a wedge
into the substance of American national cohesion. The American nation,
no matter how much (or how little) it may be devoted to democratic
political and social ideas, cannot uproot any essential element in its
national tradition without severe penalties--as the American people
discovered when they decided to cut negro slavery out of their national
composition.

On the other hand, their national health and consistency were in the
long run very much benefited by the surgical operation of the Civil War;
and it was benefited because the War eradicated the most flagrant
existing contradiction among the various parts of the American national
tradition. This instance sufficiently showed, consequently, that
although nationality has its traditional basis, it is far from being
merely a conservative principle. At any one time the current of national
public opinion embodies a temporary accommodation among the different
traditional ideas, interests, conditions, and institutions. This balance
of varying and perhaps conflicting elements is constantly being
destroyed by new conditions,--such, for instance, as the gradual
increase before the Civil War of the North as compared to the South in
wealth, population, and industrial efficiency. The effect of this
destruction of the traditional balance was to bring out the
contradiction between the institution of negro slavery and the American
democratic purpose--thereby necessitating an active conflict, and the
triumph of one of these principles over the other. The unionist
democracy conquered, and as the result of that conquest a new balance
was reached between the various ingredients of American national life.
During the past generation, the increased efficiency of organization in
business and politics, the enormous growth of an irresponsible
individual money-power, the much more definite division of the American
people into possibly antagonistic classes, and the pressing practical
need for expert, responsible, and authoritative leadership,--these new
conditions and demands have been by way of upsetting once more the
traditional national balance and of driving new wedges into American
national cohesion. New contradictions have been developed between
various aspects of the American national composition; and if the
American people wish to escape the necessity of regaining their health
by means of another surgical operation, they must consider carefully how
much of a reorganization of traditional institutions, policy, and ideas
are necessary for the achievement of a new and more stable national
balance.

In the case of our own country, however, a balance is not to be struck
merely by the process of compromise in the interest of harmony. Our
forbears tried that method in dealing with the slavery problem from
1820 to 1850, and we all know with what results. American national
cohesion is a matter of national integrity; and national integrity is a
matter of loyalty to the requirements of a democratic ideal. For better
or worse the American people have proclaimed themselves to be a
democracy, and they have proclaimed that democracy means popular
economic, social, and moral emancipation. The only way to regain their
national balance is to remove those obstacles which the economic
development of the country has placed in the path of a better democratic
fulfillment. The economic and social changes of the past generation have
brought out a serious and a glaring contradiction between the demands of
a constructive democratic ideal and the machinery of methods and
institutions, which have been considered sufficient for its realization.
This is the fundamental discrepancy which must be at least partially
eradicated before American national integrity can be triumphantly
re-affirmed. The cohesion, which is a condition of effective
nationality, is endangered by such a contradiction, and as long as it
exists the different elements composing American society will be pulling
apart rather than together. The national principle becomes a principle
of reform and reconstruction, precisely because national consistency is
constantly demanding the solution of contradictory economic and
political tendencies, brought out by alterations in the conditions of
economic and political efficiency. Its function is not only to preserve
a balance among these diverse tendencies, but to make that balance more
than ever expressive of a consistent and constructive democratic ideal.
Any disloyalty to democracy on the part of American national policy
would in the end prove fatal to American national unity.

The American democracy can, consequently, safely trust its genuine
interests to the keeping of those who represent the national interest.
It both can do so, and it must do so. Only by faith in an efficient
national organization and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the
national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good. If the
American local commonwealths had not been wrought by the Federalists
into the form of a nation, they would never have continued to be
democracies; and the people collectively have become more of a democracy
in proportion as they have become more of a nation. Their democracy is
to be realized by means of an intensification of their national life,
just as the ultimate moral purpose of an individual is to be realized by
the affirmation and intensification of its own better individuality.
Consequently the organization of the American democracy into a nation is
not to be regarded in the way that so many Americans have regarded
it,--as a necessary but hazardous surrender of certain liberties in
order that other liberties might be better preserved,--as a mere
compromise between the democratic ideal and the necessary conditions of
political cohesion and efficiency. Its nationalized political
organization constitutes the proper structure and veritable life of the
American democracy. No doubt the existing organization is far from being
a wholly adequate expression of the demands of the democratic ideal, but
it falls equally short of being an adequate expression of the demands of
the national ideal. The less confidence the American people have in a
national organization, the less they are willing to surrender themselves
to the national spirit, the worse democrats they will be. The most
stubborn impediments which block the American national advance issue
from the imperfections in our democracy. The American people are not
prepared for a higher form of democracy, because they are not prepared
for a more coherent and intense national life. When they are prepared to
be consistent, constructive, and aspiring democrats, their preparation
will necessarily take the form of becoming consistent, constructive, and
aspiring nationalists.

The difficulty raised by European political and economic development
hangs chiefly on a necessary loyalty to a national tradition and
organization which blocks the advance of democracy. Americans cannot
entirely escape this difficulty; but in our country by far the greater
obstacle to social amelioration is constituted by a democratic theory
and tradition, which blocks the process of national development. We
Americans are confronted by two divergent theories of democracy.
According to one of these theories, the interest of American democracy
can be advanced only by an increasing nationalization of the American
people in ideas, in institutions, and in spirit. According to the other
of these theories, the most effective way of injuring the interest of
democracy is by an increase in national authority and a spread of the
national leaven. Thus Americans, unlike Englishmen, have to choose, not
between a specific and efficient national tradition and a vague and
perilous democratic ideal--they have to choose between two democratic
ideals, and they have to make this choice chiefly on logical and moral
grounds. An Englishman or a German, no matter how clear his intelligence
or fervid his patriotism, cannot find any immediately and entirely
satisfactory method of reconciling the national traditions and forms of
organization with the demands of an uncompromising democracy. An
American, on the other hand, has it quite within his power to accept a
conception of democracy which provides for the substantial integrity of
his country, not only as a nation with an exclusively democratic
mission, but as a democracy with an essentially national career.

II

NATIONALITY AND CENTRALIZATION

The Federal political organization has always tended to confuse to the
American mind the relation between democracy and nationality. The nation
as a legal body was, of course, created by the Constitution, which
granted to the central government certain specific powers and
responsibilities, and which almost to the same extent diminished the
powers and the responsibilities of the separate states. Consequently, to
the great majority of Americans, the process of increasing
nationalization has a tendency to mean merely an increase in the
functions of the central government. For the same reason the affirmation
of a constructive relation between the national and the democratic
principles is likely to be interpreted merely as an attempt on the
grounds of an abstract theory to limit state government and to disparage
states rights. Such an interpretation, however, would be essentially
erroneous. It would be based upon the very idea against which I have
been continually protesting--the idea that the American nation, instead
of embodying a living formative political principle, is merely the
political system created by the Federal Constitution; and it would end
in the absurd conclusion that the only way in which the Promise of
American democracy can be fulfilled would be by the abolition of
American local political institutions.

The nationalizing of American political, economic, and social life means
something more than Federal centralization and something very different
therefrom. To nationalize a people has never meant merely to centralize
their government. Little by little a thoroughly national political
organization has come to mean in Europe an organization which combined
effective authority with certain responsibilities to the people; but the
national interest has been just as likely to demand de-centralization as
it has to demand centralization. The Prussia of Frederick the Great, for
instance, was over-centralized; and the restoration of the national
vitality, at which the Prussian government aimed after the disasters of
1806, necessarily took the form of reinvigorating the local members of
the national body. In this and many similar instances the national
interest and welfare was the end, and a greater or smaller amount of
centralized government merely the necessary machinery. The process of
centralization is not, like the process of nationalization, an
essentially formative and enlightening political transformation. When a
people are being nationalized, their political, economic, and social
organization or policy is being coördinated with their actual needs and
their moral and political ideals. Governmental centralization is to be
regarded as one of the many means which may or may not be taken in order
to effect this purpose. Like every other special aspect of the national
organization, it must be justified by its fruits. There is no
presumption in its favor. Neither is there any general presumption
against it. Whether a given function should or should not be exercised
by the central government in a Federal system is from the point of view
of political logic a matter of expediency--with the burden of proof
resting on those who propose to alter any existing Constitutional
arrangement.

It may be affirmed, consequently, without paradox, that among those
branches of the American national organization which are greatly in need
of nationalizing is the central government. Almost every member of the
American political body has been at one time or another or in one way or
another perverted to the service of special interests. The state
governments and the municipal administrations have sinned more in this
respect than the central government; but the central government itself
has been a grave sinner. The Federal authorities are responsible for the
prevailing policy in respect to military pensions, which is one of the
most flagrant crimes ever perpetrated against the national interest. The
Federal authorities, again, are responsible for the existing tariff
schedules, which benefit a group of special interests at the expense of
the national welfare. The Federal authorities, finally, are responsible
for the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, whose existence on the statute books is
a fatal bar to the treatment of the problem of corporate aggrandizement
from the standpoint of genuinely national policy. Those instances might
be multiplied, but they suffice to show that the ideal of a constructive
relation between the American national and democratic principles does
not imply that any particular piece of legislation or policy is national
because it is Federal. The Federal no less than the state governments
has been the victim of special interests; and when a group of state or
city officials effectively assert the public interest against the
private interests, either of the machine or of the local corporations,
they are noting just as palpably, if not just as comprehensively, for
the national welfare, as if their work benefited the whole American
people. The process of nationalization in its application to American
political organization means that political power shall be distributed
among the central, state, and municipal officials in such a manner that
it can be efficiently and responsibly exerted in the interest of those
affected by its action.

Be it added, however, in the same breath, that under existing conditions
and simply as a matter of expediency, the national advance of the
American democracy does demand an increasing amount of centralized
action and responsibility. In what respect and for what purposes an
increased Federal power and responsibility is desirable will be
considered in a subsequent chapter. In this connection it is sufficient
to insist that a more scrupulous attention to existing Federal
responsibilities, and the increase of their number and scope, is the
natural consequence of the increasing concentration of American
industrial, political, and social life. American government demands more
rather than less centralization merely and precisely because of the
growing centralization of American activity. The state governments,
either individually or by any practicable methods of coöperation, are
not competent to deal effectively in the national interest and spirit
with the grave problems created by the aggrandizement of corporate and
individual wealth and the increasing classification of the American
people. They have, no doubt, an essential part to play in the attempted
solution of these problems; and there are certain aspects of the whole
situation which the American nation, because of its Federal
organization, can deal with much more effectually than can a rigidly
centralized democracy like France. But the amount of responsibility in
respect to fundamental national problems, which, in law almost as much
as in practice, is left to the states, exceeds the responsibility which
the state governments are capable of efficiently redeeming. They are
attempting (or neglecting) a task which they cannot be expected to
perform with any efficiency.

The fact that the states fail properly to perform certain essential
functions such as maintaining order or administering justice, is no
sufficient reason for depriving them thereof. Functions which should be
bestowed upon the central government are not those which the states
happen to perform badly. They are those which the states, even with the
best will in the world, cannot be expected to perform satisfactorily;
and among these functions the regulation of commerce, the organization
of labor, and the increasing control over property in the public
interest are assuredly to be included. The best friends of local
government in this country are those who seek to have its activity
confined with the limits of possible efficiency, because only in case
its activity is so confined can the states continue to remain an
essential part of a really efficient and well-coördinated national
organization.

Proposals to increase the powers of the central government are, however,
rarely treated on their merits. They are opposed by the majority of
American politicians and newspapers as an unqualified evil. Any attempt
to prove that the existing distribution of responsibility is necessarily
fruitful of economic and political abuses, and that an increase of
centralized power offers the only chance of eradicating these abuses is
treated as irrelevant. It is not a question of the expediency of a
specific proposal, because from the traditional point of view any
change in the direction of increased centralization would be a violation
of American democracy. Centralization is merely a necessary evil which
has been carried as far as it should, and which cannot be carried any
further without undermining the foundations of the American system. Thus
the familiar theory of many excellent American democrats is rather that
of a contradictory than a constructive relation between the democratic
and the national ideals. The process of nationalization is perverted by
them into a matter merely of centralization, but the question of the
fundamental relation between nationality and democracy is raised by
their attitude, because the reasons they advance against increasingly
centralized authority would, if they should continue to prevail,
definitely and absolutely forbid a gradually improving coördination
between American political organization and American national economic
needs or moral and intellectual ideals. The conception of democracy out
of which the supposed contradiction between the democratic and national
ideals issues is the great enemy of the American national advance, and
is for that reason the great enemy of the real interests of democracy.

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility,
expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional
American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic
tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before
the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance
will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and,
what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom
ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average
American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a
serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.
An American national democracy must always prove its right to a further
advance, not only by the development of a policy and method adequate for
the particular occasion, but by its ability to overcome the inevitable
opposition of selfish interests and erroneous ideas. The logic of its
position makes it the aggressor, just as the logic of its opponents'
position ties them to a negative and protesting or merely insubordinate
part. If the latter should prevail, their victory would become
tantamount to national dissolution, either by putrefaction, by
revolution, or by both.

Under the influence of certain practical demands, an increase has
already taken place in the activity of the Federal government. The
increase has not gone as far as governmental efficiency demands, but it
has gone far enough to provoke outbursts of protest and anguish from the
"old-fashioned Democrats." They profess to see the approaching
extinction of the American democracy in what they call the drift towards
centralization. Such calamitous predictions are natural, but they are
none the less absurd. The drift of American politics--its instinctive
and unguided movement--is almost wholly along the habitual road; and any
effective increase of Federal centralization can be imposed only by most
strenuous efforts, by one of the biggest sticks which has ever been
flourished in American politics. The advance made in this direction is
small compared to the actual needs of an efficient national
organization, and considering the mass of interest and prejudice which
it must continue to overcome, it can hardly continue to progress at more
than a snail's pace. The great obstacle to American national fulfillment
must always be the danger that the American people will merely succumb
to the demands of their local and private interests and will permit
their political craft to drift into a compromising situation--from which
the penalties of rescue may be almost as distressing as the penalties of
submission.

The tradition of an individualist and provincial democracy, which is the
mainstay of an anti-national policy, does not include ideals which have
to be realized by aggressive action. Their ideals are the ones embodied
in our existing system, and their continued vitality demands merely a
policy of inaction enveloped in a cloud of sacred phrases. The advocates
and the beneficiaries of the prevailing ideas and conditions are little
by little being forced into the inevitable attitude of the traditional
Bourbon--the attitude of maintaining customary or legal rights merely
because they are customary or legal, and predicting the most awful
consequences from any attempt to impair them. Men, or associations of
men, who possess legal or customary rights inimical to the public
welfare, always defend those rights as the essential part of a political
system, which, if it is overthrown, will prove destructive to public
prosperity and security. On no other ground can they find a plausible
public excuse for their opposition. The French royal authority and
aristocratic privileges were defended on these grounds in 1780, and as
the event proved, with some show of reason. In the same way the partial
legislative control of nationalized corporations now exercised by the
state government, is defended, not on the ground that it has been well
exercised, not even plausibly on the ground that it can be well
exercised. It is defended almost exclusively on the ground that any
increase in the authority of the Federal government is dangerous to the
American people. But the Federal government belongs to the American
people even more completely than do the state governments, because a
general current of public opinion can act much more effectively on the
single Federal authority than it can upon the many separate state
authorities. Popular interests have nothing to fear from a measure of
Federal centralization, which bestows on the Federal government powers
necessary to the fulfillment of its legitimate responsibilities; and the
American people cannot in the long run be deceived by pleas which bear
the evidence of such a selfish origin and have such dubious historical
associations. The rights and the powers both of states and individuals
must be competent to serve their purposes efficiently in an economical
and coherent national organization, or else they must be superseded. A
prejudice against centralization is as pernicious, provided
centralization is necessary, as a prejudice in its favor. All rights
under the law are functions in a democratic political organism and must
be justified by their actual or presumable functional adequacy.

The ideal of a constructive relation between American nationality and
American democracy is in truth equivalent to a new Declaration of
Independence. It affirms that the American people are free to organize
their political, economic, and social life in the service of a
comprehensive, a lofty, and far-reaching democratic purpose. At the
present time there is a strong, almost a dominant tendency to regard the
existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror
from modifying it even in the smallest detail; and it is this
superstitious fear of changing the most trivial parts of the fundamental
legal fabric which brings to pass the great bondage of the American
spirit. If such an abject worship of legal precedent for its own sake
should continue, the American idea will have to be fitted to the rigid
and narrow lines of a few legal formulas; and the ruler of the American
spirit, like the ruler of the Jewish spirit of old, will become the
lawyer. But it will not continue, in case Americans can be brought to
understand and believe that the American national political organization
should be constructively related to their democratic purpose. Such an
ideal reveals at once the real opportunity and the real responsibility
of the American democracy. It declares that the democracy has a
machinery in a nationalized organization, and a practical guide in the
national interest, which are adequate to the realization of the
democratic ideal; and it declares also that in the long run just in so
far as Americans timidly or superstitiously refuse to accept their
national opportunity and responsibility, they will not deserve the names
either of freemen or of loyal democrats. There comes a time in the
history of every nation, when its independence of spirit vanishes,
unless it emancipates itself in some measure from its traditional
illusions; and that time is fast approaching for the American people.
They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a
nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely the
monotonous measures of its own past.

III

THE PEOPLE AND THE NATION

At the beginning of this discussion popular Sovereignty was declared to
be the essential condition of democracy; and a general account of the
nature of a constructive democratic ideal can best be brought to a close
by a definition of the meaning of the phrase, popular Sovereignty,
consistent with a nationalist interpretation of democracy. The people
are Sovereign; but who and what are the people? and how can a
many-headed Sovereignty be made to work? Are we to answer, like
Bismarck, that the "true people is an invisible multitude of
spirits--the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow"? Such an answer seems
scarcely fair to living people of to-day. On the other hand, can we
reply that the Sovereign people is constituted by any chance majority
which happens to obtain control of the government, and that the
decisions and actions of the majority are inevitably and unexceptionally
democratic? Such an assertion of the doctrine of popular Sovereignty
would bestow absolute Sovereign authority on merely a part of the
people. Majority rule, under certain prescribed conditions, is a
necessary constituent of any practicable democratic organization; but
the actions or decisions of a majority need not have any binding moral
and national authority. Majority rule is merely one means to an
extremely difficult, remote and complicated end; and it is a piece of
machinery which is peculiarly liable to get out of order. Its arbitrary
and dangerous tendencies can, as a matter of fact, be checked in many
effectual and legitimate ways, of which the most effectual is the
cherishing of a tradition, partly expressed in some body of fundamental
law, that the true people are, as Bismarck declared, in some measure an
invisible multitude of spirits--the nation of yesterday and to-morrow,
organized for its national historical mission.

The phrase popular Sovereignty is, consequently, for us Americans
equivalent to the phrase "national Sovereignty." The people are not
Sovereign as individuals. They are not Sovereign in reason and morals
even when united into a majority. They become Sovereign only in so far
as they succeed in reaching and expressing a collective purpose. But
there is no royal and unimpeachable road to the attainment of such a
collective will; and the best means a democratic people can take in
order to assert its Sovereign authority with full moral effect is to
seek fullness and consistency of national life. They are Sovereign in so
far as they are united in spirit and in purpose; and they are united in
so far as they are loyal one to another, to their joint past, and to the
Promise of their future. The Promise of their future may sometimes
demand the partial renunciation of their past and the partial sacrifice
of certain present interests; but the inevitable friction of all such
sacrifices can be mitigated by mutual loyalty and good faith. Sacrifices
of tradition and interest can only be demanded in case they contribute
to the national purpose--to the gradual creation of a higher type of
individual and associated life. Hence it is that an effective increase
in national coherence looks in the direction of the democratic
consummation--of the morally and intellectually authoritative expression
of the Sovereign popular will. Both the forging and the functioning of
such a will are constructively related to the gradual achievement of the
work of individual and social amelioration.

Undesirable and inadequate forms of democracy always seek to dispense in
one way or another with this tedious process of achieving a morally
authoritative Sovereign will. We Americans have identified democracy
with certain existing political and civil rights, and we have,
consequently, tended to believe that the democratic consummation was
merely a matter of exercising and preserving those rights. The grossest
form of this error was perpetrated when Stephen A. Douglas confused
authoritative popular Sovereignty with the majority vote of a few
hundred "squatters" in a frontier state, and asserted that on democratic
principles such expressions of the popular will should be accepted as
final. But an analogous mistake lurks in all static forms of democracy.
The bestowal and the exercise of political and civil rights are merely a
method of organization, which if used in proper subordination to the
ultimate democratic purpose, may achieve in action something of the
authority of a popular Sovereign will. But to cleave to the details of
such an organization as the very essence of democracy is utterly to
pervert the principle of national democratic Sovereignty. From this
point of view, the Bourbon who wishes the existing system with its
mal-adaptations and contradictions preserved in all its lack of
integrity, commits an error analogous to that of the radical, who wishes
by virtue of a majority vote immediately to destroy some essential part
of the fabric. Both of them conceive that the whole moral and national
authority of the democratic principle can be invoked in favor of
institutions already in existence or of purposes capable of immediate
achievement.

On the other hand, there are democrats who would seek a consummate
democracy without the use of any political machinery. The idea that a
higher type of associated life can be immediately realized by a supreme
act of faith must always be tempting to men who unite social aspirations
with deep religious faith. It is a more worthy and profound conception
of democracy than the conventional American one of a system of legally
constituted and equally exercised rights, fatally resulting in material
prosperity. Before any great stride can be made towards a condition of
better democracy, the constructive democratic movement must obtain more
effective support both from scientific discipline and religious faith.
Nevertheless, the triumph of Tolstoyan democracy at the present moment
would be more pernicious in its results than the triumph of Jeffersonian
Democracy. Tolstoy has merely given a fresh and exalted version of the
old doctrine of non-resistance, which, as it was proclaimed by Jesus,
referred in the most literal way to another world. In this world faith
cannot dispense with power and organization. The sudden and immediate
conversion of unregenerate men from a condition of violence,
selfishness, and sin into a condition of beatitude and brotherly love
can obtain even comparative permanence only by virtue of exclusiveness.
The religious experience of our race has sufficiently testified to the
permanence of the law. One man can be evangelized for a lifetime. A
group of men can be evangelized for many years. Multitudes of men can be
evangelized only for a few hours. No faith can achieve comparatively
stable social conquests without being established by habit, defined by
thought, and consolidated by organization. Usually the faith itself
subsequently sickens of the bad air it breathes in its own house.
Indeed, it is certain to lose initiative and vigor, unless it can appeal
intermittently to some correlative source of enthusiasm and devotion.
But with the help of efficient organization it may possibly survive,
whereas in the absence of such a worldly body, it must in a worldly
sense inevitably perish. Democracy as a living movement in the direction
of human brotherhood has required, like other faiths, an efficient
organization and a root in ordinary human nature; and it obtains such an
organization by virtue of the process of national development--on
condition, of course, that the nation is free to become a genuine and
thorough-going democracy.

A democracy organized into a nation, and imbued with the national
spirit, will seek by means of experimentation and discipline to reach
the object which Tolstoy would reach by an immediate and a miraculous
act of faith. The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe
coercive measures, but what schooling does not? A nation cannot merely
discharge its unregenerate citizens; and the best men in a nation or in
any political society cannot evade the responsibility which the fact of
human unregeneracy places upon the whole group. After men had reached a
certain stage of civilization, they frequently began to fear that the
rough conditions of political association excluded the highest and most
fruitful forms of social life; and they sought various ways of improving
the quality of the association by narrowing its basis. They tried to
found small communities of saints who were connected exclusively by
moral and religious bonds, and who in this way freed themselves from the
hazards, the distraction, and the violence inseparable from political
association. Such communities have made at different times great
successes; but their success has not been permanent. The political
aspect of associated life is not to be evaded. In proportion as
political organization gained in prosperity, efficiency, and dignity,
special religious associations lost their independence and power. Even
the most powerful religious association in the world, the Catholic
Church, has been fighting a losing battle with political authority, and
it is likely in the course of time to occupy in relation to the
political powers a position analogous to that of the Greek or the
English church. The ultimate power to command must rest with that
authority which, if necessary, can force people to obey; and any plan of
association which seeks to ignore the part which physical force plays in
life is necessarily incomplete. Just as formerly the irresponsible and
meaningless use of political power created the need of special religious
associations, independent of the state, so now the responsible, the
purposeful, and the efficient use of physical force, characteristic of
modern nations, has in its turn made such independence less necessary,
and tends to attach a different function to the church. A basis of
association narrower than the whole complex of human powers and
interests will not serve. National organization provides such a basis.
The perversity of human nature may cause its ultimate failure; but it
will not fail because it omits any essential constituent in the
composition of a permanent and fruitful human association. So far as it
fulfills its responsibilities, it guarantees protection against
predatory powers at home and abroad. It provides in appropriate measure
for individual freedom, for physical, moral, and intellectual
discipline, and for social consistency. It has prizes to offer as well
as coercion to exercise; and with its foundations planted firmly in the
past, its windows and portals look out towards a better future. The
tendency of its normal action is continually, if very slowly, to
diminish the distance between the ideal of human brotherhood, and the
political, economic, and social conditions, under which at any one time
men manage to live together.

That is the truth to which the patriotic Americans should firmly cleave.
The modern nation, particularly in so far as it is constructively
democratic, constitutes the best machinery as yet developed for raising
the level of human association. It really teaches men how they must
feel, what they must think, and what they must do, in order that they
may live together amicably and profitably. The value of this school for
its present purposes is increased by its very imperfections, because its
imperfections issue inevitably from the imperfections of human nature.
Men being as unregenerate as they are, all worthy human endeavor
involves consequences of battle and risk. The heroes of the struggle
must maintain their achievements and at times even promote their objects
by compulsion. The policeman and the soldier will continue for an
indefinite period to be guardians of the national schools, and the
nations have no reason to be ashamed of this fact. It is merely symbolic
of the very comprehensiveness of their responsibilities--that they have
to deal with the problem of human inadequacy and unregeneracy in all its
forms,--that they cannot evade this problem by allowing only the good
boys to attend school--that they cannot even mitigate it by drawing too
sharp a distinction between the good boys and the bad. Such
indiscriminate attendance in these national schools, if it is to be
edifying, involves one practical consequence of dominant importance.
Everybody within the school-house--masters, teachers, pupils and
janitors, old pupils and young, good pupils and bad, must feel one to
another an indestructible loyalty. Such loyalty is merely the subjective
aspect of their inevitable mutual association; it is merely the
recognition that as a worldly body they must all live or die and conquer
or fail together. The existence of an invincible loyalty is a condition
of the perpetuity of the school. The man who believes himself wise is
always tempted to ignore or undervalue the foolish brethren. The man who
believes himself good is always tempted actively to dislike the perverse
brethren. The man who insists at any cost upon having his own way is
always twisting the brethren into his friends or his enemies. But the
teaching of the national school constantly tends to diminish these
causes of disloyalty. Its tendency is to convert traditional patriotism
into a patient devotion to the national ideal, and into a patient
loyalty towards one's fellow-countrymen as the visible and inevitable
substance through which that ideal is to be expressed.

In the foregoing characteristic of a democratic nation, we reach the
decisive difference between a nation which is seeking to be wholly
democratic and a nation which is content to be semi-democratic. In the
semi-democratic nation devotion to the national ideal does not to the
same extent sanctify the citizen's relation in feeling and in idea to
his fellow-countrymen. The loyalty demanded by the national ideal of
such a country may imply a partly disloyal and suspicious attitude
towards large numbers of political associates. The popular and the
national interests must necessarily in some measure diverge. In a
nationalized democracy or a democratic nation the corresponding dilemma
is mitigated. The popular interest can only be efficiently expressed in
a national policy and organization. The national interest is merely a
more coherent and ameliorating expression of the popular interest. Its
consistency, so far as it is consistent, is the reflection of a more
humanized condition of human nature. It increases with the increasing
power of its citizens to deal fairly and to feel loyally towards their
fellow-countrymen; and it cannot increase except through the overthrow
of the obstacles to fair dealing and loyal feeling.

The responsibility and loyalty which the citizens of a democratic nation
must feel one towards another is comprehensive and unmitigable; but the
actual behavior which at any one time the national welfare demands must,
of course, be specially and carefully discriminated. National policies
and acts will be welcome to some citizens and obnoxious to others,
according to their special interests and opinions; and the citizens
whose interests and ideas are prejudiced thereby have every right and
should be permitted every opportunity to protest in the most vigorous
and persistent manner. The nation may, however, on its part demand that
these protests, in order to be heeded and respected, must conform to
certain conditions. They must not be carried to the point of refusing
obedience to the law. When private interests are injured by the national
policy, the protestants must be able to show either that such injuries
are unnecessary, or else they involve harm to an essential public
interest. All such protest must find an ultimate sanction in a group of
constructive democratic ideas. Finally, the protest must never be made
the excuse for personal injustice or national disloyalty. Even if the
national policy should betray indifference to the fundamental interests
of a democratic nation, as did that of the United States from 1820 to
1860, the obligation of patient good faith on the part of the
protestants is not diminished. Their protests may be as vivacious and as
persistent as the error demands. The supporters of the erroneous policy
may be made the object of most drastic criticism and the uncompromising
exposure. No effort should be spared to secure the adoption of a more
genuinely national policy. But beyond all this there remains a still
deeper responsibility--that of dealing towards one's fellow-countrymen
in good faith, so that differences of interest, of conviction, and of
moral purpose can be made the agency of a better understanding and a
firmer loyalty.

If a national policy offends the integrity of the national idea, as for
a while that of the American nation did, its mistake is sure to involve
certain disastrous consequences; and those consequences constitute,
usually, the vehicle of necessary national discipline. The national
school is, of course, the national life. So far as the school is
properly conducted, the methods of instruction are, if you please,
pedagogic; but if the masters are blind or negligent, or if the scholars
are unruly, there remains as a resource the more painful and costly
methods of nature's instruction. A serious error will be followed by its
inevitable penalty, proportioned to the blindness and the perversity in
which it originated; and thereafter the prosperity of the country's
future will hang partly on the ability of the national intelligence to
trace the penalty to its cause and to fix the responsibility. No matter
how loyal the different members of a national body may be one to
another, their mutual good faith will bleed to death, unless some among
them have the intelligence to trace their national ills to their
appropriate causes, and the candid courage to advocate the necessary
remedial measures. At some point in the process, disinterested
patriotism and good faith must be reënforced by intellectual insight. A
people are saved many costly perversions, in case the official
school-masters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor
insubordinate; but if the lessons are foolishly phrased, or the pupils
refuse to learn, the school will never regain its proper disciplinary
value until new teachers have arisen, who understand both the error and
its consequences, and who can exercise an effective authority over their
pupils.

The mutual loyalty and responsibility, consequently, embodied and
inculcated in a national school, depends for its efficient expression
upon the amount of insight and intelligence which it involves. The
process of national education means, not only a discipline of the
popular will, but training in ability to draw inferences from the
national experience, so that the national consciousness will gradually
acquire an edifying state of mind towards its present and its future
problems. Those problems are always closely allied to the problems which
have been more or less completely solved during the national history;
and the body of practical lessons which can be inferred from that
history is the best possible preparation for present and future
emergencies. Such history requires close and exact reading. The national
experience is always strangely mixed. Even the successes of our own
past, such as the Federal organization, contain much dubious matter,
demanding the most scrupulous disentanglement. Even the worst enemies of
our national integrity, such as the Southern planters, offer in some
respects an edifying political example to a disinterested democracy.
Nations do not have to make serious mistakes in order to learn valuable
lessons. Every national action, no matter how trivial, which is
scrutinized with candor, may contribute to the stock of national
intellectual discipline--the result of which should be to form a
constantly more coherent whole out of the several elements in the
national composition--out of the social and economic conditions, the
stock of national opinions, and the essential national ideal. And it is
this essential national ideal which makes it undesirable for the
national consciousness to dwell too much on the past or to depend too
much upon the lessons of experience alone. The great experience given to
a democratic nation must be just an incorrigible but patient attempt to
realize its democratic ideal--an attempt which must mold history as well
as hang upon its lessons. The function of the patriotic political
intelligence in relation to the fulfillment of the national Promise must
be to devise means for its redemption--means which have their relations
to the past, their suitability to the occasion, and their contribution
towards a step in advance. The work in both critical, experienced, and
purposeful. Mistakes will be made, and their effects either corrected or
turned to good account. Successes will be achieved, and their effects
must be coolly appraised and carefully discriminated. The task will
never be entirely achieved, but the tedious and laborious advance will
for every generation be a triumphant affirmation of the nationalized
democratic ideal as the one really adequate political and social
principle.

CHAPTER XIII

CONCLUSIONS--THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATIONAL PURPOSES

I

INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE EDUCATION

Hitherto we have been discussing the ways in which existing American
economic and political methods and institutions should be modified in
order to make towards the realization of the national democratic ideal.
In course of this discussion, it has been taken for granted that the
American people under competent and responsible leadership could
deliberately plan a policy of individual and social improvement, and
that with the means at their collective disposal they could make headway
towards its realization. These means consisted, of course, precisely in
their whole outfit of political, economic, and social institutions; and
the implication has been, consequently, that human nature can be raised
to a higher level by an improvement in institutions and laws. The
majority of my readers will probably have thought many times that such
an assumption, whatever its truth, has been overworked. Admitting that
some institutions may be better than others, it must also be admitted
that human nature is composed of most rebellious material, and that the
extent to which it can be modified by social and political institutions
of any kind is, at best, extremely small. Such critics may,
consequently, have reached the conclusion that the proposed system of
reconstruction, even if desirable, would not accomplish anything really
effectual or decisive towards the fulfillment of the American national
Promise.

It is no doubt true that out of the preceding chapters many sentences
could be selected which apparently imply a credulous faith in the
possibility of improving human nature by law. It is also true that I
have not ventured more than to touch upon a possible institutional
reformation, which, in so far as it was successful in its purpose,
would improve human nature by the most effectual of all means--that is,
by improving the methods whereby men and women are bred. But if I have
erred in attaching or appearing to attach too much efficacy to legal and
institutional reforms, the error or its appearance was scarcely
separable from an analytic reconstruction of a sufficient democratic
ideal. Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human
perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions,
democracy is at best a more than usually safe form of political
organization; and the only interesting inquiry about its future would
be: How long will it continue to work? But if it is to work better as
well as merely longer, it must have some leavening effect on human
nature; and the sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of the
leaven. For him the practical questions are: How can the improvement
best be brought about? and, How much may it amount to?

As a matter of fact, Americans have always had the liveliest and
completest faith in the process of individual and social improvement and
in accepting the assumption, I am merely adhering to the deepest and
most influential of American traditions. The better American has
continually been seeking to "uplift" himself, his neighbors, and his
compatriots. But he has usually favored means of improvement very
different from those suggested hereinbefore. The real vehicle of
improvement is education. It is by education that the American is
trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better
education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by
education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and
institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social
substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities
without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and
with which even bad institutions and laws can be made vehicles of grace.

The American faith in education has been characterized as a
superstition; and superstitious in some respects it unquestionably is.
But its superstitious tendency is not exhibited so much in respect to
the ordinary process of primary, secondary, and higher education. Not
even an American can over-emphasize the importance of proper teaching
during youth; and the only wonder is that the money so freely lavished
on it does not produce better results. Americans are superstitious in
respect to education, rather because of the social "uplift" which they
expect to achieve by so-called educational means. The credulity of the
socialist in expecting to alter human nature by merely institutional and
legal changes is at least equaled by the credulity of the good American
in proposing to evangelize the individual by the reading of books and by
the expenditure of money and words. Back of it all is the underlying
assumption that the American nation by taking thought can add a cubit to
its stature,--an absolute confidence in the power of the idea to create
its own object and in the efficacy of good intentions.

Do we lack culture? We will "make it hum" by founding a new university
in Chicago. Is American art neglected and impoverished? We will enrich
it by organizing art departments in our colleges, and popularize it by
lectures with lantern slides and associations for the study of its
history. Is New York City ugly? Perhaps, but if we could only get the
authorities to appropriate a few hundred millions for its
beautification, we could make it look like a combination of Athens,
Florence, and Paris. Is it desirable for the American citizen to be
something of a hero? I will encourage heroes by establishing a fund
whereby they shall be rewarded in cash. War is hell, is it? I will work
for the abolition of hell by calling a convention and passing a
resolution denouncing its iniquities. I will build at the Hague a Palace
of Peace which shall be a standing rebuke to the War Lords of Europe.
Here, in America, some of us have more money than we need and more good
will. We will spend the money in order to establish the reign of the
good, the beautiful, and the true.

This faith in a combination of good intentions, organization, words, and
money is not confined to women's clubs or to societies of amiable
enthusiasts. In the state of mind which it expresses can be detected the
powerful influence which American women exert over American men; but its
guiding faith and illusion are shared by the most hard-headed and
practical of Americans. The very men who have made their personal
successes by a rigorous application of the rule that business is
business--the very men who in their own careers have exhibited a shrewd
and vivid sense of the realities of politics and trade; it is these men
who have most faith in the practical, moral, and social power of the
Subsidized Word. The most real thing which they carry over from the
region of business into the region of moral and intellectual ideals is
apparently their bank accounts. The fruits of their hard work and their
business ability are to be applied to the purpose of "uplifting" their
fellow-countrymen. A certain number of figures written on a check and
signed by a familiar name, what may it not accomplish? Some years ago at
the opening exercises of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Mr. Andrew
Carnegie burst into an impassioned and mystical vision of the
miraculously constitutive power of first mortgage steel bonds. From his
point of view and from that of the average American there is scarcely
anything which the combination of abundant resources and good intentions
may not accomplish.

The tradition of seeking to cross the gulf between American practice and
the American ideal by means of education or the Subsidized Word is not
be dismissed with a sneer. The gulf cannot be crossed without the
assistance of some sort of educational discipline; and that discipline
depends partly on a new exercise of the "money power" now safely
reposing in the strong boxes of professional millionaires. There need be
no fundamental objection taken to the national faith in the power of
good intentions and re-distributed wealth. That faith is the immediate
and necessary issue of the logic of our national moral situation. It
should be, as it is, innocent and absolute; and if it does not remain
innocent and absolute, the Promise of American Life can scarcely be
fulfilled.

A faith may, however, be innocent and absolute without being
inexperienced and credulous. The American faith in education is by way
of being credulous and superstitious, not because it seeks individual
and social amelioration by what may be called an educational process,
but because the proposed means of education are too conscious, too
direct, and too superficial. Let it be admitted that in any one decade
the amount which can be accomplished towards individual and social
amelioration by means of economic and political reorganization is
comparatively small; but it is certainly as large as that which can be
accomplished by subsidizing individual good intentions. Heroism is not
to be encouraged by cash prizes any more than is genius; and a man's
friends should not be obliged to prove that he is a hero in order that
he may reap every appropriate reward. A hero officially conscious of his
heroism is a mutilated hero. In the same way art cannot become a power
in a community unless many of its members are possessed of a native and
innocent love of beautiful things; and the extent to which such a
possession can be acquired by any one or two generations of
traditionally inartistic people is extremely small. Its acquisition
depends not so much upon direct conscious effort, as upon the growing
ability to discriminate between what is good and what is bad in their
own native art. It is a matter of the training and appreciation of
American artists, rather than the cultivation of art. Illustrations to
the same effect might be multiplied. The popular interest in the Higher
Education has not served to make Americans attach much importance to the
advice of the highly educated man. He is less of a practical power in
the United States than he is in any European country; and this fact is
in itself a sufficient commentary on the reality of the American faith
in education. The fact is, of course, that the American tendency to
disbelieve in the fulfillment of their national Promise by means of
politically, economically, and socially reconstructive work has forced
them into the alternative of attaching excessive importance to
subsidized good intentions. They want to be "uplifted," and they want to
"uplift" other people; but they will not use their social and political
institutions for the purpose, because those institutions are assumed to
be essentially satisfactory. The "uplifting" must be a matter of
individual, or of unofficial associated effort; and the only available
means are words and subsidies.

There is, however, a sense in which it is really true that the American
national Promise can be fulfilled only by education; and this aspect of
our desirable national education can, perhaps, best be understood by
seeking its analogue in the training of the individual. An individual's
education consists primarily in the discipline which he undergoes to fit
him both for fruitful association with his fellows and for his own
special work. Important as both the liberal and the technical aspect of
this preliminary training is, it constitutes merely the beginning of a
man's education. Its object is or should be to prepare him both in his
will and in his intelligence to make a thoroughly illuminating use of
his experience in life. His experience,--as a man of business, a
husband, a father, a citizen, a friend,--has been made real to him, not
merely by the zest with which he has sought it and the sincerity with
which he has accepted it, but by the disinterested intelligence which he
has brought to its understanding. An educational discipline which has
contributed in that way to the reality of a man's experience has done as
much for him as education can do; and an educational discipline which
has failed to make any such contribution has failed of its essential
purpose. The experience of other people acquired at second hand has
little value,--except, perhaps, as a means of livelihood,--unless it
really illuminates a man's personal experience.

Usually a man's ability to profit by his own personal experience depends
upon the sincerity and the intelligence which he brings to his own
particular occupation. The rule is not universal, because some men are,
of course, born with much higher intellectual gifts than others; and to
such men may be given an insight which has little foundation in any
genuine personal experience. It remains true, none the less, for the
great majority of men, that they gather an edifying understanding of men
and things just in so far as they patiently and resolutely stick to the
performance of some special and (for the most part) congenial task.
Their education in life must be grounded in the persistent attempt to
realize in action some kind of a purpose--a purpose usually connected
with the occupation whereby they live. In the pursuit of that purpose
they will be continually making experiments--opening up new lines of
work, establishing new relations with other men, and taking more or less
serious risks. Each of these experiments offers them an opportunity both
for personal discipline and for increasing personal insight. If a man is
capable of becoming wise, he will gradually be able to infer from this
increasing mass of personal experience, the extent to which or the
conditions under which he is capable of realizing his purpose; and his
insight into the particular realities of his own life will bring with
it some kind of a general philosophy--some sort of a disposition and
method of appraisal of men, their actions, and their surroundings.
Wherever a man reaches such a level of intelligence, he will be an
educated man, even though his particular job has been that of a
mechanic. On the other hand, a man who fails to make his particular task
in life the substantial support of a genuine experience remains
essentially an unenlightened man.

National education in its deeper aspect does not differ from individual
education. Its efficiency ultimately depends upon the ability of the
national consciousness to draw illuminating inferences from the course
of the national experience; and its power to draw such inferences must
depend upon the persistent and disinterested sincerity with which the
attempt is made to realize the national purpose--the democratic ideal of
individual and social improvement. So far as Americans are true to that
purpose, all the different aspects of their national experience will
assume meaning and momentum; while in so far as they are false thereto,
no amount of "education" will ever be really edifying. The fundamental
process of American education consists and must continue to consist
precisely in the risks and experiments which the American nation will
make in the service of its national ideal. If the American people balk
at the sacrifices demanded by their experiments, or if they attach
finality to any particular experiment in the distribution of political,
economic, and social power, they will remain morally and intellectually
at the bottom of a well, out of which they will never be "uplifted" by
the most extravagant subsidizing of good intentions and noble words.

The sort of institutional and economic reorganization suggested in the
preceding chapters is not, consequently, to be conceived merely as a
more or less dubious proposal to improve human nature by laws. It is to
be conceived as (possibly) the next step in the realization of a
necessary collective purpose. Its deeper significance does not consist
in the results which it may accomplish by way of immediate improvement.
Such results may be worth having; but at best they will create almost as
many difficulties as they remove. Far more important than any practical
benefits would be the indication it afforded of national good faith. It
would mean that the American nation was beginning to educate itself up
to its own necessary standards. It would imply a popular realization
that our first experiment in democratic political and economic
organization was founded partly on temporary conditions and partly on
erroneous theories. A new experiment must consequently be made; and the
great value of this new experiment would derive from the implied
intellectual and moral emancipation. Its trial would demand both the
sacrifice of many cherished interests, habits, and traditions for the
sake of remaining true to a more fundamental responsibility and a much
larger infusion of disinterested motives into the economic and political
system. Thus the sincere definite decision that the experiment was
necessary, would probably do more for American moral and social
amelioration than would the specific measures actually adopted and
tried. Public opinion can never be brought to approve any effectual
measures, until it is converted to a constructive and consequently to a
really educational theory of democracy.

Back of the problem of educating the individual lies the problem of
collective education. On the one hand, if the nation is rendered
incapable of understanding its own experience by the habit of dealing
insincerely with its national purpose, the individual, just in so far as
he himself has become highly educated, tends to be divided from his
country and his fellow-countrymen. On the other hand, just in so far as
a people is sincerely seeking the fulfillment of its national Promise,
individuals of all kinds will find their most edifying individual
opportunities in serving their country. In aiding the accomplishment of
the collective purpose by means of increasingly constructive
experiments, they will be increasing the scope and power of their own
individual action. The opportunities, which during the past few years
the reformers have enjoyed to make their personal lives more
interesting, would be nothing compared to the opportunities for all
sorts of stirring and responsible work, which would be demanded of
individuals under the proposed plan of political and economic
reorganization. The American nation would be more disinterestedly and
sincerely fulfilling its collective purpose, partly because its more
distinguished individuals had been called upon to place at the service
of their country a higher degree of energy, ability, and unselfish
devotion. If a nation, that is, is recreant to its deeper purpose,
individuals, so far as they are well educated, are educated away from
the prevailing national habits and traditions; whereas when a nation is
sincerely attempting to meet its collective responsibility, the better
individuals are inevitably educated into active participation in the
collective task.

The reader may now be prepared to understand why the American faith in
education has the appearance of being credulous and superstitious. The
good average American usually wishes to accomplish exclusively by
individual education a result which must be partly accomplished by
national education. The nation, like the individual, must go to school;
and the national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its
schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at
the realization of the collective purpose. If the action is not aimed at
the collective purpose, a nation will learn little even from its
successes. If its action is aimed at the collective purpose, it may
learn much even from its mistakes. No process of merely individual
education can accomplish the work of collective education, because the
nation is so much more than a group of individuals. Individuals can be
"uplifted" without "uplifting" the nation, because the nation has an
individuality of its own, which cannot be increased without the
consciousness of collective responsibilities and the collective official
attempt to redeem them. The processes of national and individual
education should, of course, parallel and supplement each other. The
individual can do much to aid national education by the single-minded
and intelligent realization of his own specific purposes; but all
individual successes will have little more than an individual interest
unless they frequently contribute to the work of national construction.
The nation can do much to aid individual education; but the best aid
within its power is to offer to the individual a really formative and
inspiring opportunity for public service. The whole round of superficial
educational machinery--books, subsidies, resolutions, lectures,
congresses--may be of the highest value, provided they are used to
digest and popularize the results of a genuine individual and national
educational experience, but when they are used, as so often at present,
merely as a substitute for well-purposed individual and national action,
they are precisely equivalent to an attempt to fly in a vacuum.

That the direct practical value of a reform movement may be equaled or
surpassed by its indirect educational value is a sufficiently familiar
idea--an idea admirably expressed ten years ago by Mr. John Jay Chapman
in the chapter on "Education" in his "Causes and Consequences." But the
idea in its familiar form is vitiated, because the educational effect of
reform is usually conceived as exclusively individual. Its effect
_must_, indeed, be considered wholly as an individual matter, just so
long as reform is interpreted merely as a process of purification. From
that point of view the collective purpose has already been fulfilled as
far as it can be fulfilled by collective organization, and the _only_
remaining method of social amelioration is that of the self-improvement
of its constituent members. As President Nicholas Murray Butler of
Columbia says, in his "True and False Democracy": "We must not lose
sight of the fact that the corporate or collective responsibility which
it (socialism) would substitute for individual initiative is only such
corporate or collective responsibility as a group of these very same
individuals could exercise. Therefore, socialism is primarily an attempt
to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, in
the hope that they will cancel each other." But what is all organization
but an attempt, not to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding
them together, so much as to make use of many men's varying individual
abilities by giving each a sufficient sphere of exercise? While all men
are imperfect, they are not all imperfect to the same extent. Some have
more courage, more ability, more insight, and more training than others;
and an efficient organization can accomplish more than can a mere
collection of individuals, precisely because it may represent a standard
of performance far above that of the average individual. Its merit is
simply that of putting the collective power of the group at the service
of its ablest members; and the ablest members of the group will never
attain to an individual responsibility commensurate with their powers,
until they are enabled to work efficiently towards the redemption of the
collective responsibility. The nation gives individuality an increased
scope and meaning by offering individuals a chance for effective
service, such as they could never attain under a system of collective
irresponsibility. Thus under a system of collective responsibility the
process of social improvement is absolutely identified with that of
individual improvement. The antithesis is not between nationalism and
individualism, but between an individualism which is indiscriminate, and
an individualism which is selective.

II

CONDITIONS OF INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION

It is, then, essential to recognize that the individual American will
never obtain a sufficiently complete chance of self-expression, until
the American nation has earnestly undertaken and measurably achieved the
realization of its collective purpose. As we shall see presently, the
cure for this individual sterility lies partly with the individual
himself or rather with the man who proposes to become an individual; and
under any plan of economic or social organization, the man who proposes
to become an individual is a condition of national as well as individual
improvement. It is none the less true that any success in the
achievement of the national purpose will contribute positively to the
liberation of the individual, both by diminishing his temptations,
improving his opportunities, and by enveloping him in an invigorating
rather than an enervating moral and intellectual atmosphere.

It is the economic individualism of our existing national system which
inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; and American
individual achievement in politics and science and the arts will remain
partially impoverished as long as our fellow-countrymen neglect or
refuse systematically to regulate the distribution of wealth in the
national interest. I am aware, of course, that the prevailing American
conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion.
Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited
popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities. Yet it would
be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically
unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which
makes for individual bondage. Neither does the bondage which such a
system fastens upon the individual exist only in the case of those
individuals who are victimized by the pressure of unlimited economic
competition. Such victims exist, of course, in large numbers, and they
will come to exist in still larger number hereafter; but hitherto, at
least, the characteristic vice of the American system has not been the
bondage imposed upon its victims. Much more insidious has been the
bondage imposed upon the conquerors and their camp-followers. A man's
individuality is as much compromised by success under the conditions
imposed by such a system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may
tend to make his individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the
work is determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself
thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal
independence or any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American
business men are one from another in temperament, circumstances, and
habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their
individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate
measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its
results in cash.

Consider for a moment what individuality and individual independence
really mean. A genuine individual must at least possess some special
quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the
successive phases and the various aspects of his own life and which
results in personal moral freedom. In what way and to what extent does
the existing economic system contribute to the creation of such genuine
individuals? At its best it asks of every man who engages in a business
occupation that he make as much money as he can, and the only conditions
it imposes on this pursuit of money are those contained in the law of
the land and a certain conventional moral code. The pursuit of money is
to arouse a man to individual activity, and law and custom determine the
conditions to which the activity must conform. The man does not become
an individual merely by obeying the written and unwritten laws. He
becomes an individual because the desire to make money releases his
energy and intensifies his personal initiative. The kind of individuals
created by such an economic system are not distinguished one from
another by any special purpose. They are distinguished by the energy and
success whereby the common purpose of making money is accompanied and
followed. Some men show more enterprise and ingenuity in devising ways
of making money than others, or they show more vigor and zeal in taking
advantage of the ordinary methods. These men are the kind of individuals
which the existing economic system tends to encourage; and critics of
the existing system are denounced, because of the disastrous effect upon
individual initiative which would result from restricting individual
economic freedom.

But why should a man become an individual because he does what everybody
else does, only with more energy and success? The individuality so
acquired is merely that of one particle in a mass of similar particles.
Some particles are bigger than others and livelier; but from a
sufficient distance they all look alike; and in substance and meaning
they all are alike. Their individual activity and history do not make
them less alike. It merely makes them bigger or smaller, livelier or
more inert. Their distinction from their fellows is quantitative; the
unity of their various phases a matter of repetition; their independence
wholly comparative. Such men are associated with their fellows in the
pursuit of a common purpose, and they are divided from their fellows by
the energy and success with which that purpose is pursued. On the other
hand, a condition favorable to genuine individuality would be one in
which men were divided from one another by special purposes, and
reunited in so far as these individual purposes were excellently and
successfully achieved.

The truth is that individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit
of a disinterested object. It is a moral and intellectual quality, and
it must be realized by moral and intellectual means. A man achieves
individual distinction, not by the enterprise and vigor with which he
accumulates money, but by the zeal and the skill with which he pursues
an exclusive interest--an interest usually, but not necessarily,
connected with his means of livelihood. The purpose to which he is
devoted--such, for instance, as that of painting or of running a
railroad--is not exclusive in the sense of being unique. But it becomes
exclusive for the individual who adopts it, because of the single-minded
and disinterested manner in which it is pursued. A man makes the purpose
exclusive for himself by the spirit and method in which the work is
done; and just in proportion as the work is thoroughly well done, a
man's individuality begins to take substance and form. His individual
quality does not depend merely on the display of superior enterprise
and energy, although, of course, he may and should be as enterprising
and as energetic as he can. It depends upon the actual excellence of the
work in every respect,--an excellence which can best be achieved by the
absorbing and exclusive pursuit of that alone. A man's individuality is
projected into his work. He does not stop when he has earned enough
money, and he does not cease his improvements when they cease to bring
in an immediate return. He is identified with his job, and by means of
that identification his individuality becomes constructive. His
achievement, just because of its excellence, has an inevitable and an
unequivocal social value. The quality of a man's work reunites him with
his fellows. He may have been in appearance just as selfish as a man who
spends most of his time in making money, but if his work has been
thoroughly well done, he will, in making himself an individual, have
made an essential contribution to national fulfillment.

Of course, a great deal of very excellent work is accomplished under the
existing economic system; and by means of such work many a man becomes
more or less of an individual. But in so far as such is the case, it is
the work which individualizes and not the unrestricted competitive
pursuit of money. In so far as the economic motive prevails,
individuality is not developed; it is stifled. The man whose motive is
that of money-making will not make the work any more excellent than is
demanded by the largest possible returns; and frequently the largest
possible returns are to be obtained by indifferent work or by work which
has absolutely no social value. The ordinary mercenary purpose always
compels a man to stop at a certain point, and consider something else
than the excellence of his achievement. It does not make the individual
independent, except in so far as independence is merely a matter of cash
in the bank; and for every individual on whom it bestows excessive
pecuniary independence, there are many more who are by that very
circumstance denied any sort of liberation. Even pecuniary independence
is usually purchased at the price of moral and intellectual bondage.
Such genuine individuality as can be detected in the existing social
system is achieved not because of the prevailing money-making motive,
but in spite thereof.

The ordinary answer to such criticisms is that while the existing
system may have many faults, it certainly has proved an efficient means
of releasing individual energy; whereas the exercise of a positive
national responsibility for the wholesome distribution of wealth would
tend to deprive the individual of any sufficient initiative. The claim
is that the money-making motive is the only one which will really arouse
the great majority of men, and to weaken it would be to rob the whole
economic system of its momentum. Just what validity this claim may have
cannot, with our present experience, be definitely settled. That to
deprive individuals suddenly of the opportunities they have so long
enjoyed would be disastrous may be fully admitted. It may also be
admitted that any immediate and drastic attempt to substitute for the
present system a national regulation of the distribution of wealth or a
national responsibility for the management even of monopolies or
semi-monopolies would break down and would do little to promote either
individual or social welfare. But to conclude from any such admissions
that a systematic policy of promoting individual and national
amelioration should be abandoned in wholly unnecessary. That the
existing system has certain practical advantages, and is a fair
expression of the average moral standards of to-day is not only its
chief merit, but also its chief and inexcusable defect. What a
democratic nation must do is not to accept human nature as it is, but to
move in the direction of its improvement. The question it must answer
is: How can it contribute to the increase of American individuality? The
defender of the existing system must be able to show either (1) that it
does contribute to the increase of American individuality; or that (2)
whatever its limitations, the substitution of some better system is
impossible.

Of course, a great many defenders of the existing system will
unequivocally declare that it does contribute effectually to the
increase of individuality, and it is this defense which is most
dangerous, because it is due, not to any candid consideration of the
facts, but to unreasoning popular prejudice and personal
self-justification. The existing system contributes to the increase of
individuality only in case individuality is deprived of all serious
moral and intellectual meaning. In order to sustain their assertion they
must define individuality, not as a living ideal, but as the
psychological condition produced by any individual action. In the light
of such a definition every action performed by an individual would
contribute to individuality; and, conversely, every action performed by
the state, which conceivably could be left to individuals, would
diminish individuality. Such a conception derives from the early
nineteenth century principles of an essential opposition between the
state and the individual; and it is a deduction from the common
conception of democracy as nothing but a finished political organization
in which the popular will prevails. As applied in the traditional
American system this conception of individuality has resulted in the
differentiation of an abundance of raw individual material, but the raw
material has been systematically encouraged to persist only on condition
that it remained undeveloped. Properly speaking, it has not encouraged
individualism at all. Individuality is necessarily based on genuine
discrimination. It has encouraged particularism. While the particles
have been roused into activity, they all remain dominated by
substantially the same forces of attraction and repulsion. But in order
that one of the particles may fulfill the promise of a really separate
existence, he must pursue some special interest of his own. In that way
he begins to realize his individuality, and in realizing his
individuality he is coming to occupy a special niche in the national
structure. A national structure which encourages individuality as
opposed to mere particularity is one which creates innumerable special
niches, adapted to all degrees and kinds of individual development. The
individual becomes a nation in miniature, but devoted to the loyal
realization of a purpose peculiar to himself. The nation becomes an
enlarged individual whose special purpose is that of human amelioration,
and in whose life every individual should find some particular but
essential function.

It surely cannot be seriously claimed that the improvement of the
existing economic organization for the sake of contributing to the
increase of such genuine individuals is impossible. If genuine
individuality depends upon the pursuit of an exclusive interest,
promoted most certainly and completely by a disinterested motive, it
must be encouraged by enabling men so far as possible to work from
disinterested motives. Doubtless this is a difficult, but it is not an
impossible task. It cannot be completely achieved until the whole basis
of economic competition is changed. At present men compete chiefly for
the purpose of securing the most money to spend or to accumulate. They
must in the end compete chiefly for the purpose of excelling in the
quality of their work that of other men engaged in a similar occupation.
And there are assuredly certain ways in which the state can diminish the
undesirable competition and encourage the desirable competition.

The several economic reforms suggested in the preceding chapter would,
so far as they could be successfully introduced, promote more
disinterested economic work. These reforms would not, of course,
entirely do away with the influence of selfish acquisitive motives in
the economic field, because such motives must remain powerful as long as
private property continues to have a public economic function. But they
would at least diminish the number of cases in which the influence of
the mercenary motive made against rather than for excellence of work.
The system which most encourages mere cupidity is one which affords too
many opportunities for making "easy money," and our American system has,
of course, been peculiarly prolific of such opportunities. As long as
individuals are allowed to accumulate money from mines, urban real
estate, municipal franchises, or semi-monopolies of any kind, just to
that extent will the economic system of the country be poisoned, and its
general efficiency impaired. Men will inevitably seek to make money in
the easiest possible way, and as long as such easy ways exist fewer
individuals will accept cordially the necessity of earning their living
by the sheer excellence of achievement. On the other hand, in case such
opportunities of making money without earning it can be eliminated,
there will be a much closer correspondence than there is at present
between the excellence of the work and the reward it would bring. Such a
correspondence would, of course, be far from exact. In all petty kinds
of business innumerable opportunities would still exist of earning more
money either by disregarding the quality of the work or sometimes by
actually lowering it. But at any rate it would be work which would earn
money, and not speculation or assiduous repose in an easy chair.

In the same way, just in so far as industry became organized under
national control for the public benefit, there would be a much closer
correspondence between the quality of the work and the amount of the
reward. In a well-managed corporation a man is promoted because he does
good work, and has shown himself capable of assuming larger
responsibilities and exercising more power. His promotion brings with it
a larger salary, and the chance of obtaining a larger salary doubtless
has much to do with the excellence of the work; but at all events a man
is not rewarded for doing bad work or for doing no work at all. The
successful employee of a corporation has not become disinterested in his
motives. Presumably he will not do any more work than will contribute to
his personal advancement; and if the standard of achievement in his
office is at all relaxed, he will not be kept up to the mark by an
exclusive and disinterested devotion to the work itself. Still, under
such conditions a man might well become better than his own motives.
Whenever the work itself was really interesting, he might become
absorbed in it by the very momentum of his habitual occupation, and this
would be particularly the case provided his work assumed a technical
character. In that case he would have to live up to the standard, not
merely of an office, but of a trade, a profession, a craft, an art, or a
science; and if those technical standards were properly exacting, he
would be kept up to the level of his best work by a motive which had
almost become disinterested. He could not fall below the standard, even
though he derived no personal profit from striving to live up to it,
because the traditions and the honor of his craft would not let him.

The proposed economic policy of reform, in so far as it were successful,
would also tend to stimulate labor to more efficiency, and to diminish
its grievances. The state would be lending assistance to the effort of
the workingman to raise his standard of living, and to restrict the
demoralizing effect of competition among laborers who cannot afford to
make a stand on behalf of their own interest. It should, consequently,
increase the amount of economic independence enjoyed by the average
laborer, diminish his "class consciousness" by doing away with his class
grievances, and intensify his importance to himself as an individual. It
would in every way help to make the individual workingman more of an
individual. His class interest would be promoted by the nation in so
far as such promotion was possible, and could be adjusted to a general
policy of national economic construction. His individual interest would
be left in his own charge; but he would have much more favorable
opportunities of redeeming the charge by the excellence of his
individual work than he has under the existing system. His condition
would doubtless still remain in certain respects unsatisfactory, for the
purpose of a democratic nation must remain unfulfilled just in so far as
the national organization of labor does not enable all men to compete on
approximately equal terms for all careers. But a substantial step would
be made towards its improvement, and the road marked, perhaps, for still
further advance.

Again, however, must the reader be warned that the important thing is
the constructive purpose, and not the means proposed for its
realization. Whenever the attempt at its realization is made, it is
probable that other and unforeseen measures will be found necessary; and
even if a specific policy proposed were successfully tried, this would
constitute merely an advance towards the ultimate end. The ultimate end
is the complete emancipation of the individual, and that result depends
upon his complete disinterestedness. He must become interested
exclusively in the excellence of his work; and he can never become
disinterestedly interested in his work as long as heavy responsibilities
and high achievements are supposed to be rewarded by increased pay. The
effort equitably to adjust compensation to earnings is ultimately not
only impossible, but undesirable, because it necessarily would foul the
whole economic organization--so far as its efficiency depended on a
generous rivalry among individuals. The only way in which work can be
made entirely disinterested is to adjust its compensation to the needs
of a normal and wholesome human life.

Any substantial progress towards the attainment of complete individual
disinterestedness is far beyond the reach of contemporary collective
effort, but such disinterestedness should be clearly recognized as the
economic condition both of the highest fulfillment which democracy can
bestow upon the individual and of a thoroughly wholesome democratic
organization. Says Mr. John Jay Chapman in the chapter on "Democracy,"
in his "Causes and Consequences": "It is thought that the peculiar merit
of democracy lies in this: that it gives every man a chance to pursue
his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption
imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow-men.... The
concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger and
not the safety of democracy, for democracy contemplates that every man
shall think first of the state and next of himself.... Democracy assumes
perfection in human nature." But men will always continue chiefly to
pursue their own private ends as long as those ends are recognized by
the official national ideal as worthy of perpetuation and encouragement.
If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man
shall serve his fellow-men, the organization of democracy should be
gradually adapted to that assumption. The majority of men cannot be made
disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any
expenditure of subsidized words, or even by a grave and manifest public
need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to
become disinterested in their individual purposes, and how can they be
disinterested except in a few little spots as long as their daily
occupation consists of money seeking and spending in conformity with a
few written and unwritten rules? In the complete democracy a man must in
some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to
his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is
dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between
private and public interests. To ask an individual citizen continually
to sacrifice his recognized private interest to the welfare of his
countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a
continual sacrifice is apparently required of an individual in a
democratic state. The only entirely satisfactory solution of the
difficulty is offered by the systematic authoritative transformation of
the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to
a special object.

American public opinion has not as yet begun to understand the relation
between the process of national education by means of a patient attempt
to realize the national purpose and the corresponding process of
individual emancipation and growth. It still believes that democracy is
a happy device for evading collective responsibilities by passing them
on to the individual; and as long as this belief continues to prevail,
the first necessity of American educational advance is the arousing of
the American intellectual conscience. Behind the tradition of national
irresponsibility is the still deeper tradition of intellectual
insincerity in political matters. Americans are almost as much afraid of
consistent and radical political thinking as are the English, and with
nothing like as much justification. Jefferson offered them a seductive
example of triumphant intellectual dishonesty, and of the sacrifice of
theory to practice, whenever such a sacrifice was convenient.
Jefferson's example has been warmly approved by many subsequent
intellectual leaders. Before Emerson and after, mere consistency has
been stigmatized as the preoccupation of petty minds; and our American
superiority to the necessity of making ideas square with practice, or
one idea with another, has been considered as an exhibition of
remarkable political common sense. The light-headed Frenchmen really
believed in their ideas, and fell thereby into a shocking abyss of
anarchy and fratricidal bloodshed, whereas we have avoided any similar
fate by preaching a "noble national theory" and then practicing it just
as far as it suited our interests or was not too costly in time and
money. No doubt, we also have had our domestic difficulties, and were
obliged to shed a good deal of American blood, because we resolutely
refused to believe that human servitude was not entirely compatible with
the loftiest type of democracy; but then, the Civil War might have been
avoided if the Abolitionists had not erroneously insisted on being
consistent. The way to escape similar trouble in the future is to go on
preaching ideality, and to leave its realization wholly to the
individual. We can then be "uplifted" by the words, while the resulting
deeds cannot do us, as individuals, any harm. We can continue to
celebrate our "noble national theory" and preserve our perfect
democratic system until the end of time without making any of the
individual sacrifices or taking any of the collective risks, inseparable
from a systematic attempt to make our words good.

The foregoing state of mind is the great obstacle to the American
national advance; and its exposure and uprooting is the primary need of
American education. In agitating against the traditional disregard of
our full national responsibility, a critic will do well to dispense with
the caution proper to the consideration of specific practical problems.
A radical theory does not demand in the interest of consistency an
equally radical action. It only demands a sincere attempt to push the
application of the theory as far as conditions will permit, and the
employment of means sufficient probably to accomplish the immediate
purpose. But in the endeavor to establish and popularize his theory, a
radical critic cannot afford any similar concessions. His own opinions
can become established only by the displacement of the traditional
opinions; and the way to displace a traditional error is not to be
compromising and conciliatory, but to be as uncompromising and as
irritating as one's abilities and one's vision of the truth will permit.
The critic in his capacity as agitator is living in a state of war with
his opponents; and the ethics of warfare are not the ethics of
statesmanship. Public opinion can be reconciled to a constructive
national programme only by the agitation of what is from the traditional
standpoint a body of revolutionary ideas.

In vigorously agitating such a body of revolutionary ideas, the critic
would be doing more than performing a desirable public service. He would
be vindicating his own individual intellectual interest. The integrity
and energy of American intellectual life has been impaired for
generations by the tradition of national irresponsibility. Such
irresponsibility necessarily implies a sacrifice of individual
intellectual and moral interests to individual and popular economic
interests. It could not persist except by virtue of intellectual and
moral conformity. The American intellectual habit has on the whole been
just about as vigorous and independent as that of the domestic animals.
The freedom of opinion of which we boast has consisted for the most part
in uttering acceptable commonplaces with as much defiant conviction as
if we were uttering the most daring and sublimest heresies. In making
this parade of the uniform of intellectual independence, the American is
not consciously insincere. He is prepared to do battle for his
convictions, but his really fundamental convictions he shares with
everybody else. His differences with his fellow-countrymen are those of
interest and detail. When he breaks into a vehement proclamation of his
faith, he is much like a bull, who has broken out of his stall, and goes
snorting around the barnyard, tossing everybody within reach of his
horns. A bull so employed might well consider that he was offering the
world a fine display of aggressive individuality, whereas he had in
truth been behaving after the manner of all bulls from the dawn of
domestication. No doubt he is quite capable of being a dangerous
customer, in case he can reach anybody with his horns; but on the other
hand how meekly can he be led back into the stall by the simple device
of attaching a ring to his nose. His individuality always has a tender
spot, situated in much the same neighborhood as his personal economic
interests. If this tender spot is merely irritated, it will make him
rage; but when seized with a firm grip he loses all his defiance and
becomes as aggressive an individual as a good milch cow.

The American intellectual interest demands, consequently, a different
sort of assertion from the American economic or political interest.
Economically and politically the need is for constructive regulation,
implying the imposition of certain fruitful limitations upon traditional
individual freedom. But the national intellectual development demands
above all individual emancipation. American intelligence has still to
issue its Declaration of Independence. It has still to proclaim that in
a democratic system the intelligence has a discipline, an interest, and
a will of its own, and that this special discipline and interest call
for a new conception both of individual and of national development. For
the time being the freedom which Americans need is the freedom of
thought. The energy they need is the energy of thought. The moral unity
they need cannot be obtained without intensity and integrity of thought.

III

ATTEMPTS AT INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION

Americans believe, of course, that they enjoy perfect freedom of
opinion, and so they do in form. There is no legal encouragement of any
one set of opinions. There is no legal discouragement of another set of
opinions. They have denied intellectual freedom to themselves by
methods very much more insidious than those employed by a despotic
government. A national tradition has been established which prevents
individuals from desiring freedom; and if they should desire and obtain
it, they are prevented from using it. The freedom of American speech and
thought has not been essentially different from the freedom of speech
which a group of prisoners might enjoy during the term of their
imprisonment. The prisoners could, of course, think and talk much as
they pleased, but there was nobody but themselves to hear; and in the
absence both of an adequate material, discipline, and audience, both the
words and thoughts were without avail. The truth is, of course, that
intellectual individuality and independence were sacrificed for the
benefit of social homogeneity and the quickest possible development of
American economic opportunities; and in this way a vital relation has
been established for Americans between the assertion of intellectual
independence or moral individuality and the adoption of a nationalized
economic and political system.

During the Middle Period American individual intelligence did, indeed,
struggle gallantly to attain freedom. The intellectual ferment at that
time was more active and more general than it is to-day. During the
three decades before the war, a remarkable outbreak of heresy occurred
all over the East and middle West. Every convention of American life was
questioned, except those unconscious conventions of feeling and thought
which pervaded the intellectual and moral atmosphere. The Abolitionist
agitation was the one practical political result of this ferment, but
many of these free-thinkers wished to emancipate the whites as well as
the blacks. They fearlessly challenged substantially all the established
institutions of society. The institutions of marriage and the state
fared frequently as ill as did property and the church. Radical,
however, as they were in thought, they were by no means revolutionary in
action. The several brands of heresy differed too completely one from
another to be melted into a single political agitation and programme.
The need for action spent itself in the formation of socialistic
communities of the most varied kind, the great majority of which were
soon either disbanded or transformed. But whatever its limitations the
ferment was symptomatic of a genuine revolt of the American spirit
against the oppressive servitude of the individual intelligence to the
social will, demanded by the popular democratic system and tradition.

The revolt, however, with all the sincere enthusiasm it inspired, was
condemned to sterility. It accomplished nothing and could accomplish
nothing for society, because it sought by individual or unofficial
associated action results which demanded official collective action; and
it accomplished little even for the individual, because it was not the
outcome of any fruitful individual discipline. The emancipated idea was
usually defined by seeking the opposite of the conventional idea.
Individuality was considered to be a matter of being somehow and anyhow
different from other people. There was no authentic intellectual
discipline behind the agitation. The pioneer democrat with all his
limitations embodied the only living national body of opinion, and he
remained untainted by this outburst of heresy. He deprived it of all
vitality by depriving its separate explosions, Abolitionism excepted, of
all serious attention. He crushed it far more effectually by
indifference than he would have by persecution. When the shock of the
Civil War aroused Americans to a realization of the unpleasant political
realities sometimes associated with the neglect of a "noble national
theory," the ferment subsided without leaving behind so much as a loaf
of good white bread.

For practical political purposes it exhausted itself, as I have said, in
Abolitionism, and in that movement both its strength and weakness are
writ plain. Its revolt on behalf of emancipation was courageous and
sincere. The patriotism which inspired it recognized the need of
justifying its protestantism by a better conception of democracy. But
the heresy was as incoherent and as credulous as the antithetic
orthodoxy. It sought to accomplish an intellectual revolution without
organizing either an army or an armament--just as the pioneer democrat
expected to convert untutored enthusiasm into acceptable technical work,
and a popular political and economic atomism into a substantially
socialized community. In its meaning and effect, consequently, the
revolt was merely negative and anti-national. It served a constructive
democratic purpose only by the expensive and dubious means of
instigating a Civil War. If any of the other heresies of the period, as
well as Abolitionism, had developed into an effective popular agitation,
they could have obtained a similar success only by means of incurring a
similar danger. The intellectual ideals of the movement were not
educational, and its declaration of intellectual independence issued in
as sterile a programme for the Republic of American thought as did the
Declaration of Political Independence for the American national
democracy.

In truth all these mid-century American heretics were not heretics at
all in relation to really stupefying and perverting American tradition.
They were sturdily rebellious against all manner of respectable methods,
ideas, and institutions, but none of them dreamed of protesting against
the real enemy of American intellectual independence. They never dreamed
of associating the moral and intellectual emancipation of the individual
with the conscious fulfillment of the American national purpose and with
the patient and open-eyed individual and social discipline thereby
demanded. They all shared the illusion of the pioneers that somehow a
special Providential design was effective on behalf of the American
people, which permitted them as individuals and as a society to achieve
their purposes by virtue of good intentions, exuberant enthusiasm, and
enlightened selfishness. The New World and the new American idea had
released them from the bonds in which less fortunate Europeans were
entangled. Those bonds were not to be considered as the terms under
which excellent individual and social purposes were necessarily to be
achieved. They were bad habits, which the dead past had imposed upon the
inhabitants of the Old World, and from which Americans could be
emancipated by virtue of their abundant faith in human nature and the
boundless natural opportunities of the new continent.

Thus the American national ideal of the Middle Period was essentially
geographical. The popular thinkers of that day were hypnotized by the
reiterated suggestion of a new American world. Their fellow-countrymen
had obtained and were apparently making good use of a wholly
unprecedented amount of political and economic freedom; and they jumped
to the conclusion that the different disciplinary methods which limited
both individual and social action in Europe were unnecessary. Just as
the Jacksonian Democracy had finally vindicated American political
independence by doing away with the remnants of our earlier political
colonialism, so American moral and intellectual independence demanded a
similar vindication. This geographical protestantism was in a measure
provoked, if not justified, by the habit of colonial dependence upon
Europe in matters of opinion, which so many well-educated Americans of
that period continued to cherish. But it was based upon the illusion
that the economic and social conditions of the Middle Period, which
favored temporarily a mixture of faith and irresponsibility, freedom and
formlessness, would persist and could be translated into terms of
individual intellectual and moral discipline. In truth, it was, of
course, a great mistake to conceive Americanism as intellectually and
morally a species of Newer-Worldliness. A national intellectual ideal
did not divide us from Europe any more than did a national political
ideal. In both cases national independence had no meaning except in a
system of international, intellectual, moral, and political relations.
American national independence was to be won, not by means of a perverse
opposition to European intellectual and moral influence, but by a
positive and a thorough-going devotion to our own national democratic
ideal.

The national intellectual ideal could afford to be as indifferent to the
sources of American intellectual life as the American political ideal
was to the sources of American citizenship. The important thing was and
is, not where our citizens or our special disciplinary ideals come from,
but what use we make of them. Just as economic and political Americanism
has been broad enough and vital enough to make a place in the American
social economy for the hordes of European immigrants with their many
diverse national characteristics, so the intellectual basis of
Americanism must be broad enough to include and vigorous enough to
assimilate the special ideals and means of discipline necessary to every
kind of intellectual or moral excellence. The technical ideals and
standards which the typical American of the Middle Period instinctively
under-valued are neither American nor European. They are merely the
special forms whereby the several kinds of intellectual eminence are to
be obtained. They belong to the nature of the craft. Those forms and
standards were never sufficiently naturalized in America during the
Colonial Period, because the economic and social conditions of the time
did not justify such naturalization. The appropriate occasion for the
transfer was postponed until after American political independence had
been secured; and when occasion did not arise, the naturalness of the
transfer was perverted and obscured by political preconceptions.

The foregoing considerations throw a new light upon the mistake made by
the American heretics of the Middle Period. In so far as their assertion
of American intellectual independence was negative, it should not have
been a protest against "feudalism," social classification, social and
individual discipline, approved technical methods, or any of those
social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely
believed to be exclusively European. It should have been a protest
against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism--the Americanism of
national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism. The bondage
from which Americans needed, and still need, emancipation is not from
Europe, but from the evasions, the incoherence, the impatience, and the
easy-going conformity of their own intellectual and moral traditions. We
do not have to cross the Atlantic in order to hunt for the enemies of
American national independence and fulfillment. They sit at our
political fireside and toast their feet on its coals. They poison
American patriotic feeling until it becomes, not a leaven, but a kind of
national gelatine. They enshrine this American democratic ideal in a
temple of canting words which serves merely as a cover for a religion of
personal profit. American moral and intellectual emancipation can be
achieved only by a victory over the ideas, the conditions, and the
standards which make Americanism tantamount to collective
irresponsibility and to the moral and intellectual subordination of the
individual to a commonplace popular average.

The heretics of the Middle Period were not cowardly, but they were
intellectually irresponsible, undisciplined, and inexperienced. Sharing,
as they did, most of the deeper illusions of their time, they did not
vindicate their own individual intellectual independence, and they
contributed little or nothing to American national intellectual
independence. With the exception of a few of the men of letters who had
inherited a formative local tradition, their own personal careers were
examples not of gradual individual fulfillment, but at best of
repetition and at worst of degeneracy. Like the most brilliant
contemporary Whig politicians, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster,
their intellectual individuality was gradually cheapened by the manner
in which it was expressed; and it is this fact which makes the case of
Lincoln, both as a politician and a thinker, so unique and so
extraordinary. The one public man of this period who did impose upon
himself a patient and a severe intellectual and moral discipline, who
really did seek the excellent use of his own proper tools, is the man
who preëminently attained national intellectual and moral stature. The
difference in social value between Lincoln and, say, William Lloyd
Garrison can be measured by the difference in moral and intellectual
discipline to which each of these men submitted. Lincoln sedulously
turned to account every intellectual and moral opportunity which his
life afforded. Garrison's impatient temper and unbalanced mind made him
the enthusiastic advocate of a few distorted and limited ideas. The
consequence was that Garrison, although apparently an arch-heretic, was
in reality the victim of the sterile American convention which makes
willful enthusiasm, energy, and good intentions a sufficient substitute
for necessary individual and collective training. Lincoln, on the other
hand, was in his whole moral and intellectual make-up a living protest
against the aggressive, irresponsible, and merely practical Americanism
of his day; while at the same time in the greatness of his love and
understanding he never allowed his distinction to divide him from his
fellow-countrymen. His was the unconscious and constructive heresy which
looked in the direction of national intellectual independence and
national moral union and good faith.

IV

MEANS OF INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION

We are now in a position to define more clearly just how the American
individual can assert his independence, and how in asserting his
independence he can contribute to American national fulfillment. He
cannot make any effective advance towards national fulfillment merely by
educating himself and his fellow-countrymen as individuals to a higher
intellectual and moral level, because an essential condition of really
edifying individual education is the gradual process of collective
education by means of collective action and formative collective
discipline. On the other hand, this task of collective education is far
from being complete in itself. It necessarily makes far greater demands
upon the individual than does a system of comparative collective
irresponsibility. It implies the selection of peculiarly competent,
energetic, and responsible individuals to perform the peculiarly
difficult and exacting parts in a socially constructive drama; and it
implies, as a necessary condition of such leadership, a progressively
higher standard of individual training and achievement, unofficial as
well as official, throughout the whole community. The process of
educating men of moral and intellectual stature sufficient for the
performance of important constructive work cannot be disentangled from
the process of national fulfillment by means of intelligent collective
action. American nationality will never be fulfilled except under the
leadership of such men; and the American nation will never obtain the
necessary leadership unless it seeks seriously the redemption of its
national responsibility.

Such being the situation in general, how can the duty and the
opportunity of the individual at the present time best be defined? Is he
obliged to sit down and wait until the edifying, economic, political,
and social transformation has taken place? Or can he by his own
immediate behavior do something effectual both to obtain individual
emancipation and to accelerate the desirable process of social
reconstruction? This question has already been partially answered by the
better American individual; and it is, I believe, being answered in the
right way. The means which he is taking to reach a more desirable
condition of individual independence, and inferentially to add a little
something to the process of national fulfillment, consist primarily and
chiefly in a thoroughly zealous and competent performance of his own
particular job; and in taking this means of emancipation and fulfillment
he is both building better and destroying better than he knows.

The last generation of Americans has taken a better method of asserting
their individual independence than that practiced by the heretics of the
Middle Period. Those who were able to gain leadership in business and
politics sought to justify their success by building up elaborate
industrial and political organizations which gave themselves and their
successors peculiar individual opportunities. On the other hand, the men
of more specifically intellectual interests tacitly abandoned the
Newer-Worldliness of their predecessors and began unconsciously but
intelligently to seek the attainment of some excellence in the
performance of their own special work. In almost every case they
discovered that the first step in the acquisition of the better
standards of achievement was to go abroad. If their interests were
scholarly or scientific, they were likely to matriculate at one of the
German universities for the sake of studying under some eminent
specialist. If they were painters, sculptors, or architects, they
flocked to Paris, as the best available source of technical instruction
in the arts. Wherever the better schools were supposed to be, there the
American pupils gathered; and the consequence was during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century a steady and considerable improvement
in the standard of special work and the American schools of special
discipline. In this way there was domesticated a necessary condition and
vehicle of the liberation and assertion of American individuality.

A similar transformation has been taking place in the technical aspects
of American industry. In this field the individual has not been obliged
to make his own opportunities to the same extent as in business,
politics, and the arts. The opportunities were made for him by the
industrial development of the country. Efficient special work soon
became absolutely necessary in the various branches of manufacture, in
mining, and in the business of transportation; and in the beginning it
was frequently necessary to import from abroad expert specialists. The
technical schools of the country were wholly inadequate to supply the
demand either for the quantity or the quality of special work needed.
When, for instance, the construction of railroads first began, the only
good engineering school in the country was West Point, and the
consequence was that many army officers became railroad engineers. But
little by little the amount and the standard of technical instruction
improved; while at the same time the greater industrial organizations
themselves trained their younger employees with ever increasing
efficiency. Of late years even farming has become an occupation in which
special knowledge is supposed to have certain advantages. In every kind
of practical work specialization, founded on a more or less arduous
course of preparation, is coming to prevail; and in this way
individuals, possessing the advantages of the necessary gifts and
discipline, are obtaining definite and stimulating opportunities for
personal efficiency and independence.

It would be a grave mistake to conclude, however, that the battle is
already won--that the individual has already obtained in any department
of practical or intellectual work sufficient personal independence or
sufficiently edifying opportunities. The comparatively zealous and
competent individual performer does not, of course, feel so much of an
alien in his social surroundings as he did a generation or two ago. He
can usually obtain a certain independence of position, a certain amount
of intelligent and formative appreciation, and a sufficiently
substantial measure of reward. But he has still much to contend against
in his social, economic, and intellectual environment. His independence
is precarious. In some cases it is won with too little effort. In other
cases it can be maintained only at too great a cost. His rewards, if
substantial, can be obtained as readily by sacrificing the integrity of
his work as by remaining faithful thereto. The society in which he
lives, and which gives him his encouragement and support, has the
limitations of a clique. Its encouragement is too conscious; its support
too willful. Beyond a certain point its encouragement becomes indeed
relaxing rather than stimulating, and the aspiring individual is placed
in the situation of having most to fear from the inhabitants of his own
household. His intellectual and moral environment is lukewarm. He is
encouraged to be an individual, but not too much of an individual. He is
encouraged to do good work, but not to do always and uncompromisingly
his best work. He is trusted, but he is not trusted enough. He believes
in himself, but he does not believe as much in himself and in his
mission as his own highest achievement demands. He is not sufficiently
empowered by the idea that just in so far as he does his best work, and
only his best work, he is contributing most to national as well as
personal fulfillment.

What the better American individual particularly needs, then, is a
completer faith in his own individual purpose and power--a clearer
understanding of his own individual opportunities. He needs to do what
he has been doing, only more so, and with the conviction that thereby he
is becoming not less but more of an American. His patriotism, instead of
being something apart from his special work, should be absolutely
identified therewith, because no matter how much the eminence of his
personal achievement may temporarily divide him from his
fellow-countrymen, he is, by attaining to such an eminence, helping in
the most effectual possible way to build the only fitting habitation for
a sincere democracy. He is to make his contribution to individual
improvement primarily by making himself more of an individual. The
individual as well as the nation must be educated and "uplifted" chiefly
by what the individual can do for himself. Education, like charity,
should begin at home.

An individual can, then, best serve the cause of American individuality
by effectually accomplishing his own individual emancipation--that is,
by doing his own special work with ability, energy, disinterestedness,
and excellence. The scope of the individual's opportunities at any one
time will depend largely upon society, but whatever they amount to, the
individual has no excuse for not making the most of them. Before he can
be of any service to his fellows, he must mold himself into the
condition and habit of being a good instrument. On this point there can
be no compromise. Every American who has the opportunity of doing
faithful and fearless work, and who proves faithless to it, belongs to
the perfect type of the individual anti-democrat. By cheapening his own
personality he has cheapened the one constituent of the national life
over which he can exercise most effectual control; and thereafter, no
matter how superficially patriotic and well-intentioned he may be, his
words and his actions are tainted and are in some measure corrupting in
their social effect.

A question will, however, immediately arise as to the nature of this
desirable individual excellence. It is all very well to say that a man
should do his work competently, faithfully, and fearlessly, but how are
we to define the standard of excellence? When a man is seeking to do his
best, how shall he go about it? Success in any one of these individual
pursuits demands that the individual make some sort of a personal
impression. He must seek according to the nature of the occupation a
more or less numerous popular following. The excellence of a painter's
work does not count unless he can find at least a small group of patrons
who will admire and buy it. The most competent architect can do nothing
for himself or for other people unless he attracts clients who will
build his paper houses. The playwright needs even a larger following. If
his plays are to be produced, he must manage to amuse and to interest
thousands of people. And the politician most of all depends upon a
numerous and faithful body of admirers. Of what avail would his
independence and competence be in case there were nobody to accept his
leadership? It is not enough, consequently, to assert that the
individual must emancipate himself by means of excellent and
disinterested work. His emancipation has no meaning, his career as an
individual no power, except with the support of a larger or smaller
following. Admitting the desirability of excellent work, what kind of
workmanlike excellence will make the individual not merely independent
and incorruptible, but powerful? In what way and to what end shall he
use the instrument, which he is to forge and temper, for his own
individual benefit and hence for that of society?

These questions involve a real difficulty, and before we are through
they must assuredly be answered; but they are raised at the present
stage of the discussion for the purpose of explicitly putting them aside
rather than for the purpose of answering them. The individual
instruments must assuredly be forged and tempered to some good use, but
before we discuss their employment let us be certain of the instruments
themselves. Whatever that employment may be and however much of a
following its attainment may demand, the instrument must at any rate be
thoroughly well made, and in the beginning it is necessary to insist
upon merely instrumental excellence, because the American habit and
tradition is to estimate excellence almost entirely by results. If the
individual will only obtain his following, there need be no close
scrutiny as to his methods. The admirable architect is he who designs
an admirably large number of buildings. The admirable playwright is he
who by whatever means makes the hearts of his numerous audiences
palpitate. The admirable politician is he who succeeds somehow or anyhow
in gaining the largest area of popular confidence. This tradition is the
most insidious enemy of American individual independence and
fulfillment. Instead of declaring, as most Americans do, that a man may,
if he can, do good work, but that he _must_ create a following, we
should declare that a man may, if he can, obtain a following, but that
he _must_ do good work. When he has done good work, he may not have done
all that is required of him; but if he fails to do good work, nothing
else counts. The individual democrat who has had the chance and who has
failed in that essential respect is an individual sham, no matter how
much of a shadow his figure casts upon the social landscape.

The good work which for his own benefit the individual is required to
do, means primarily technically competent work. The man who has
thoroughly mastered the knowledge and the craft essential to his own
special occupation is by way of being the well-forged and well-tempered
instrument. Little by little there have been developed in relation to
all the liberal arts and occupations certain tested and approved
technical methods. The individual who proposes to occupy himself with
any one of these arts must first master the foundation of knowledge, of
formal traditions, and of manual practice upon which the superstructure
is based. The danger that a part of this fund of technical knowledge and
practice may at any particular time be superannuated must be admitted;
but the validity of the general rule is not affected thereby. The most
useful and effective dissenters are those who were in the beginning
children of the Faith. The individual who is too weak to assert himself
with the help of an established technical tradition is assuredly too
weak to assert himself without it. The authoritative technical tradition
associated with any one of the arts of civilization is merely the net
result of the accumulated experience of mankind in a given region. That
experience may or may not have been exhaustive or adequately defined;
but in any event its mastery by the individual is merely a matter of
personal and social economy. It helps to prevent the individual from
identifying his whole personal career with unnecessary mistakes. It
provides him with the most natural and serviceable vehicle for
self-expression. It supplies him with a language which reduces to the
lowest possible terms the inevitable chances of misunderstanding. It is
society's nearest approach to an authentic standard in relation to the
liberal arts and occupations; and just so far as it is authentic society
is justified in imposing it on the individual.

The perfect type of authoritative technical methods are those which
prevail among scientific men in respect to scientific work. No scientist
as such has anything to gain by the use of inferior methods or by the
production of inferior work. There is only one standard for all
scientific investigators--the highest standard; and so far as a man
falls below that standard his inferiority is immediately reflected in
his reputation. Some scientists make, of course, small contributions to
the increase of knowledge, and some make comparatively large
contributions; but just in so far as a man makes any contribution at
all, it is a real contribution, and nothing makes it real but the fact
that it is recognized. In the Hall of Science exhibitors do not get
their work hung upon the line because it tickles the public taste, or
because it is "uplifting," or because the jury is kindly and wishes to
give the exhibitor a chance to earn a little second-rate reputation. The
same standard is applied to everybody, and the jury is incorruptible.
The exhibit is nothing if not true, or by way of becoming or being
recognized as true.

A technical standard in any one of the liberal or practical arts cannot
be applied as rigorously as can the standard of scientific truth,
because the standard itself is not so authentic. In all these arts many
differences of opinion exist among masters as to the methods and forms
which should be authoritative; and in so far as such is the case, the
individual must be allowed to make many apparently arbitrary personal
choices. The fact that a man has such choices to make is the
circumstance which most clearly distinguishes the practice of an art
from that of a science, but this circumstance, instead of being an
excuse for technical irresponsibility or mere eclecticism, should, on
the contrary, stimulate the individual more completely to justify his
choice. In his work he is fighting the battle not merely of his own
personal career, but of a method, of a style, of an idea, or of an
ideal. The practice of the several arts need not suffer from diversity
of standard, provided the several separate standards are themselves
incorruptible. In all the arts--and by the arts I mean all disinterested
and liberal practical occupations--the difficulty is not that
sufficiently authoritative standards do not exist, but that they are not
applied. The standard which is applied is merely that of the
good-enough. The juries are either too kindly or too lax or too much
corrupted by the nature of their own work. They are prevented from being
incorruptible about the work of other people by a sub-conscious
apprehension of the fate of their own performances--in case similar
standards were applied to themselves. Just in so far as the second-rate
performer is allowed to acquire any standing, he inevitably enters into
a conspiracy with his fellows to discourage exhibitions of genuine and
considerable excellence, and, of course, to a certain extent he
succeeds. By the waste which he encourages of good human appreciation,
by the confusion which he introduces into the popular critical
standards, he helps to effect a popular discrimination against any
genuine superiority of achievement.

Individual independence and fulfillment is conditioned on the technical
excellence of the individual's work, because the most authentic standard
is for the time being constituted by excellence of this kind. An
authentic standard must be based either upon acquired knowledge or an
accepted ideal. Americans have no popularly accepted ideals which are
anything but an embarrassment to the aspiring individual. In the course
of time some such ideals may be domesticated--in which case the
conditions of individual excellence would be changed; but we are dealing
with the present and not with the future. Under current conditions the
only authentic standard must be based, not upon the social influence of
the work, but upon its quality; and a standard of this kind, while it
falls short of being complete, must always persist as one indispensable
condition of final excellence. The whole body of acquired technical
experience and practice has precisely the same authority as any other
body of knowledge. The respect it demands is similar to the respect
demanded by science in all its forms. In this particular case the
science is neither complete nor entirely trustworthy, but it is
sufficiently complete and trustworthy for the individual's purpose, and
can be ignored only at the price of waste, misunderstanding, and partial
inefficiency and sterility.

A standard of uncompromising technical excellence contains, however, for
the purpose of this argument, a larger meaning than that which is
usually attached to the phrase. A technically competent performance is
ordinarily supposed to mean one which displays a high degree of manual
dexterity; and a man who has acquired such a degree of dexterity is also
supposed to be the victim of his own mastery. No doubt such is
frequently the case; but in the present meaning the thoroughly competent
individual workman becomes necessarily very much more of an individual
than any man can be who is merely the creature of his own technical
facility and preoccupation. I have used the word art not in the sense
merely of fine art, but in the sense of all liberal and disinterested
practical work; and the excellent performance of that work demands
certain qualifications which are common to all the arts as well as
peculiar to the methods and materials of certain particular arts and
crafts. These qualifications are both moral and intellectual. They
require that no one shall be admitted to the ranks of thoroughly
competent performers until he is morally and intellectually, as well as
scientifically and manually, equipped for excellent work, and these
appropriate moral and intellectual standards should be applied as
incorruptibly as those born of specific technical practices.

A craftsman whose merits do not go beyond technical facility is probably
deficient in both the intellectual and moral qualities essential to good
work. The rule cannot be rigorously applied, because the boundaries
between high technical proficiency and some very special examples of
genuine mastery are often very indistinct. Still, the majority of
craftsmen who are nothing more than, manually dexterous are rarely
either sincere or disinterested in their personal attitude towards their
occupation. They have not made themselves the sort of moral instrument
which is capable of eminent achievement, and whenever unmistakable
examples of such a lack of sincerity and conviction are distinguished,
they should in the interest of a complete standard of special excellence
meet with the same reprobation as would manual incompetence. It must
not be inferred, however, that the standard of moral judgment applied to
the individual in the performance of his particular work is identical
with a comprehensive standard of moral practice. A man may be an
acceptable individual instrument in the service of certain of the arts,
even though he be in some other respects a tolerably objectionable
person. A single-minded and disinterested attempt to obtain mastery of
any particular occupation may in specific instances force a man to
neglect certain admirable and in other relations essential qualities. He
may be a faithless husband, a treacherous friend, a sturdy liar, or a
professional bankrupt, without necessarily interfering with the
excellent performance of his special job. A man who breaks a road to
individual distinction by such questionable means may always be tainted;
but he is a better public servant than would be some comparatively
impeccable nonentity. It all depends on the nature and the requirements
of the particular task, and the extent to which a man has really made
sacrifices in order to accomplish it. There are many special jobs which
absolutely demand scrupulous veracity, loyalty in a man's personal
relations, or financial integrity. The politician who ruins his career
in climbing down a waterspout, or the engineer who prevents his
employers from trusting his judgment and conscience in money matters,
cannot plead in extenuation any other sort of instrumental excellence.
They have deserved to fail, because they have trifled with their job;
and it may be added that serious moral delinquencies are usually grave
hindrances to a man's individual efficiency.

From the intellectual point of view also technical competence means
something more than manual proficiency. Just as the master must possess
those moral qualities essential to the integrity of his work, so he must
possess the corresponding intellectual qualities. All the liberal arts
require, as a condition of mastery, a certain specific and considerable
power of intelligence; and this power of intelligence is to be sharply
distinguished from all-round intellectual ability. From our present
point of view its only necessary application concerns the problems of a
man's special occupation. Every special performer needs the power of
criticising the quality and the subject-matter of his own work. Unless
he has great gifts or happens to be brought up and trained under
peculiarly propitious conditions, his first attempts to practice his
art will necessarily be experimental. He will be sure to commit many
mistakes, not merely in the choice of alternative methods and the
selection of his subject-matter, but in the extent to which he
personally can approve or disapprove of his own achievements. The
thoroughly competent performer must at least possess the intellectual
power of profiting from this experience. A candid consideration of his
own experiments must guide him in the selection of the better methods,
in the discrimination of the more appropriate subject-matter, in the
avoidance of his own peculiar failings, and in the cultivation of his
own peculiar strength. The technical career of the master is up to a
certain point always a matter of growth. The technical career of the
second-rate man is always a matter of degeneration or at best of
repetition. The former brings with it its own salient and special form
of enlightenment based upon the intellectual power to criticise his own
experience and the moral power to act on his own acquired insight. To
this extent he becomes more of a man by the very process of becoming
more of a master.

The intellectual power required to criticise one's own experience with a
formative result will of course vary considerably in different
occupations. Technical mastery of the occupation of playwriting,
criticism, or statesmanship, will require more specifically intellectual
qualities than will be demanded by the competent musician or painter.
But no matter how much intelligence may be needed, the way in which it
should be used remains the same. Mere industry, aspiration, or a fluid
run of ideas make as meager an equipment for a politician, a
philanthropist, or a critic as they would for an architect; and
absolutely the most dangerous mistake which an individual can make is
that of confusing admirable intentions expressed in some inferior manner
with genuine excellence of achievement. If such men succeed, they are
corrupting in their influence. If they fail, they learn nothing from
their failure, because they are always charging up to the public,
instead of to themselves, the responsibility for their inferiority.

The conclusion is that at the present time an individual American's
intentions and opinions are of less importance than his power of giving
them excellent and efficient expression. What the individual can do is
to make himself a better instrument for the practice of some
serviceable art; and by so doing he can scarcely avoid becoming also a
better instrument for the fulfillment of the American national Promise.
To be sure, the American national Promise demands for its fulfillment
something more than efficient and excellent individual instruments. It
demands, or will eventually demand, that these individuals shall love
and wish to serve their fellow-countrymen, and it will demand
specifically that in the service of their fellow-countrymen, they shall
reorganize their country's economic, political, and social institutions
and ideas. Just how the making of competent individual instruments will
of its own force assist the process of national reconstruction, we shall
consider presently; but the first truth to drive home is that all
political and social reorganization is a delusion, unless certain
individuals, capable of edifying practical leadership, have been
disciplined and trained; and such individuals must always and in some
measure be a product of self-discipline. While not only admitting but
proclaiming that the processes of individual and social improvement are
mutually dependent, it is equally true that the initiative cannot be
left to collective action. The individual must begin and carry as far as
he can the work of his own emancipation; and for the present he has an
excuse for being tolerably unscrupulous in so doing. By the successful
assertion of his own claim to individual distinction and eminence, he is
doing more to revolutionize and reconstruct the American democracy than
can a regiment of professional revolutionists and reformers.

Professional socialists may cherish the notion that their battle is won
as soon as they can secure a permanent popular majority in favor of a
socialistic policy; but the constructive national democrat cannot
logically accept such a comfortable illusion. The action of a majority
composed of the ordinary type of convinced socialists could and would in
a few years do more to make socialism impossible than could be
accomplished by the best and most prolonged efforts of a majority of
malignant anti-socialists. The first French republicans made by their
behavior another republic out of the question in France for almost sixty
years; and the second republican majority did not do so very much
better. When the republic came in France it was founded by men who were
not theoretical democrats, but who understood that a republic was for
the time being the kind of government best adapted to the national
French interest. These theoretical monarchists, but practical
republicans, were for the most part more able, more patriotic, and
higher-minded men than the convinced republicans; and in all probability
a third republic, started without their coöperation, would also have
ended in a dictatorship. Any substantial advance toward social
reorganization will in the same way be forced by considerations of
public welfare on a majority of theoretical anti-socialists, because it
is among this class that the most competent and best disciplined
individuals are usually to be found. The intellectual and moral ability
required, not merely to conceive, but to realize a policy of social
reorganization, is far higher than the ability to carry on an ordinary
democratic government. When such a standard of individual competence has
been attained by a sufficient number of individuals and is applied to
economic and social questions, some attempt at social reorganization is
bound to be the result,--assuming, of course, the constructive relation
already admitted between democracy and the social problem.

The strength and the weakness of the existing economic and social system
consist, as we have observed, in the fact that it is based upon the
realities of contemporary human nature. It is the issue of a
time-honored tradition, an intense personal interest, and a method of
life so habitual that it has become almost instinctive. It cannot be
successfully attacked by any body of hostile opinion, unless such a body
of opinion is based upon a more salient individual and social interest
and a more intense and vital method of life. The only alternative
interest capable of putting up a sufficiently vigorous attack and
pushing home an occasional victory is the interest of the individual in
his own personal independence and fulfillment--an interest which, as we
have seen, can only issue from integrity and excellence of individual
achievement. An interest of this kind is bound in its social influence
to make for social reorganization, because such reorganization is in
some measure a condition and accompaniment of its own self-expression;
and the strength of its position and the superiority of its weapons are
so decisive that they should gradually force the existing system to give
way. The defenses of that system have vulnerable points; and its
defenders are disunited except in one respect. They would be able to
repel any attack delivered along their whole line; but their binding
interest is selfish and tends under certain conditions to divide them
one from another without bestowing on the divided individuals the energy
of independence and self-possession. Their position can be attacked at
its weaker points, not only without meeting with combined resistance,
but even with the assistance of some of their theoretical allies. Many
convinced supporters of the existing order are men of superior merit,
who are really fighting against their own better individual interests;
and they need only to taste the exhilaration of freedom in order better
to understand its necessary social and economical conditions. Others,
although men of inferior achievement, are patriotic and well-intentioned
in feeling; and they may little by little be brought to believe that
patriotism in a democracy demands the sacrifice of selfish interests and
the regeneration of individual rights. Men of this stamp can be made
willing prisoners by able and aggressive leaders whose achievements have
given them personal authority and whose practical programme is based
upon a sound knowledge of the necessary limits of immediate national
action. The disinterested and competent individual is formed for
constructive leadership, just as the less competent and independent, but
well-intentioned, individual is formed more or less faithfully to follow
on behind. Such leadership, in a country whose traditions and ideals are
sincerely democratic, can scarcely go astray.

V

CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM

The preceding section was concluded with a statement, which the majority
of its readers will find extremely questionable and which assuredly
demands some further explanation. Suppose it to be admitted that
individual Americans do seek the increase of their individuality by
competent and disinterested special work. In what way will such work and
the sort of individuality thereby developed exercise a decisive
influence on behalf of social amelioration? We have already expressly
denied that a desire to succor their fellow-countrymen or an ideal of
social reorganization is at the present time a necessary ingredient in
the make-up of these formative individuals. Their individual excellence
has been defined exclusively in terms of high but special technical
competence; and the manner in which these varied and frequently
antagonistic individual performers are to coöperate towards socially
constructive results must still remain a little hazy. How are these
eminent specialists, each of whom is admittedly pursuing unscrupulously
his own special purpose, to be made serviceable in a coherent national
democratic organization? How, indeed, are these specialists to get at
the public whom they are supposed to lead? Many very competent
contemporary Americans might claim that the real difficulty in relation
to the social influence of the expert specialist has been sedulously
evaded. The admirably competent individual cannot exercise any
constructive social influence, unless he becomes popular; and the
current American standards being what they are, how can an individual
become popular without more or less insidious and baleful compromises?
The gulf between individual excellence and effective popular influence
still remains to be bridged; and until it is bridged, an essential stage
is lacking in the transition from an individually formative result to
one that is also socially formative.

Undoubtedly, a gulf does exist in the country between individual
excellence and effective popular influence. Many excellent specialists
exercise a very small amount of influence, and many individuals who
exercise apparently a great deal of influence are conspicuously lacking
in any kind of excellence. The responsibility for this condition is
usually fastened upon the Philistine American public, which refuses to
recognize genuine eminence and which showers rewards upon any
second-rate performer who tickles its tastes and prejudices. But it is
at least worth inquiring whether the responsibility should not be
fastened, not upon the followers, but upon the supposed leaders. The
American people are what the circumstances, the traditional leadership,
and the interests of American life have made them. They cannot be
expected to be any better than they are, until they have been
sufficiently shown the way; and they cannot be blamed for being as bad
as they are, until it is proved that they have deliberately rejected
better leadership. No such proof has ever been offered.

Some disgruntled Americans talk as if in a democracy the path of the
aspiring individual should be made peculiarly safe and easy. As soon as
any young man appears whose ideals are perched a little higher than
those of his neighbors, and who has acquired some knack of performance,
he should apparently be immediately taken at his own valuation and
loaded with rewards and opportunities. The public should take off its
hat and ask him humbly to step into the limelight and show himself off
for the popular edification. He should not be obliged to make himself
interesting to the public. They should immediately make themselves
interested in him, and bolt whatever he chooses to offer them as the
very meat and wine of the mind. But surely one does not need to urge
very emphatically that popularity won upon such easy terms would be
demoralizing to any but very highly gifted and very cool-headed men. The
American people are absolutely right in insisting that an aspirant for
popular eminence shall be compelled to make himself interesting to them,
and shall not be welcomed as a fountain of excellence and enlightenment
until he has found some means of forcing his meat and his wine down
their reluctant throats. And if the aspiring individual accepts this
condition as tantamount to an order that he must haul down the flag of
his own individual purpose in order to obtain popular appreciation and
reward, it is he who is unworthy to lead, not they who are unworthy of
being led. The problem and business of his life is precisely that of
keeping his flag flying at any personal cost or sacrifice; and if his
own particular purpose demands that his flying flag shall be loyally
saluted, it is his own business also to see that his flag is well worthy
of a popular salutation. In occasional instances these two aspects of a
special performer's business may prove to be incompatible. Every real
adventure must be attended by risks. Every real battle involves a
certain number of casualties. But better the risk and the wounded and
the dead than sham battles and unearned victories.

There is only one way in which popular standards and preferences can be
improved. The men whose standards are higher must learn to express their
better message in a popularly interesting manner. The people will never
be converted to the appreciation of excellent special performances by
argumentation, reproaches, lectures, associations, or persuasion. They
will rally to the good thing, only because the good thing has been made
to look good to them; and so far as individual Americans are not capable
of making their good things look good to a sufficient number of their
fellow-countrymen, they will on the whole deserve any neglect from which
they may suffer. They themselves constitute the only efficient source of
really formative education. In so far as a public is lacking, a public
must be created. They must mold their followers after their own
likeness--as all aspirants after the higher individual eminence have
always been obliged to do.

The manner in which the result is to be brought about may be traced by
considering the case of the contemporary American architect--a case
which is typical because, while popular architectural preferences are
inferior, the very existence of the architect depends upon his ability
to please a considerable number of clients. The average well-trained
architect in good standing meets this situation by designing as well as
he can, consistent with the building-up an abundant and lucrative
practice. There are doubtless certain things which he would not do even
to get or keep a job; but on the whole it is not unfair to say that his
first object is to get and to keep the job, and his second to do good
work. The consequence is that, in compromising the integrity of his
work, he necessarily builds his own practice upon a shifting foundation.
His work belongs to the well-populated class of the good-enough. It can
have little distinctive excellence; and it cannot, by its peculiar force
and quality, attract a clientele. Presumably, it has the merit of
satisfying prevailing tastes; but the architect, who is designing only
as well as popular tastes will permit, suffers under one serious
disadvantage. There are hundreds of his associates who can do it just as
well; and he is necessarily obliged to face demoralizing competition.
Inasmuch as it is not his work itself that counts, he is obliged to
build up his clientele by other means. He is obliged to make himself
personally popular, to seek social influence and private "pulls"; and
his whole life becomes that of a man who is selling his personality
instead of fulfilling it. His relations with his clients suffer from the
same general condition. They have come to him, not because they are
particularly attracted by his work and believe in it, but, as a rule,
because of some accidental and arbitrary reason. His position,
consequently, is lacking in independence and authority. He has not
enough personal prestige as a designer to insist upon having his own way
in all essential matters. He tends to become too much of an agent,
employed for the purpose of carrying out another man's wishes, instead
of a professional expert, whose employer trusts his judgment and leans
loyally on his advice.

Take, on the other hand, the case of the exceptional architect who
insists upon doing his very best. Assuming sufficient ability and
training, the work of the man who does his very best is much more likely
to possess some quality of individual merit, which more or less sharply
distinguishes it from that of other architects. He has a monopoly of his
own peculiar qualities. Such merit may not be noticed by many people;
but it will probably be noticed by a few. The few who are attracted will
receive a more than usually vivid impression. They will talk, and begin
to create a little current of public opinion favorable to the designer.
The new clients who come to him will be influenced either by their
appreciation of the actual merit of the work or by this approving body
of opinion. They will come, that is, because they want _him_ and believe
in his work. His own personal position, consequently, becomes much more
independent and authoritative than is usually the case. He is much less
likely to be embarrassed by ignorant and irrelevant interference. He can
continue to turn out designs genuinely expressive of his own individual
purpose. If he be an intelligent as well as a sincere and gifted
designer, his work will, up to a certain point, grow in distinction and
individuality; and as good or better examples of it become more
numerous, it will attract and hold an increasing body of approving
opinion. The designer will in this way have gradually created his own
special public. He will be molding and informing the architectural taste
and preference of his admirers. Without in any way compromising his own
standards, he will have brought himself into a constructive relation
with a part at least of the public, and the effect of his work will soon
extend beyond the sphere of his own personal clientele. In so far as he
has succeeded in popularizing a better quality of architectural work, he
would be by way of strengthening the hands of all of his associates who
were standing for similar ideals and methods.

It would be absurd to claim that every excellent and competent special
performer who sticks incorruptibly to his individual purpose and
standard can succeed in creating a special public, molded somewhat by
his personal influence. The ability to succeed is not given to
everybody. It cannot always be obtained by sincere industry and able and
single-minded work. The qualities needed in addition to those mentioned
will vary in different occupations and according to the accidental
circumstances of different cases; but they are not always the qualities
which a man can acquire. Men will fail who have deserved to succeed and
who might have succeeded with a little more tenacity or under slightly
more favorable conditions. Men who have deserved to fail will succeed
because of certain collateral but partly irrelevant merits--just as an
architect may succeed who is ingenious about making his clients' houses
comfortable and building them cheap. In a thousand different ways an
individual enterprise, conceived and conducted with faith and ability,
may prove to be abortive. Moreover, the sacrifices necessary to success
are usually genuine sacrifices. The architect who wishes to build up a
really loyal following by really good work must deliberately reject many
possible jobs; and he must frequently spend upon the accepted jobs more
money than is profitable. But the foregoing is merely tantamount to
saying, as we have said, that the adventure involves a real risk. A
resolute, intelligent man undertakes a doubtful and difficult
enterprise, not because it is sure to succeed, but because if it
succeeds, it is worth the risk and the cost, and such is the case with
the contemporary American adventurer. The individual independence,
appreciation, and fulfillment which he secures in the event of success
are assuredly worth a harder and a more dangerous fight than the one by
which frequently he is confronted. In any particular case a man, as we
have admitted, may put up a good fight without securing the fruits of
victory, and his adventure may end, not merely in defeat, but in
self-humiliation. But if any general tendency exists to shirk, or to
back down, or to place the responsibility for personal ineptitude on the
public, it means, not that the fight was hopeless, but that the warriors
were lacking in the necessary will and ability.

The case of the statesman, the man of letters, the philanthropist, or
the reformer does not differ essentially from that of the architect.
They may need for their particular purposes a larger or a smaller
popular following, a larger or smaller amount of moral courage, and a
more or less peculiar kind of intellectual efficiency; but wherever
there is any bridge to be built between their own purposes and standards
and those of the public, they must depend chiefly upon their own
resources for its construction. The best that society can do to assist
them at present is to establish good schools of preliminary instruction.
For the rest it is the particular business of the exceptional individual
to impose himself on the public; and the necessity he is under of
creating his own following may prove to be helpful to him as his own
exceptional achievements are to his followers. The fact that he is
obliged to make a public instead of finding one ready-made, or instead
of being able by the subsidy of a prince to dispense with one--this
necessity will in the long run tend to keep his work vital and human.
The danger which every peculiarly able individual specialist runs is
that of overestimating the value of his own purpose and achievements,
and so of establishing a false and delusive relation between his own
world and the larger world of human affairs and interests. Such a danger
cannot be properly checked by the conscious moral and intellectual
education of the individual, because when he is filled too full of
amiable intentions and ideas, he is by way of attenuating his individual
impulse and power. But the individual who is forced to create his own
public is forced also to make his own special work attractive to a
public; and when he succeeds in accomplishing this result without
hauling down his personal flag, his work tends to take on a more normal
and human character.

It tends, that is, to be socially as well as individually formative. The
peculiarly competent individual is obliged to accept the
responsibilities of leadership with its privileges and fruits. There is
no escape from the circle by which he finds himself surrounded. He
cannot obtain the opportunities, the authority, and the independence
which he needs for his own individual fulfillment, unless he builds up a
following; and he cannot build up a secure personal following without
making his peculiar performances appeal to some general human interest.
The larger and more general the interest he can arouse, the more secure
and the more remunerative his personal independence becomes. It by no
means necessarily follows that he will increase his following by
increasing the excellence of his work, or that he will not frequently
find it difficult to keep his following without allowing his work to
deteriorate. No formula, reconciling the individual and the popular
interest, can be devised which will work automatically. The
reconciliation must always remain a matter of victorious individual or
national contrivance. But it is none the less true that the chance of
fruitful reconciliation always exists, and in a democracy it should
exist under peculiarly wholesome conditions. The essential nature of a
democracy compels it to insist that individual power of all kinds,
political, economic, or intellectual, shall not be perversely and
irresponsibly exercised. The individual democrat is obliged no less to
insist in his own interest that the responsible exercise of power shall
not be considered equivalent to individual mediocrity and dependence.
These two demands will often conflict; but the vitality of a democracy
hangs upon its ability to keep both of them vigorous and assertive. Just
in so far as individual democrats find ways of asserting their
independence in the very act of redeeming their responsibility, the
social body of which they form a part is marching toward the goal of
human betterment.

It cannot be claimed, however, that the foregoing account of the
relation between the individual and a nationalized democracy is even yet
entirely satisfactory. No relation can be satisfactory which implies
such a vast amount of individual suffering and defeat and such a huge
waste of social and individual effort. The relation is only as
satisfactory as it can be made under the circumstances. The individual
cannot be immediately transformed by individual purpose and action into
a consummate social type, any more than society can be immediately
transformed by purposive national action into a consummate residence for
the individual. In both cases amelioration is a matter of intelligent
experimental contrivance based upon the nature of immediate conditions
and equipped with every available resource and weapon. In both cases
these experiments must be indefinitely continued, their lessons candidly
learned, and the succeeding experiments based upon past failures and
achievements. Throughout the whole task of experimental educational
advance the different processes of individual and social amelioration
will be partly opposed, partly supplementary, and partly parallel; but
in so far as any genuine advance is made, the opposition should be less
costly, and coöperation, if not easier, at least more remunerative.

The peculiar kind of individual self-assertion which has been outlined
in the foregoing sections of this chapter has been adapted, not to
perfect, but to actual moral, social, and intellectual conditions. For
the present Americans must cultivate competent individual independence
somewhat unscrupulously, because their peculiar democratic tradition has
hitherto discouraged and under-valued a genuinely individualistic
practice and ideal. In order to restore the balance, the individual must
emancipate himself at a considerable sacrifice and by somewhat forcible
means; and to a certain extent he must continue those sacrifices
throughout the whole of his career. He must proclaim and, if able, he
must assert his own leadership, but he must be always somewhat on his
guard against his followers. He must always keep in mind that the very
leadership which is the fruit of his mastery and the condition of his
independence is also, considering the nature and disposition of his
average follower, a dangerous temptation; and while he must not for that
reason scorn popular success, he must always conscientiously reckon its
actual cost. And just because a leader cannot wholly trust himself to
his following, so the followers must always keep a sharp lookout lest
their leaders be leading them astray. For the kind of leadership which
we have postulated above is by its very definition and nature liable to
become perverse and distracting.

But just in so far as the work of social and individual amelioration
advances, the condition will be gradually created necessary to completer
mutual confidence between the few exceptional leaders and the many
"plain people." At present the burden of establishing any genuine means
of communication rests very heavily upon the exceptionally able
individual. But after a number of exceptionally able individuals have
imposed their own purposes and standards and created a following, they
will have made the task of their successors easier. Higher technical
standards and more adequate forms of expression will have become better
established. The "public" will have learned to expect and to appreciate
more simple and appropriate architectural forms, more sincere and
better-formed translations of life in books and on the stage, and more
independent and better equipped political leadership. The "public," that
is, instead of being as much satisfied as it is at present with cheap
forms and standards, will be prepared to assume part of the expense of
establishing better forms and methods of social intercourse. In this way
a future generation of leaders may be enabled to conquer a following
with a smaller individual expenditure of painful sacrifices and wasted
effort. They can take for granted a generally higher technical and
formal tradition, and they themselves will be freed from an
over-conscious preoccupation with the methods and the mechanism of their
work. Their attention will naturally be more than ever concentrated on
the proper discrimination of their subject-matter; and just in so far as
they are competent to create an impression or a following, that
impression should be more profound and the following more loyal and more
worthy of loyalty.

Above all, a substantial improvement in the purposes and standards of
individual self-expression should create a more bracing intellectual
atmosphere. Better standards will serve not only as guides but as
weapons. In so far as they are embodied in competent performances, they
are bound also to be applied in the critical condemnation of inferior
work; and the critic himself will assume a much more important practical
job than he now has. Criticism is a comparatively neglected art among
Americans, because a sufficient number of people do not care whether and
when the current practices are really good or bad. The practice of
better standards and their appreciation will give the critic both a more
substantial material for his work and a larger public. It will be his
duty to make the American public conscious of the extent of the
individual successes or failures and the reasons therefor; and in case
his practice improves with that of the other arts, he should become a
more important performer, not only because of his better opportunities
and public, but because of his increase of individual prowess. He should
not only be better equipped for the performance of his work and the
creation of a public following, but he should have a more definite and
resolute conviction of the importance of his own job. It is the business
of the competent individual as a type to force society to recognize the
meaning and the power of his own special purposes. It is the special
business of the critic to make an ever larger portion of the public
conscious of these expressions of individual purpose, of their relations
one to another, of their limitations, and of their promises. He not only
popularizes and explains for the benefit of a larger public the
substance and significance of admirable special performance, but he
should in a sense become the standard bearer of the whole movement.

The function of the critic hereafter will consist in part of carrying on
an incessant and relentless warfare on the prevailing American
intellectual insincerity. He can make little headway unless he is
sustained by a large volume of less expressly controversial individual
intellectual self-expression; but on the other hand, there are many
serious obstructions to any advancing intellectual movement, which he
should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more
unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab
away at the gelatinous mass of popular indifference, sentimentality, and
complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick
and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive
achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is
the less responsible for the production of any substantial effect, or
the building up of any following except a handful of free lances like
himself. He need only assure himself of his own competence with his own
peculiar tools, his own good-humored sincerity, and his
disinterestedness in the pursuit of his legitimate purposes, in order to
feel fully justified in pushing his strokes home. In all serious
warfare, people have to be really wounded for some good purpose; and in
this particular fight there may be some chance that not only a good
cause, but the very victim of the blow, may possibly be benefited by its
delivery. The stabbing of a mass of public opinion into some
consciousness of its active torpor, particularly when many particles of
the mass are actively torpid because of admirable patriotic
intentions,--that is a job which needs sharp weapons, intense personal
devotion, and a positive indifference to consequences.

Yet if the American national Promise is ever to be fulfilled, a more
congenial and a more interesting task will also await the
critic--meaning by the word "critic" the voice of the specific
intellectual interest, the lover of wisdom, the seeker of the truth.
Every important human enterprise has its meaning, even though the
conduct of the affair demands more than anything else a hard and
inextinguishable faith. Such a faith will imply a creed; and its
realizations will go astray unless the faithful are made conscious of
the meaning of their performances or failures. The most essential and
edifying business of the critic will always consist in building up "a
pile of better thoughts," based for the most part upon the truth
resident in the lives of their predecessors and contemporaries, but not
without its outlook toward an immediate and even remote future. There
can be nothing final about the creed unless there be something final
about the action and purposes of which it is the expression. It must be
constantly modified in order to define new experiences and renewed in
order to meet unforeseen emergencies. But it should grow, just in so far
as the enterprise itself makes new conquests and unfolds new aspects of
truth. Democracy is an enterprise of this kind. It may prove to be the
most important moral and social enterprise as yet undertaken by mankind;
but it is still a very young enterprise, whose meaning and promise is by
no means clearly understood. It is continually meeting unforeseen
emergencies and gathering an increasing experience. The fundamental duty
of a critic in a democracy is to see that the results of these
experiences are not misinterpreted and that the best interpretation is
embodied in popular doctrinal form. The critic consequently is not so
much the guide as the lantern which illuminates the path. He may not
pretend to know the only way or all the ways; but he should know as much
as can be known about the traveled road.

Men endowed with high moral gifts and capable of exceptional moral
achievements have also their special part to play in the building of an
enduring democratic structure. In the account which has been given of
the means and conditions of democratic fulfillment, the importance of
this part has been under-estimated; but the under-estimate has been
deliberate. It is very easy and in a sense perfectly true to declare
that democracy needs for its fulfillment a peculiarly high standard of
moral behavior; and it is even more true to declare that a democratic
scheme of moral values reaches its consummate expression in the religion
of human brotherhood. Such a religion can be realized only through the
loving-kindness which individuals feel toward their fellow-men and
particularly toward their fellow-countrymen; and it is through such
feelings that the network of mutual loyalties and responsibilities woven
in a democratic nation become radiant and expansive. Whenever an
individual democrat, like Abraham Lincoln, emerges, who succeeds in
offering an example of specific efficiency united with supreme
kindliness of feeling, he qualifies as a national hero of consummate
value. But--at present--a profound sense of human brotherhood is no
substitute for specific efficiency. The men most possessed by intense
brotherly feelings usually fall into an error, as Tolstoy has done, as
to the way in which those feelings can be realized. Consummate faith
itself is no substitute for good work. Back of any work of moral
conversion must come a long and slow process of social reorganization
and individual emancipation; and not until the reorganization has been
partly accomplished, and the individual released, disciplined and
purified, will the soil be prepared for the crowning work of some
democratic Saint Francis.

Hence, in the foregoing account of a possible democratic fulfillment,
attention has been concentrated on that indispensable phase of the work
which can be attained by conscious means. Until this work is measurably
accomplished no evangelist can do more than convert a few men for a few
years. But it has been admitted throughout that the task of individual
and social regeneration must remain incomplete and impoverished, until
the conviction and the feeling of human brotherhood enters into
possession of the human spirit. The laborious work of individual and
social fulfillment may eventually be transfigured by an outburst of
enthusiasm--one which is not the expression of a mood, but which is
substantially the finer flower of an achieved experience and a living
tradition. If such a moment ever arrives, it will be partly the creation
of some democratic evangelist--some imitator of Jesus who will reveal to
men the path whereby they may enter into spiritual possession of their
individual and social achievements, and immeasurably increase them by
virtue of personal regeneration.

Be it understood, however, that no prophecy of any such consummate
moment has been made. Something of the kind may happen, in case the
American or any other democracy seeks patiently and intelligently to
make good a complete and a coherent democratic ideal. For better or
worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human
perfectibility, and hence from the adoption of measures looking in the
direction of realizing such an aspiration. It may be that the attempt
will not be seriously made, or that, if it is, nothing will come of it.
Mr. George Santayana concludes a chapter on "Democracy" in his "Reason
in Society" with the following words: "For such excellence to grow
general mankind must be notably transformed. If a noble and civilized
democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint
and something of a hero. We see, therefore, how justly flattering and
profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu's saying
that the principle of democracy is virtue." The principle of democracy
_is_ virtue, and when we consider the condition of contemporary
democracies, the saying may seem to be more ominous than flattering. But
if a few hundred years from now it seems less ominous, the threat will
be removed in only one way. The common citizen can become something of a
saint and something of a hero, not by growing to heroic proportions in
his own person, but by the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes
and saints, and whether or not he will ever come to such imitation will
depend upon the ability of his exceptional fellow-countrymen to offer
him acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness.