The Soul of Democracy Part 6

When we say that the path of democracy is education, we do not mean that there is an easy solution of its problem. There is no patent medicine we can feed the American people and cure it of its diseases. There is no specific for the menaces that threaten. Eternal vigilance and effort are the price, not only of liberty, but of every good of man. Let things alone, and they get bad; to keep them good, we must struggle everlastingly to make them better. Leave the pool of politics unstirred by putting into it ever new individual thought and ideal, and how quickly it becomes a stagnant, ill-smelling pond. Leave a church unvitalized, by ever fresh personal consecration, and how quickly it becomes a dead form, hampering the life of the spirit. Leave a university uninfluenced by ever new earnestness and devotion on the part of student and teacher, and how soon it becomes a scholastic machine, positively oppressing the mind and spirit.

There is a true sense in which the universe exists momentarily by the grace of G.o.d. Take light away, and you have darkness. Take darkness away, and you have not necessarily light; you might have chaos. Take health away, and you have disease. Take disease away, and you have not necessarily health; you may have death. Take virtue away, and you have vice. Take vice away, and you have not necessarily virtue; you might have negative respectability. Thus it is the continual affirmation of the good that keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the step toward to-morrow.

Nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of the problem, there are certain big lines of attack. If we are right in our diagnosis, that the problem of democracy is a problem of education, then our whole system of education, for child, youth and adult, should be reconstructed to focus upon the building of positive and effective moral personality.

American education began as a subsidiary process. Children got organic education in the home, on the farm, in the work shop. They went to school to get certain formal disciplines, to learn to read, write and cipher and to acquire formal grammar. With the moving into the cities, the industrial revolution and the entire transformation of our life, the school has had to take over more and more of the process of organic education. If children fail to get such education in the school, they are apt to miss it altogether.

With this entire change in the meaning of the school, old notions of its purpose still survive. Probably no one is so benighted to-day as to imagine that the chief function of the school is to fill the mind with information; but there are many who still hold to the tradition that the chief purpose of education is to sharpen the intellectual tools of the individual for the sake of his personal success. This notion is a misleading survival, for tools are of value only in terms of the character using them. The same equipment may serve, equally, good or bad ends. Only as education focusses on the development of positive and effective moral character can it aid in solving the problem of democracy.

Need it be added that this does not mean teaching morals and manners to children, thirty minutes a day, three times a week? That is a minor fragment of moral education. It means that all phases of the process-- the relation of pupil and teacher, school and home, the government and discipline, the lessons taught in every subject, the environment, the proportioning of the curriculum, of physical, emotional and intellectual culture--all shall be focussed and organized upon the one significant aim of the whole--_character_.

Further, if education is to overcome the menaces and solve the dilemma of democracy, it must be carried beyond childhood and youth and outside the walls of academic inst.i.tutions. The ever wider education of adult citizens.h.i.+p is indispensable to the progress and safety of democracy. It is one of the glaring ill.u.s.trations of the inefficiency of our democracy that there are still communities where school boards build school houses with public money, open them five or six hours, five days in the week, and refuse to allow them to be opened any other hour of the day or night, for a civic forum, parents' meeting, public lecture or other activity of adult education; and yet we call ourselves a practical people! Surely, in a democracy, the state is as vitally interested in the education of the adult citizen as of the child.

Herein is the significance of those various extensions of education, developing and spreading so widely to-day. University-extension and Chautauqua movements, civic forums, free lectures to the people by boards of education and public libraries, summer schools, night schools for adults--all are ill.u.s.trations of this movement, so vital to the progress of democracy. Through these instrumentalities the popular ideal may be elevated, the public mind may be trained to more logical and earnest thought, citizens.h.i.+p may be made more serious and intelligent, and finally a most helpful influence may be exerted on the academic inst.i.tutions themselves. It is an easily verifiable truth that any academic inst.i.tution that builds around itself an enclosing scholastic wall, refuses to go outside and serve and learn in the larger world of humanity, in the long run inevitably dies of academic dry rot.

In the endeavor to solve the problem of democracy cannot we do more than we have done hitherto in cultivating reverence for moral leaders.h.i.+p--the quality so much needed in democracy at the present hour? This may be achieved through many aspects of education, but especially through contact with n.o.ble souls in literature and history. History, above all, is the great opportunity, and, from this point of view, is it not necessary to rewrite our histories: instead of portraying solely statesmen and warriors, to fill them with lofty examples of leaders.h.i.+p in all walks of life?

Women as well as men: for surely ideals of both should be fostered. A colleague, interested in this problem, recently took one of the most widely used text-books of American history, and counted the pages on which a woman was mentioned. Of the five hundred pages, there were four: not four pages devoted to women; but four mentioning a woman.

What does it mean: that women have contributed less than one part in a hundred and five to the development of American life? Surely no one would think that. What, then, are the reasons for the discrepancy?

There are several, but one may be mentioned: men have written the histories, and they have written chiefly of the two fields of action where men have been most important and women least, war and statesmans.h.i.+p. Surely, however, if American history is to reveal the American spirit, exercise the contagion of n.o.ble ideals and develop reverence for true moral leaders.h.i.+p, it must present types of both manhood and womanhood in all fields of action and endeavor.

One who has stood with Socrates in the common criminal prison in Athens and watched him drink the hemlock poison, saying "No evil can happen to a good man in life or after death," who has heard the oration of Paul on Mars Hill or that of Pericles over the Athenian dead, who has thrilled to the heroism of Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell, the n.o.ble service of Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, the high appeal of Helen Hunt Jackson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who has heard Giordano Bruno exclaim as the flames crept up about him, "I die a martyr, and willingly," who has responded to the calm elevation of Marcus Aurelius, the cosmopolitan wisdom of Goethe, the sweet gentleness of Maeterlinck's spirit and the t.i.tan dreams of Ibsen, can scarcely fail to appreciate the brotherhood of all men and to learn that reverence for the true moral leader, that dignifies alike giver and recipient.

XX

TRAINING FOR MORAL LEADERs.h.i.+P

Since the path of democracy is education, moral leaders.h.i.+p is more necessary to it, than in any other form of society; yet there are exceptional obstacles to its development. We speak of "the white light that beats upon a throne": it is nothing compared to the search light played upon every leader of democracy. With our lack of reverence, we delight in pulling to pieces the personalities of those who lead us.

Thus it is increasingly difficult to get men of sensitive spirit to pay the price of leaders.h.i.+p for democracy.

Is it not possible to do more than we have done, consciously to develop such leaders.h.i.+p? Where is it trained? In life, the college and university, the normal school, the schools of law, medicine and theology. Yes, but if not one boy and girl in ten graduates from the high school, surely we want one man and woman in ten to fulfill some measure of moral leaders.h.i.+p, and the high school is directly concerned with the task of furnis.h.i.+ng such leaders.h.i.+p for American democracy.

If that is true, is it not a pity that the high school is so largely dominated from above by the demand of the college upon the entering freshman? It is not to be taken for granted that the particular regimen of studies, best fitting the student to pa.s.s the entrance examinations of a college or university, is the best possible for the nine out of ten students, who go directly from the high school into the world, and must fulfill some measure of moral leaders.h.i.+p for American democracy. The presumption is to the contrary. College professors are human--some of them. They want students prepared to enter as smoothly as possible into the somewhat artificial curricula of academic studies they have arranged. The Latin professor wishes not to go back and start with the rudiments of his subject, as the professor of mathematics with the beginnings of Algebra and Geometry. The result is they demand of the high school what fits most smoothly into their scheme.

Now if it is not possible to serve equally the needs of both groups, would it not be better to neglect the one tenth of the students, going on to college, even a.s.suming they are the pick of the flock, which they are not always? They have four more years to correct their mistakes and round out their culture. If any one must be subordinated, it would be better to neglect them, and focus upon the needs of the nine out of ten, who go directly from the high school into life and have not another chance; yet there are states in the Union, where it is possible for a committee of the state university at the top to say to every high school teacher in the state, "Conform to our requirements, or leave the state, or get out of the profession." The threat, moreover, has been carried out more than once.

That situation is utterly wrong. We want organization of the educational system, with each unit cooperating with the next higher, but if education is to solve the problem of democracy and furnish moral leaders.h.i.+p for American life, we want each unit to be free, first of all, to serve its own const.i.tuency to the best of its power. The problem is not serious for the big city high school, with its multiplied elective courses, but for the small rural or town high school, with its limited corps of teachers and its necessarily fixed courses, the burden is onerous indeed.

Is the American college and university doing all that it might do in cultivating moral leaders.h.i.+p for American democracy? The last decades have seen an astounding and unparalleled development of higher education in America. In the old days, the college was usually on a denominational foundation. It was supported by the dollars and pennies of earnest religionists who believed that education was necessary to religion and morality. The president was generally a clergyman of the denomination; he taught the ethics course, and all students were required to take it. There was compulsory chapel attendance, and once a day the entire student body gathered together to listen to some moral and religious thought.

Then came the immense expansion of higher education. Courses were multiplied and diversified. Universities were established or endowed by the state. Academies became colleges, and colleges, universities.

Inst.i.tutions were generally secularized. Compulsory chapel attendance was rightly abandoned. Each department served its own interest apart.

Until to-day certain of our great universities are not unlike vast intellectual department stores, with each professor calling his goods across the counter, and the president, a sort of superior floorwalker, to see that no one clerk gets too many customers. It is an impressive ill.u.s.tration of what has happened to our higher inst.i.tutions that, in certain of them, the one regular meeting place of the entire student body in a common interest, is the bleachers by the athletic field. One continues to believe in college athletics, in spite of the frequent absurdities and worse, done in their name; only if the numbers of those playing the game and those exercising only their lungs and throats from the bleachers, were reversed, better all-round athletic education would result. Is it not, however, a trenchant criticism on the situation in our higher education, that so often the one common interest should be in something that is, at least, aside from the main business of the inst.i.tution?

Moreover, no inst.i.tution can rightly serve democracy, unless it is itself democratic. Thus the growth of an aristocratic spirit in our colleges and universities is an ominous sign. For instance, it is still true that any boy or girl, with a sound body and a good mind and no family to support, can get a college education. Money is not indispensable: it is possible to work one's way through. Will this always be true? One wonders. It is significant that it is easiest to work your way through college, and keep your self-respect and the respect of your fellows, in the small, meagerly endowed college on the frontier. It is most difficult, with a few exceptions one gladly recognizes, in the great, rich universities of the East. What does that mean?

Straws show the tide: it was announced some time ago by the president of one of our richest and oldest universities that henceforth scholars.h.i.+ps in that inst.i.tution would be given solely on the basis of intellectual scholars.h.i.+p, as tested by examination; and applause went up from the alumni all across the country; yet what does it mean? It means that the boy who has to work on a thres.h.i.+ng machine, sell books to an unsuspecting public, or do some other semi-honorable work all summer to get back into college in the Fall, cannot pa.s.s those examinations equally with a rich man's son of equal mind, who can take a tutor to the seash.o.r.e or the mountains and coach up all summer. Thus foundations, established by well-meaning people to help poor boys self-respectingly through college, become intellectual prizes for those who do not need them. That is all wrong.

Take the special student problem. When a college or university is founded, it needs students: they are the life-blood of the inst.i.tution.

Really all that is needed to make a college is a teacher and some students: buildings are not indispensable, but students the school must have. Thus it is apt to keep its bars down and its entrance requirements flexible. Special students, often mature men and women, who are not prepared to pa.s.s the freshman examinations, are admitted on the recommendation of heads of d epartments, to special courses they are well fitted to take. Students are admitted freely, and then sifted out afterward, if they prove unworthy of their opportunity: not a bad method, by the way.

A dozen years pa.s.s, and the inst.i.tution wants to become respectable.

It is just as with the individual: the man, at first, is absorbed in money-getting, and when he has it, yearns for respectability. Now getting respectable, for a college or university, is called "raising the standard of scholars.h.i.+p." Let this not be misunderstood: painstaking, infinitely laborious, accurate scholars.h.i.+p is a n.o.ble aim, well worth the consistent effort of a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising the standard of scholars.h.i.+p. Does an educational inst.i.tution exist for the sake of its reputation, or to serve its const.i.tuency? If it seeks to advance its reputation at the expense of its fullest and best service to those who need its help, is it not recreant to its duty and opportunity?

Well, in the mood cited, the inst.i.tution raises and standardizes its entrance-requirements and generally excludes special students. One readily sees why: it is much easier to work with the regularly prepared freshman, he fits much more smoothly and comfortably into the machinery of the inst.i.tution. Many a wise teacher will admit, nevertheless, that the best students he ever taught and the ones whose lives he is proudest of having influenced, were often men and women, thirty, forty, fifty years of age--teachers who suddenly realized that the ruts of their calling had become so deep they could no longer see over them, ministers awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action-- working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman cannot imagine--he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and often for them useless, work of preparing to pa.s.s the examinations for entrance to the freshman cla.s.s. That, too, is all wrong.

The American college and university stands to-day at the parting of the ways: this generation will largely determine its future. If the American college and university ever becomes a social club for the sons and daughters of the rich, an inst.i.tution making it easy for them to secure business and professional opportunity and advancement, to the exclusion of their poorer fellows, it may be as necessary to disestablish the foundations of our great universities, as statesmen in Europe thought it necessary to disestablish the monastic foundations at the close of the middle age. They, too, began as educational inst.i.tutions. If, on the other hand, the American college and university remains true to its task, if it keeps its doors open and its spirit democratic, if it seeks to render ever larger service to the great public and to develop moral leaders.h.i.+p for American democracy, then, indeed, it will go ever forward upon its n.o.ble path.

XXI

DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE

We have seen the conflict of ideas in the War: the German philosophy that man exists for the state, the contrasting idea of democracy that the state exists for man. We may well ask why any inst.i.tution should be regarded as sacred, except as it has the advent.i.tious sacredness, coming from time, convention and h.o.a.ry tradition. It was said long ago that "the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath," and the statement may be universalized. Every inst.i.tution on earth--marriage, the family, education, the church, the state--was made for man and not man for the inst.i.tution. Humanity must always be the end. Why should we perpetuate any inst.i.tution that does not serve life? Kant voiced the principle in his second imperative of duty: "Always treat humanity, whether in thine own person or that of any other, as an end withal, and never as a means only." Kant was a Prussian philosopher: one wonders what he would have thought of the "Kanonen-Futter" theory of manhood!

An organization or inst.i.tution is only a machine, an instrument for a purpose. Thus always it is a means, never an end: its value lies in serving its purpose--the end of human life. So the whole existing order must justify itself. Where it rests on forms of injustice, it must be broken or destroyed, and there is no reason to fear the breaking.

Thus there is no "divine right" of kings. They represent a vested interest, surviving from the past. They must justify themselves by the service of those under them, or pa.s.s.

Similarly, there is no divine right of a cla.s.s or caste, enjoying supremacy or special privilege. It also is a surviving vested interest, that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an incubus.

The same test applies to an empire. It, too, is a vested interest, developed out of conditions prevailing in the past. If it does not justify itself by the largest service of all within it, then it, too, is an anachronistic survival, no longer to be tolerated.

The principle is universal: the inst.i.tution of private property, the controlling power of captains of industry, the capitalistic system, finally, the state itself, in every form: all are vested interests that may be permitted to continue in the exercise of power only as they prove their superiority to any other form of organization in serving the good of all.

This does not mean that, under democracy, the individual shall fail of sacrifice and the dedication to something higher than himself. That is the glory of life, transfiguring human nature, and without it, life sinks to sordid selfishness. Your life is worth, not what you have, but what you are, and what you are is determined by that to which you dedicate yourself. Is it creature comforts, pleasure, selfish privilege, or the largest life and the fullest service of humanity? What you have is merely the condition, the important question is, what do you do with it? Is it wealth, prosperity: do you sit down comfortably on the fact of it, to secure all the selfish pleasures possible; or do you regard your fortunate circ.u.mstances as so much more opportunity and obligation of leaders.h.i.+p and service? Is it poverty, even starvation: do you whine and grovel, or stand erect, with shut teeth, andwring heroic manhood from the breast of suffering?

That is why peace can never be an end: it, too, is merely a condition or means. The question is, what do you do with your peace, for peace may mean merely sloth and cowardly ease, where war may mean unselfish heroism. That is what the peace promoters forget. War has its brutalities, and terrible indeed they are: unleashed hate, l.u.s.t, cruelty and revenge; but war has its heroisms. It calls out the devotion to something higher than the individual from even the commonest of men.

To-day all over the earth, ordinary men are quietly going out to probable death or mutilation in its most horrible forms, and going for the sake of an ideal larger than themselves. Women are doing even more than that. For it is not so hard to die, but to send out those you love, dearer than life itself, to almost certain death--that, indeed, is difficult, and women are doing it everywhere with a smile on their lips and choked-back tears.

Peace, on the other hand, has its virtues: the softening and refining of life, gradual development of sympathy, achievement of comfort and beauty; but peace has its vices. In times of peace and prosperity there seems to be no great cause at stake. Of course, always it is there, but we do not see it. We become increasingly absorbed in selfish interests, in the good of our immediate family. Thus petty, time-serving selfishness is the vice peculiarly characteristic of times of peace and prosperity. Consider, for instance, the spirit of France during the closing years of the nineteenth century, and at the present dark, but pregnant, hour of destiny.

Thus the question is not whether you have peace or war, but what you do with your peace or war. It is not whether you are rich or poor, but what you do with your riches or poverty.

Suppose we were able to reconstruct our entire social and industrial world, so that every human being would have plenty to eat, plenty to wear and a comfortable house to live in: would we have the kingdom of heaven? Not necessarily: we might have merely a comfortable, well-decorated pig-sty, if men lived to nothing higher than pigs. "Man cannot live by bread alone," important as bread is, but by dedication to the things of the spirit.

Thus there must ever be the capacity for self-forgetfulness, self-sacrifice, the dedication of life to supreme aims, but that does not mean the dedication of man to the inst.i.tution. Rather it is the consecration to the welfare of humanity. Man for the State means autocracy and imperialism; Man for Mankind is the soul of democracy.

That is the ideal to which we must rise, if democracy is to prove itself worthy to be the form of human society for the great future.

This ideal is realized through many lesser forms and instruments, but always with the same final test. The family, for instance, is one of these lesser forms, and the subordination of the individual to the family unit is just. Thus there is a measure of right in seeking first the interest of the family group; but when this is sought to the end of special privilege and debauching luxury, against the welfare of all, it becomes, as we have seen, an evil.

There is, similarly, a certain justice in the subordination of the individual to the social cla.s.s or group interest. It is right that artisans should unite in trade unions, that employers should get together in a.s.sociations for common benefit. One need only contrast the conditions where each workman had to bid in compet.i.tion against all others, and each manufacturer, the same, to realize the advance made through group union and cooperation. When either group, however, seeks to further its own interest at the expense of the welfare of the whole society, as in securing cla.s.s legislation, achieving monopolies, holding efficient workers to the level of production of the slowest and least capable of the group, then the cla.s.s or group spirit becomes an evil that must be fought for the good of all.