^- -^v^^ •« ^0^ 4 O ^^--^ "o^^^'^'^o' V^^*'y'^ "%^^^-">^ .. ^^. ^ . . s \ > ^oV" ,v v^. ', •^ '^ .^' ^'^^^ \ -^0^ ■^' .' r "V, .'^ ^'^ v<^^ <^, 'o . . ^•^ )C!.A494794 TO THE MEMORY OF GEORGE SHERMAN ALEXANDER WHO TAUGHT HIS SONS THAT THE WATCHFULNESS OF THE CITIZEN IS THE SALVATION OF THE STATE PREFACE ► A LL human thinking is temporary and r\ experimental, Hke the life of which it is a part. But in time of war, and of such a war as this that now wracks the world, the temporal perils of thought swell to new measures. Our emotions are intense; familiar things take on discolouratlons, while strange orders of fact breed strangely new percep- tions, making easy the inroads of fantasy and suspicion; and even the mind con- sciously in search of a truth that is eternal finds itself hypnotically in bond to the garish actualities of the present. Nevertheless, there are no times when hard thinking is more the need." Such intelligence as we have is meant (if meant for anything) to be of service under stress; and that citizen and that student who fails to respond with his clearest effort betrays at once his country and the best part of human nature, — namely, its quest of rational guidance. The essays which form the present volume represent but one man's endeavour to dis- cover the light of reason in a period of tre- mendous stress. They were written, from time to time, under the impulse of events, and for contemporary reading. They cannot, therefore, pretend to either system or con- secution, and they undoubtedly contain repe- PREFACE titions, not only as between the several essays, but of matters that have been frequently and better expressed elsewhere. Yet with all this, the author believes that the urgency of thought is such that every citizen who prizes his citizenship should publicly and repeatedly express the best that is in him; and he hopes that in the collection here offered there will be found something that may be of real, even if temporary, value in clarifying the problems of principle which beset society. Problems of principle, — for if there Is one conviction that underlies this book, and may perhaps give it unity of thought as well as of intent, it is that the wisdom of political con- duct is proportionate to the clarity with which political principles are defined and the con- stancy with which they are held in view. To those who find no value in general principles the effort here expended will appear vain; but for those who hold with the author that general principles must be the first rules of all telling practice, no such effort can seem en- tirely useless. True, there is here no con- structive, no reconstructive programme. But the hour calls for diagnosis: we have under- stood neither our constitution, as a state, nor our maladies, as a society; and not until we achieve these understandings, through analy- sis of symptoms, can we hope to provide an effective cure. That the physician must have health in his mind when he studies disease was a rule of Greek medicine; and it is in the vi PREFACE spirit of this rule that the diagnoses here sug- gested are made. But while a programme of reconstruction is yet to make, it may be worth a word here to define the line which the author's thinking repeatedly brings him to believe such re- construction must follow. This is the educa- tional, — not in any narrow scholastic way, but broadly, touching the whole life of the citizen and the whole endeavour of the state. Democracy can only flourish where the citi- zens are both intelligent and alert, intelligent as to the purposes of their society and alert as to the means of attaining these: unceasing vigilance is the preserver of freedom, but this must be accompanied by a no less unceasing consideration of the ends of human life if the liberty is to be worth preserving. "He who would duly enquire about the best form of the state ought first to determine which is the most eligible life." Aristotle's aphorism is the core of political wisdom; and its applied meaning can only be that the citizen who is a true warden of his rights must be an athlete of the mind, forever trained and in training. The problem of due training is the problem of political self-preservation. The several essays are here reprinted (in a few cases with slight modifications) from their original publication in The International Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, The North American Review, The New Republic, The PREFACE Dial, The Hibbert Journal, and, in the case of the assembled "Letters to the Public," from the columns of The Nebraska State Journal. In view of the current character and impulse of most of the articles, the author has deemed it advisable to give for each the date of its composition. February i, iqi8. nil CONTENTS I. Liberty and Democracy ... i II. The Fear of Machines ... 28 III. Rousseau and Political Humani- TARIANISM 48 IV. Trial by Combat and the Tribunal of God ..... 02 V. Justice and Progress . . . 113 VI. Americanism 124 VII. The Limits of Tolerance . . 134 VIII. Essential Liberty .... 143 IX. America's Self-Revelation . . 151 X. Letters to the Public . . . 177 He who would duly enquire about the best form of a state ought first to deter- mine which is the most eligible life. — Aristotle y Politics y vii, i. LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY IN the presence of death — if the dead be not too near and precious — all men become for the moment philosophical. There is, in the stillness and calm of the life- bereft body, released forever from the im- patient and relentless activity of man's estate, a something which commands in our mood the imitation of its image; and we, the living, instinctively withdraw from the sounding world about us and enter into the hushed and solemn courts that hold our dead. In a very deep sense Socrates was right when he defined philosophy as a love of death, and the phil- osopher's pursuit as a practice of dying, — of which no proof is more simple than the power which death itself possesses of bringing upon men the mood and desire of philosophy. As is the dead body of a man a presence that commands philosophy, so, in its greater degree, is the dead thought and desire of nations and centuries. Most of all is this true when we are suddenly and helplessly brought face to face with the blight and prostration of ideals which we have been taught to believe LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY are the very bloom of life and the treasure of existence. Man's ideals are the most intensely human of his possessions, and their destruc- tion is the most cataclysmic of tragedies. From the wreck of a perished dream all nature must move to salvage the soul, for which, in its first weakness, there is none other save the sour medicine of philosophy. To-day we are in the presence of such a corpse of thought. I can think of no death in history quite so stupendously bitter as is that which has stricken down the gorgeous human- itarian optimism of the nineteenth century. Backed by the material display of modern life, which blinded us to the inner flimsiness of our faith, this optimism took possession of the modern world with a thoroughness which was the more complete because not subjected to reflective criticism. Socially, in- tellectually, and morally we had centred our worship in man to a degree unexampled in history; our pride in our own nature was overweening, — and its fall is cataclysmic. To-day we stand aghast before the broken idol of the humanitarians, — that ritualized Man of the West Europeans in whom it was believed that reason and science and love of peace and love of his fellows must irresistibly bear onward to a compelling felicity. To-day, mid the bitterness of bloodshed and the sweat of human agony, we see the Colossus fallen; and sharpest of all the cries that war has raised, piercing the roar of battle like a thin LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY scream of death, comes the lamentation of Europe for the lost idol and the ruined shrine. It is not the burned manuscripts of Louvain, the shattered sculptures of Reims, nor yet the welter of blood-soaked flesh in her sodden fields, that have most unchangeably painted Europe with horror of the German; but it is the loss of that faith in man, which the humanitarian romanticism of nearly two cen- turies had made into the image of her spir- itual desire, that has envenomed her soul against the image-breakers. The Germany that men hate is the Germany that would assert the might of man as against the rights of man, that would put the rule of blood and iron in the place of liberty, equality, and fra- ternity, and that would elevate the Ueber- mensch above humanity. Doubtless the hu- manitarian faith was phantasmal and insub- stantial, — the event has so proved it. Possi- bly the Germans themselves regard their Realpolitik as but the continuation of the philosophic tradition of disillusionment: like Xenophanes they would remind us that the gods of the Ethiopians are snub-nosed and swart, of the Thracians blue-eyed and red- haired, and that if oxen had gods their gods would be oxen. But the phantoms that leave men's souls, in the hour of their departure go forth with a great cry — "Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead ! " — and the hurt that they leave behind is like the hurt of broken love. LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY Europe today is fighting over the body of her dead hopes, her dead ideals. She is struck too nearly and too deeply to be able to per- ceive that the life is departed from her beloved, that only the dead form remains. For her the hour of realization, and hence the hour of philosophy, is not yet come: she is not re- signed to the inevitable separation; she can- not, therefore, reflect upon it. With us in America the case is not quite the same. It is true that we have shared the European ideal, the humanitarian idolatry of man; it is true, also, that we feel a vague horror for the broken idol. But with us the disillusion- ment is not wrought amid scenes of material havoc; the curse of war is not directly upon us; and so we are in a position to begin to feel already that decent detachment in the scene of sorrow which belongs, not to the intimately afflicted, but to those for whom the presence of death may be the gateway to philosophy. We are sufliciently recovered from the shock to begin to be able to think, — and God knows that we have need of thought. For the war in Europe has brought us problems such as we have never faced in our national life — and I do not except the issue of slavery, — upon our solution of which, as I believe, depends our continued existence as one of the nations of this earth. For a cen- tury and a quarter we have nourished our democracy upon certain ideals born direct from that European humanitarianism which LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY now lies dead, — the ideals of liberty and law and justice, which we have made the corner- stone of our Constitution. We have accepted these ideals as coloured by the easy optimism of the eighteenth century; we have recounted them with much enthusiasm and with little reflection. But unless we go on to define them in a new sense which will give them a resurrection and a life renewed, they will fall with the failure of the spirit which gave them form. Our democracy, if it is not to vanish utterly, must restate and revivify the articles of its faith, in a form suiting the change which has come over the life of mankind, and in a spirit which shall be different from the old, both in the greater humility and the greater courage which it will require. For such a task only the philosophic mood of quiet and reso- lute reflection is competent. To such a task the philosophic mind of America will surely rise, inspired by the yet unconquered idealism through which this continent was peopled. II The United States of America came into national existence as the result of a war for independence. It was not an accident of territory or race or language or religion that converted the thirteen Colonies of the Crown into a federal state; it was a political ideal. This fact, more than any other, has appealed to the imagination of Americans, and has 5 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY moulded in them their conception of the mean- ing of their own polity. " We hold these truths to be self-evident," reads our Declaration, *'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It is on the strength of these postulates that the Declaration goes on to affirm that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." It is obvious that the conception that gives inotive to this language is the conception of liberty. Equality and the pursuit of happi- ness are incidents in the definition of liberty : equality is a vague conception of the social boundaries of liberty; the pursuit of happi- ness is an equally vague estimate of the mean- ing of liberty for individuals; but the central and moving idea of the Declaration is that of liberty itself. Liberty it is that, in the con- ception of the fathers of our country, consti- tutes the fountain and tide of all political rights; and liberty it is that, in our own day, has^ seemed to Americans the very genius of their national institutions. But the history of human conduct shows nothing more certainly than that an idea may be both moving and powerful without being either clear or consistent. The history of American political idealism is but an added illustration of this. From the beginning we have been greatly stirred by the symbols of 6 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY liberty, but we have given little thought to its essence. Certain elements, to be sure, stand out with eminence, yet none of them go to the marrow of the conception, even as it affects our practice. On the one hand, liberty has come to mean for us an exaggerated indi- vidualism, — the pursuit of happiness carried to the extreme of do-as-you-please and mind- your-own-business. The Jeff ersonian aphorism, "that government is best which governs least," is the typical expression of this notion in political philosophy. On the other hand, liberty has been assumed to imply a social equality of citizen with citizen which all human organization is strenuous to deny. What we call our democracy is the current expression of this notion, socially represented by our willingness to 'mix', as we say. Its noblest verbal embodiment is the great deter- mination of Lincoln "that we here highly resolve that government of the people, for the people, and by the people shall not perish from the earth." The ambiguity of our thinking is reflected in our turbid history. I know of no more spectacular example of the blindness with which an idea can sere men's minds to fact than in our own political career has issued from the assertion that ' all men are born free and equal.' This, which seemed self-evident truth to our fathers, seems self-evident false- hood to us. Yet a great war, the War of the Rebellion, was fought in the terrific effort to LIBERTY A^D DEMOCRACY steep this lie into the blood of Nature. North and South alike, in that war, fought in the name of liberty; yet neither understood the thing. The liberty for which the North con- tended was the social liberty represented by a fictitious human equality; the liberty for which the South fought was the freedom to realize equally fictitious individual rights. In less spectacular, though perhaps not less momentous ways, the same see-saw is appar- ent in our economic and social life. From the 'squatter sovereign' to the 'plutocrat', from the boy bully to the flamboyant lechers of affinity unions, we are loud in our proclama- tions of individual independence. On the other hand, no people more hoarsely vocif- erates vox populi, vox Dei, or more piously cants that the public sentiment is the wisdom of God. None of these fancies could endure, I am certain, were it not for the conviction, less conscious than determined, that some- how the essence of liberty is interbound with them. We cannot forget that we are a nation founded in the faith of freedom, and it is to that faith that we will be true to the cost of every sanity. No one, I think, can comprehend American history without some feeling for the force with which the symbol of liberty appeals to the American mind; but it would be a rash man who should assert that in America, liberty, in any intelligible and definable form, has ever been realized. Indeed, the observer 8 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY of our history might well sympathize with the aphorism of a shrewd student of the his- tory of Florence: "The Florentines had in a very marked degree the sentiment of liberty but the sentiment is often in inverse propor- tion to the possibility." And for our own democracy, surely the thinking man will share something of the bitter contempt which Plato felt for the democracy of Athens, — "a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike." Democracies have their own special forms of tyranny, not the least rancorous of which is the tyranny of a public sentiment called to support a liberty which the public does not comprehend. In the recently published report of the Committee on Academic Freedom to the American Association of University Pro- fessors occurs the following significant judg- ment: "Public opinion is at once the chief safeguard of a democracy, and the chief menace to the real liberty of the individual. It almost seems as if the danger of despotism cannot be wholly averted under any form of government. In a political autocracy there is no effective public opinion, and all are sub- ject to the tyranny of the ruler; in a democ- racy there is political freedom, but there is likely to be a tyranny of public opinion." If educated Americans so diagnose their own state, it is not surprising that foreigners coming from states governed by totally dif- LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY ferent conceptions should be profoundly and disagreeably impressed by our servitude to the vox populi, — by that justice of demo- cratic states which is, says Aristotle, governed by a numerical, not by a qualitative principle. In a current pamphlet, Nordamerika und Deutschla7id, the famous historian, Eduard Meyer, says: "The cultivated German, from the moment when he lands on the quay of New York until he leaves it again, feels him- self under an unwonted sense of oppression, the yoke of 'public opinion,' which is exer- cised not only by the press, but also through all the forms of social life. His behaviour, his utterances are all controlled and dragged into publicity; he has no freedom of move- ment nor of opinion; it is surely the greatest problem of 'the land of contrasts' that the Americans regard themselves as a free people." It is in no spirit of self-depreciation, but with real solicitude, that we should study such criticisms as these, asking ourselves whether indeed our vaunted freedom may not be the illusory thing which to Meyer it appears to be. Ill It is the common opinion of men, says Aristotle, that the basis of the democratic state is liberty, and that liberty can only be enjoyed in democracies. This judgment — true, doubtless, of the average Hellene of Aristotle's day — can lO LIBERTY A^D DEMOCRACY hardly be regarded as universal to-day. Cer- tainly the expression just quoted from Eduard Meyer implies that in America essential liberty is absent. We know well that the Im- perial German states of to-day are not democ- racies, and yet that they consider themselves free, — free in a truer sense than that in which we are free. In an inquiry into the nature of liberty it behooves us to ask for the precise meaning which the Germans attach to liberty, especially when that meaning is so obviously contradistinguished from the meaning of liberty as understood by demo- crats, ancient and modern. In the pamphlet above cited Meyer says that the German and the Anglo-Saxon have diametrically opposite conceptions of freedom and of the state. Now it is from the difference in the conception of the state that the diflPerent conceptions of freedom follow. If, therefore, we would understand the German conception of freedom, we must get it through an under- standing of the German conception of the state. This is no simple idea. The oft-quoted phrase of Treitschke, "der Staat ist Macht, " is only one of its interpretations, and by no means a clear one; for while Treitschke, no doubt, has political power chiefly in his eye, his is but one focalization out of many possible focalizations of a much more comprehensive philosophical idea. I refer to Hegel's notion that the state is one II LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY living mind, — not figuratively, but literally, one living mind, the necessary and rational expression of nationality. It would be alto- gether false to Hegel's genius to identify this mind which is the state with the 'collective mind' of the French sociologists, much less with the 'public sentiment' and 'popular sovereignty' of American phrase. The mind which Hegel has in view is a definitely organ- ized and logically articulate expression of reason, having a metaphysical unity of its own, as real, if not as comprehensive, as is the unity of the universe. The state is the rational expression of the nation, whose individual citizens it should rule as our human reason should rule our lesser faculties. From another point of view — the cosmic view — the state is an expression of the universal mind of the Absolute; it is a unity within the greater unity of the universe, comprising within itself the lesser units which are its citizens. All of these — universe, state, citizen — are essen- tially spiritual entities; but as the broader unities are the more spiritual, the state is a more spiritual thing than is the man whose civic being enters into it, and who is, there- fore, in every sense a less worthy object than is the state. In such a system as this, where the reason of every citizen is subordinate to the reason of the state, where is liberty to be found? Hegel's answer, and the answer of Germany, which has been drawn from Hegel, is simple. 12 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY Liberty is never private; liberty is always public and collective. "The universal is bound up with the full freedom of the par- ticular," is Hegel's phrase, the only meaning of which must be that there is no freedom for the will of the individual save in its concord with the will of the state. Indeed, the essential quality of individuality, as we democrats conceive it, disappears altogether: the great man, the man of genius and apparent indi- viduality is, in Hegel's view, but "the mouth- piece and executor of his age," — the more or less conscious voice and instrument of the national mind. This, in my opinion, is the essential and by all odds the most respectable form of the Germanic philosophy of the state. It is echoed, in varying intonation, by many suc- ceeding writers. The Nietzschean and Treitschkean and Bernhardian effusions but represent the decline of this conception from that of a state mind whose rule is the rule of reason, to that of a state mind whose rule is the rule of appetite and force. The thing is more decently expressed by better thinkers. Hugo Muensterberg puts it: "In the German view the state is not for the individuals, but the individuals for the state. The ideal state unit which has existence only in the belief of the individuals is felt as higher and more im- portant than those chance personalities which enter into it." And again: "The Anglo- Saxon system is controlled by the belief in the 13 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY individual as such, and the Teutonic ideals are bound by the belief in the overindividual soul." In the same vein and with the same intention Professor Meyer tells us that the German state is "a living thing, set on high above all individuals." It is obvious that the German conception of the state thus sketched is in reality as dia- metrically opposed to the conception of the state held by Americans, and with them by Frenchmen and Englishmen, as Professors Meyer and Muensterberg say it is. It is ob- vious, too, that the German notion of liberty, flowing from the German notion of the state, is to the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon no liberty at all. We cannot say of a man who can ex- ercise his will and reason only when they are in accord with a more authoritative will and reason, that he is a free man; we cannot regard that citizen whose highest activity is as mouthpiece or tool of the state, as a free citizen. But if freedom, in our sense, is foreign to German political ideals, may there not be compensation in other qualities which we miss, — if, indeed, our freedom is in itself desirable? Few will deny, I imagine, that there is, in some degree, such compensating virtue. Undoubtedly its expression is that * efficiency' which all nations to-day unite in envying the German. Efficiency in execution 14 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY is the direct correlative of unity of purpose and simplicity of ends; and unity of purpose and simplicity of ends are exactly what a state of the German type is adapted to secure. The basis of such a state is not liberty (as Aristotle would have it for democratic states) but loyalty, — the great virtue of feudalism. The institution of feudalism was Germany's first gift to European civilization. After the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the Ger- manic tribes which were Rome's destroyers reorganized Western Europe on the basis of feudal law; and the key to that law is the loyalty of vassal to suzerain. A man's security, in the feudal system, lay in being some other man's man, and in being true to that other man; personal dependence, not personal in- dependence, is the structural principle. There is no direct relation of the individual to the law, as in the Roman system, but only of the individual to the higher individual, up to the sovereign, who is himself supported, as is the capstone of an arch, by the hierarchical edifice to which he gives solidity. In Germany, France, and England, and even in Italy, this feudal law became the dominant feature of mediseval states. It was broken in Italy by the Renaissance democracies, in England by the Magna Carta, in France by the Revolu- tion; but it remains to this day the outstand- ing feature, of the polity of those imperial German states from whose remote founders it first issued. Indeed, I am inclined to think IS LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY that the nub of what Western Europe calls Prussian militarism is feudalism pure and simple. And Hegel, in his conception of a hierarchical universe, of which the hierarchical state is only a lesser image and division, is, I believe, but speaking in philosophical terms the political meaning of German feudalism. Clearly, in such a state equality and the liberty which is associated with equality have no place. Its political principle is self-sur- render, inequality, and its virtue is loyalty to a superior. There may be a kind of humani- tarianism involved in the conception, the faith of the man in his master, but there is an utter destruction of that West European humanitarianism based on equality before the law and the faith of man in man. This, however, is not a condemnation of philosophical feudalism, if I may so term the German view; it is merely a definition of its difference from our own view. Surely we can never condemn such a polity if it be true, as so stout a Ghibelline as Dante affirmed and so stanch a Ghibelline as Kaiser Wilhelm II vociferates, that the Empire is the visible ex- pression of God's will on earth. Dante's noblest verse is that in which he sums up the spiritual unity of a feudal universe, — E la sua volontate e nostra pace, — and I suppose that it could be only Satanic rebels who would care or dare to oppose the will of a divinely inspired Empire. The one question which remains, if we accept, as many do, the feudal t6 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY conception of the cosmopolis, is as to the authenticity of the German inspiration, — or, to put it into more contemporary terms, the righteous superiority of German Kultur. IV On this question even men who accept the Hegelian philosophy and acknowledge the supremacy of loyalty over liberty as the civic virtue hold divergent views. But it is hardly a matter worth arguing. For it seems obvious that if you believe that God is the omnipotent suzerain of the universe, the event of Ger- many's victory or defeat will prove whether the Kaiser is indeed the Lord's most eminent feudatory, — for, \ as again Dante points out, trial by combat is the last determinant of justice in a feudal world: might is, as our German instructors have informed us, the proof of right, and military conquest a divine vindication of superiority. But my philosophy is opposed to this, and I would argue against the whole view, irre- spective of Germany's merits, of her successes or of her defeats. For the real question, as I see it, is not whether German culture is the culture providentially designed for all man- kind, nor whether Germany is the providential instrument for its dissemination, but it is whether or not the German conception of the universe, and hence of polity, is true. I cannot believe that it is true. 17 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY In the first place I do not believe that the universe is exclusively mental and spiritual; I think that it is in part material, and that this materiality is an essential condition of whatever spirituality it may possess. That is to say, my philosophy is dualistic, or, as I should prefer to say, Platonic. Let us take the issue at its crux, — the conditions of reason. Of all our mental and spiritual powers, reason is the most obviously mental and spiritual; and yet the whole exercise of reason is dependent upon the existence of material, or irrational, factors and situations into which reason introduces its own peculiar kind of order. To put the matter simply, reason acts through judgments. A judgment is always a decision between possible alternates, — the rational and the irrational consequences of a situation. Without judgment, without choice, we could have no reason; and this means that the existence of reason is directly conditioned by the existence of the irrational, — • which is Plato's and my conception of the material. It means further that rational choice is always a free choice, and indeed that the essence of freedom is the power to make a rational choice.^ 'I say this in full consciousness of the phrase 'rational necessity,' — a phrase which is wholly unfortunate in so far as it has been made the support of a theory of logical bondage. For rational determinism is in no sense analogous to physical or mechanical determinism: it is, in fact, an opposite quality. Rational necessity is fundamentally only respect for truth; it is a valuation of true judgments or decisions in preference to false judgments and decisions, and it is determination with respect to this valuation. If there were no alternatives involved, l8 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY It is to the great credit of Dante and the mediaevaUsts that they recognized this truth. For them freedom was no matter of libertine impulse; it was the gift of reason. "Free choice is free judgment in matters of will," is Dante's phrase, and this freedom of judgment he regarded as the greatest gift conferred by God upon the human race. The difficulty of the mediaeval view, — a difficulty which was never solved, — is the reconciliation of bona fide choice with thoroughgoing foreordination. If what has just been said about the funda- mental condition of reason be true, its impli- cations with reference to states are not far to seek. Reason consists in free choice as be- tween real alternatives; the existence of reason, therefore, rests upon the existence of conflicting possibilities. Reason within ^ a state • — no more than reason in human affairs generally — cannot exist except among a citizenship endowed with the power of free choice; an utterly 'efficient' state can be neither rational nor free; the first condition of a reign of reason is a reign of freedom. _ This is the first point in regard to political reason: that it can only exist in states whose citizens are free. But there is a second char- acteristic of almost equal pertinency to the the word 'necessity' would itself be meaningless (as essentially it is when applied to mechanical situations, which are without alternative outcomes until restated in ideal terms). Reason, therefore, is funda- mentally based upon free choice in a situation presenting real alter- natives; or, otherwise put, the essence of true freedom is rational choice, which is rational determinism. 19 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY times. This is the essential detachment of reason. Reason is conditioned by a material situation, but it is not itself material. It is essentially a condition of withdrawal from the material and the physical. We ' stop to think, ' as we say; and the whole art of rational living is the cultivation of the power to withdraw from action for the sake of thinking. The main portion of our active life is a social life; but reason is mainly anti-social, individual, in character. It is a notorious fact that men reason least when their activities are most collective; the responsibilities of reason are far more with the closet scholar than with the orator of the forum; even generals are bomb- proofed when they plan their battles. Men act most efficiently for the accomplishment of determined ends when they act in groups, but they think most eifectively when they think in severalty. The history of civilization, with its Plato, Archimedes, Galileo, Coper- nicus, and the rest, is loud in this asseveration. The den may have and does have its fallacies, but they are fallacies of logic, not of tempera- ment, as are those of the forum and the ros- trum. The truth is that a state in which the will and desire to act is controlled by collectivist purpose, and not by free choice, is only an organized — and hence an especially dan- gerous — mob. The mob mind, no matter how complexly organized, is inferior to the individual mind, than which it is infinitely 20 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY less rational. The excellencies of mind (as history shows) develop in detachment from affairs, in the acquisition of what we call mental perspective, and not in social absorp- tion. Individual detachment no less than individual liberty is requisite to all realization of ideal values. If reason possesses the characteristics which I have assigned to it, — free judgment and detachment from action, i. e., liberty and in- dividualism, — it follows inevitably that reason must be sought not in coUectivistic states, but in democratical states, where liberty and individualism are prized. It follows, too, that such a metaphysical entity as the "overindividual state" of Professor Muensterberg or the "living being set high above individuals" of Professor Meyer is a rational monstrosity; and I cannot but feel that it is just this monstrosity which drives the non-Teutonic world to its present horror of the German state machine. There is in this machine's hugely brutal operation something at once fascinating and terrible, and, as with all terrible fascinations, something inhuman. To call it superhuman is quite in the Ger- manic vogue, but to men reared in the humanitarian school there is nothing com- plimentary in the epithet: the Uebermensch can never be less than unlovely and ogreish. Prussian militarism is not, in my view, a thing of arms and munitions; it is a point of view. A while back I said that it is a modern 21 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY expression of mediaeval feudalism. I will now add that it is feudalism despiritualized and imbruted by the superposition of a conception of the state in which true reason and hence true humanity have no part. No one, I trust, will regard this condemnation of a theory of the state as a condemnation of the German people nor even entirely of the German state; for no state, whether autocracy or democracy, is perfect of its type; and this is obviously true of Germany, which contains many ele- ments of democracy, wherein, as I believe, are to be found the sources of the true great- ness of the German people. But the essential character of an "overindividual state" and an "overindividual national mind" seems to me, both in its conception and in its present fruits, nothing short of damnable. V In this criticism of the anti-democratical state I have tried to lay the foundations for a proper estimate of what should constitute the true democracy, — not such a democracy as we have in our United States of to-day, to the flaws and weaknesses of which no man is more willing to confess than am I, but such a democ- racy as we would have our state to be, could we reconstruct it according to the true principles of rational liberty. It is a fact we cannot blink that historically democracies have been short-lived. Their 22 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY equilibrium is unstable and likely to be ephemeral. This follows, inevitably perhaps, from the slothfulness of human nature; men do not cherish the responsibilities of thought, especially of rational thinking. It is much easier to act under command than to com- mand, much easier to act than to think; the herd follows the leader because this is the path of least psychical resistance, and the ever-pressing peril of democracies is the will- ingness of the citizenry to become a led herd, to degenerate into an undisciplined mob. To many minds such an undisciplined mob is a more revolting spectacle than is the mechani- cally organized mob-soul of the autocratic state, and the bad democracy seems to be the worst of states. But here I am inclined to stand with Plato to the extent, at least, of maintaining that of all evil states the evil democracy is the least evil, and for the very reason that it is the least efficient. But what of the good democracy? Plato regarded it as the least good of good states, but on this I must part company with the ancient. I am willing enough to concede that the good democracy is less efficient than the good autocracy or oligarchy; but efficiency I cannot regard as the measure of goodness. Efficiency means only instrumentality; it is an agency, not an end; and in political insti- tutions it happens to be an instrument whose perfection defeats the proper ends of demo- cratic states, as we see too often in our own 23 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY *well oiled' politics. The proper ends of democracy are that law and justice which express the liberty of reason. These are not expressions of perfection, but of imperfection; they are not the products of concord, but of conflict; and their continued existence is dependent upon the continuation of the conflicts of which they are the partial, but never complete, harmonizations. To put it quite shortly, justice, which repre- sents the exercise of reason, and law, which represents a body of rational judgments, are both definable only in terms of irreconcilable conflicts. And democracies, which depend for their existence upon the exercise of reason by the individual citizens, are only possible where some degree of strife, some internal discord, prevails. I make no doubt but that this is what was in the background of Lincoln's mind when he said, "It has long been a grave question whether any government not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies." History is not reassuring on this point, for the democracies of Athens and Rome and Florence were all too fleeting and it would be arrogance and senselessness for us to assume any necessary superiority of rational resourcefulness over the men of these great cities. How then shall we save our state and its ideals? Is a truly democratic liberty possible? Organization for material interests is essential 24 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY to human society; yet organization of ideal interests is ruinous. Can we maintain the one and avoid the other? It is through ideaUty that we create, and if there is any primary right of man it is surely the right of the indi- vidual to create, — to be something more than the voice and mouthpiece of others. If a mean is to be found anywhere between the material necessity for collective action and the ideal necessity for individual thought, it will be found, I conceive, by way of the clearer conception of law and justice. In one of the most brilliant pamphlets which the war has called forth. The War and Religion, Alfred Loisy says: "What mankind yearns for in our time is an ideal of healthy freedom and real justice. It desires that force shall be utilized no longer to create laws, but that law shall regulate the use of force." Law, in the state, is the equivalent of self-control in the individual; justice is the equivalent of the restraint of reason and the love of truth. Liberty, which with the Greeks we must define as a mean between license and slavery, can exist only in states where the individual in- telligences are eternally alert; hence, where there are real problems, involving real issues and real frictions of man with man. Liberty is the delicate equilibrium of life, and like all life it is a state of individual souls. The moment individuals are subjected to col- lectivist ideals, the state becomes mechanical and monstrous; on the other hand, the mo- LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY ment law and justice become uncritically institutionalized, the democracy becomes decadent. In Justinian's Digest there is a definition of justice, quoted from Ulpian, which to my mind goes to the very heart of true state- craft: Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi. Justice is a 'con- stant and perpetual wiW; justice is an un- failing hold upon the mental powers of thought and determination, an eternal alert- ness of the reason. It could not be better put; and I would only add to Ulpian's qualifica- tion that this eternally vigilant will should be directed not only to 'rendering to each his due,' but to defending in and for each his right. I have stated my reasons for believing that this will, which is the essence of justice and hence of the liberty of states, is possible of cultivation only in democracies. But I have not sjiown that it is long possible there; nor am I sure that it is so. In the United States to-day I seem to see a petty efficiency prized over liberty, party loyalty over justice, sub- servience to mob expression over the exercise of individual reason. These, I believe, are symptoms of a deep and biting disease. And for its cure I can conceive no other agency than the personal inspiration of personal thought, that inspiration for which Socrates so greatly stood in the days of Pericles. Mor- dantly ironical, pitilessly just, indifferent to 26 LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY all save truth, Socrates allowed no weakness of sentiment or frailty of feeling to withstay his probing. He spared none save the intel- lectually dead. Hither and thither he went, stinging the lethargic souls of men, and leav- ing them to writhe with their problems. It was the ruin of the narrow efficiency of ty- rants, but it was the salvation of that liberty of the reason which is the fountain of all liberty. The Athenian democracy put Soc- rates to death, — yes, but it was a death which was the suicide of the democracy, while for Socrates it was only the gateway to the city of truth. March, igi6. 27 THE FEAR OF MACHINES THERE are few traits of human nature more curious than is our awe of human nature itself. In the mode of attraction this awe becomes veneration, sometimes ideaHstic, sometimes superstitious. IdeaHstic is the veneration of hero, sage, and saint, whose high humanity seems to us a trans- figuration wrought by some superhuman grace. Superstitious is our quaint creduKty in the wisdom of emotions and intuitions, and above all in the sacrosanct sagacity of tides of public sentiment — the divine voice of the people. ' Soul, ' we say, is manifested in these things, — 'soul,' a hidden treasure, not well understood, be it the perquisite of a private temperament or sacramentally shared by a mob. In this mode of attraction our awe becomes a veneration, which may descend to superstition; in the opposite mode of repul- sion this same awe of our nature and its manifestations begins with suspicion and mounts to superstitious terror. The suspicion is directed to the unresolved motives with 28 THE FEAR OF MACHINES which we credit men, for we deem that there is a subterranean level of impulse beneath human conduct, to which reason gives only a specious surfacing; and, as with all dark vulcanic forces, we fear it. The terror is most shown in the presence of those great material and social agencies which form the outward bodiments of our inward desires, and in hor- rific mode image the soul's hid lineaments in soulless machines. In all nature there is noth- ing more brutal than is human device, and on the face of nature is no scar so black as those inflicted by the hand of man. And yet the thing need not be: it is but a crude self- fear that perpetuates the shudder. I Idiocy is the most horrible of monstrosities — reasonless instinct bearing the mask of man. The like vacant mentality in the scaly saurian moves us only to curiosity or con- tempt; it is as a parody of humanity that idiocy becomes frightful. Doubtless this is in part due to the fact that the human parody conjures up to us those saurian instincts, sleeping within our own souls, of which we are all squeamishly aware, — sleeping, but with a restless and uncertain sleep which only the perpetual commands of a vigilant intelligence can keep them from breaking: for the brutish ghost of unreason, buried deep in our being, 29 THE FEAR OF MACHINES Is never securely laid. Its emergence in what we call the 'mob soul' seems to us a bestial thing; but when it comes forth in the apparel of reason — as now and again it does, both in individuals and in nations, — then it inspires in us the horror which besets all idiocy. It is this same quality which makes our own created machines seem frightful. A machine has all the device of rational pur- pose, and none of its soul. In the parsi- monious constriction of its elements and in their relentless application to determined motions, the machine is the very image of efficiency, — governed, deadly, predestinarian. But it is an efficiency against which nature cries out; it is an efficiency destitute of that adaptability of means and idealization of ends which is the humane essence of true reason. A theologically monstrous God ad- ministers a justice untempered by mercy; a soul made monstrous by its own miserliness warps life to one idea; nature without acci- dent is ugly, and device with no latitude of adaptation is hideous. The poetry of tools attaches to the most primitive and the most generalized forms, — to the smith's hammer, the woodman's axe, the tiller's hoe, to spindle and distaff, hearth and crane; the pen will never be replaced by the typewriter in the imagery of letters, nor the sword by the ma- chine-gun in the imagery of war. Those old- fashioned locomotives with polished brass bands, floral ornaments, and personal names, 30 THE FEAR OF MACHINES were far more intimately human than the modern Molochs of the rails, serially num- bered and mechanically interchangeable. No author has pictured the horror that is inherent in mere device with more vivid imagination than has H. G. Wells in such novels as The First Men in the Moon and The War of the Worlds. The first-named shows the fate of a man who here on earth is the arch embodiment of the 'coldly scientific reason,' when transported to the moon. That orb he finds honeycombed by a colony of ant-like beings, mocking man in size, but gifted in superhuman measure with intelligence of machines, so that they have reduced the whole lunar world to one efl[icient state, utterly 'socialized' and utterly soulless. In the presence of such monstrosity the earth-born scientist, still feeling the tug of his humanity becomes insane. In this novel Wells holds up to deserved satire the conception of a mechanically organized world-polity; in The War of the Worlds he portrays with no less frank imagination the hideousness of mechani- cal efficiency when bent on destruction. His octopus-like Martians are in fact no more than embodied appetites provided with the narrow machinery of self-gratification. Until the present War, when Germany has displayed to the world their hateful likeness, such possible antagonists seemed indeed as remote as Mars. The striking difference in the two struggles, the fictive and the real, is that 31 THE FEAR OF MACHINES whereas Wells depicted human heroism as futile when thrown into contest with machine- endowed appetite, the War in Europe reads a different value into human heroism. In material engines, things of wheels and levers, we see the exteriorization of one dis- tortion of our natures, — undeviating applica- tion of all force to one determined end, which eliminates both the need for judgment and its exercise, and hence eliminates individual will. In our social machines, — all the care- fully organized device of politics, industry, and war, — we see a similar exteriorization of distorted humanity, similarly precluding the general exercise of reason, enforcing intoler- ance, and destroying liberty. Publicly we have long felt a fear of such social machines, without any clear understanding of their im- port. In politics our distrust of party organi- zations, bosses, and professionalism, is such a fear; in industry it is reflected in our antip- athy to irresponsible unions and 'soulless' corporations, and again in our wistful harking back to the day of the likable jack-of-all- trades and to the poetry of handicrafts; in the matter of war it is present in our abjection before what we call 'militarism.' We vaguely realize the need of such social machines; we helplessly employ them; but all the time we regard them with animosity and assail them with abuse. If at times we concede a timorous admiration to their 'efflciency,' this is only to point the evil of their misapplied power. 32 THE FEAR OF MACHINES Especially since Germany has reared for us the specter of an organized mob, a reasonless appetite guided by reasonless ambition, have we become obsessed with panic, — now mani- fested in a clamorous demand that we sur- render our reason and liberty in the building of a machine that will enable us to gratify our own meaner appetites, now in a weakling plea that we bury our heads in the sands, a trembling invitation to destruction, until the storm pass. Both of these policies are contemptible surrenders to contemptible fears. There are facts that must be faced. Among them, first and inexorable, is the fact that human ma- chines, social and physical, are growing in complexity with the increase in the numbers of men, as well as with the natural complexifi- cation of human wants. Primitivism is as natural to the mind burdened with the prob- lems of civilization as is Utopianism; but it is even more visionary to dream of a return of an Arcadian past than to hope for a Millennial future. Democrats from Aristotle to Rousesau have framed as their ideal polity a small state, secluded in its prospects, moderate in its de- mands; yet both Aristotle and Rousseau lived on the eve of huge experiments in empire. Tacitus, amid the artifice of Caesar's court, idealized the simple virtues of the German; while the whole mind of the artificial eighteenth century sought philosophic relief in its fantasy of the 'natural man.' But such dreamings 33 THE FEAR OF MACHINES are mere simps for a jaded taste. The forward- facing man knows that human artifice must not and cannot be wrecked. Even were it desirable, there is possible no 'back to nature'; on the contrary, every coming year must in- evitably see mankind laying a more unhesi- tating and a more commanding hand upon Earth's body, until all her five continents and all her seven seas are bounded in his polity. The future is not in the hands of those who fear human organization. But is it to be in the hands of men who command or of men who are commanded by the organizing ma- chines? This is the radical question, and on its solution turns the way of our world, — whether it is to become an arena of free and rational endeavour or a circus given over to painted shows and the glutting of beastly appetites. There is no manner of doubt that the apparatus of organization is dangerous to the very intelligence that creates it; that in complicating the instrument we obscure the end; and that there is an unceasing peril lest we be blinded by our own device and snared by our own inventions. Hoist with their own petard, Americans are drowned by sub- marines of American contrivance; while the irony of the goosestep is that it is self-imposed. There are monarchs puppeted from birth, statesmen become the fools of their own diplo- macies, soldiers who are but the mechanic slaves of the art of war, — all no better than 34 THE FEAR OF MACHINES the Siegesallee's nail-studded block in the image of Hindenberg;^ but assuredly all no worse than are those pastes and casts of man- liness which, in democracies, are blocked and reblocked to suit the raw greeds of political parties. It is no part of wisdom to deny the danger created by the machine, or that there is peril to its makers in social device. It may well be that the danger besets democracy even more than other forms of government: for democracy is, by its nature, nearer than are other forms to easy surrender to the sway of the reasonless mob. The ends which guide democratic societies are necessarily complex; indeed, complexity of end is just what makes ^African colonies bulk large in the War's controversies, and the place in the sun which Germany demands is mostly in the tropical sun. But is there no Nemesis in empire and has Germany got only good and learned no evil from her black colonies? To me, at least, the Hindenburg colossus is a grisly sign. The West Africans have a type of fetish called Fetish-into-which-Nails-are-Driven. The making of a fetish of this sort is a matter of tribal importance (I cite Den- nett). "A palaver is held, and it is there decided whose kulu [soul] it is that is to enter into the Muamba tree and preside over the fetish to be made. Aboy of great spirit, or else, above all, a great and daring hunter is chosen. Then they go into the bush and call his name. The Nganga priest cuts down the tree, and blood is said to gush forth. A fowl is killed and its blood is mingled with the blood that thev say comes from the tree. The named one then dies, certainly within ten days. His life has been sacrificed for what the Zinganga consider the welfare of the people. They say that the named one never fails to die. .... People pass before these fetishes calling on them to kill them if they do, or have done, such and such a thing. Others go to them and insist upon their killing so and so, who has done or is about to do some fearful injury. And as they swear or make their demand, a nail is driven into the fetish, and the palaver is settled so far as they are concerned. The kulu of the man whose life was sacrificed upon the cutting of the tree sees to the rest." Has not Germany immured the soul of humanity in her nail-studded idols.'' Africa capta ferum victorem cepit ! 35 THE FEAR OF MACHINES them democratic, — "full of variety and dis- order," as Plato ironically puts ^ it. Oligar- chical states, on the other hand, have rela- tively simple ends, reflecting the fewer wills which define public purposes; and this sim- plicity of end makes easy not only that effi- ciency of self-seeking which we profess so to admire, but it also enables such states to keep in view their purposes with a directness which is impossible to the complex and disor- derly democracy. Imperial Russia could follow the policy of a Peter for centuries, whereas America must blunder bloodily into the nationalism its institutions assume. Reason is assuredly put to a harder trial by the tumult of the Forum than by the devils of the Den. But shall we therefore yield us to our fears .f" Legions have destroyed the Caesar who created them, and the armies of republics have im- perialized consuls. Arms forged for protection have been perverted to conquest, and fed- erations for defense into empires of oppression. But must we for this abjure the right of free- men to maintain their liberty.? Militarism is not an embodiment in arsenals and armies; militarism is a surrender of the passion for righteousness to the panoply of war, and for a nation which can keep that passion strong and pure arsenals and armies present no peril. Those who cringe at the thought of the nation in arms are but visibly expressing their own moral weakness and their want of faith in the possibility of a just 36 THE FEAR OF MACHINES democracy. There is peril in a loaded gun; there may also be safety: in last analysis, it is the alertness of the controlling intelligence that decides. The same is true of the loco- motive and its engineer; and the same of medicine and its practitioners, of industry and its captains, of courts of law and their magistrates, of all mechanical and social device and its devisers. We live in a kind of world and in an age of the world where devices of all sorts are growing in complexity, where, therefore, the necessity for alertness and self- mastery in the control of device is ever more urgent. If we are democrats we know that especial perils beset us, both because of the confusion of our aims and because it is easier for the mob than for the individual to mistake appetite for reason, and advantage for right. But if we are men, we shall not be craven because our world happens to be dangerous; and remembering that our machines are of our own make, we shall refuse to succumb to superstitious terrors. Hunc ighur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest non radii soils nee lucida tela diei discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque. II Natures species ratioque! The cure of super- stitious terror is knowledge of Nature in her outward forms and knowledge of Nature in her inward reason; and this Lucretian cure 37 THE FEAR OF MACHINES is double because the peril of ignorance is double, outward and inward. The outer peril is that fear of mechanical things, grim mobili- zations of material and personnel, which give us so huge an impression of power. But is not this monstrousness and deformity of machines due just to the fact of their automatism, — to their purposelessness or to our ignorance of the uses to which they may be put? And is not this ignorance itself an ignorance of our own intentions, of our own purposes and reason, — for machines are human tools .f* The inward peril is more terrible than the outward, and it is the cause of the outward: what we see exteriorized in machines is human purposeless- ness, but purposelessness endowed with force. That force can act only under some direction; if the directing power be not foresight, it must be impulse and appetite, and impulse and appetite too often and too fearfully it is. Here is the deep peril of the soul. Our terror of things outward is due to the gloom of things inward — terror animi tenebrceque, — and of these Itwain suspicions 'tis the latter is most damning. A Washington despatch, in the days just succeeding the breaking of relations with Germany, stated that President Wilson could not then define what, in his opinion, would constitute that overt act on the part of Ger- many which would bring him before Congress. But, said the despatch, the President is cer- tain that when the time comes he will "feel" 38 THE FEAR OF MACHINES that it has come, Congress will " feel " that it has come, and the whole neutral world will "feel" that it has come. Intuition, emo- tion, the imperative inspiration of public feeling, these, rather than foresight and reason (so the despatch implied), were to govern the United States of America in a supreme crisis of her history. The event has proven the President wiser than the press, but it has not altered the fact of our public distrust of the public reason. When the citizens of a democratic nation are asked to repose an unenlightened confidence in its official leaders, leaving to them knowledge of the facts upon which national policy is to be based, and the option of its disclosure, this can only be because the self-reliance of reason is no article of the national faith, — because, in short, it has no belief in the democracy of rational judgment. The secret diplomacies which precede wars, and the political (as distin- guished from military) censorships which accompany them are the inevitable ex- pression of this unfaith, whose harsh cor- ollary is flattery of impulse and idolatry of appetite. Distrust of reason is the first descent. Be- yond looms an altar to the Genius Publicus, and the wild adulation of a sovereign mob running amuck beneath the pillars of the Forum. Choice between beasts of the arena and incense to Caesar is next, and beyond that the images of grim Pharaohs and death- 39 THE FEAR OF MACHINES less majesticals asserting sway over men as insouciant gods. The Divine Right of the Lord's Anointed, be he Kaiser Wilhelm II or the Sovereign Voice of the American People, is the right of unreason over reason, of super- stitious fear over intelligent purpose. In the history of political theory there are just two key conceptions. The one finds the source of sovereignty in blind and emotional ac- quiescences, — in belief in the holiness of rulerships (and even Dante was moved to this) ; belief in the right of the lust of power (which Machiavelli and Nietzsche proclaim); belief in the contagious benevolence of our natural sympathies (which is the text of Rousseau and the modern democrats). The other conception is the Greek, the Aristotelian conception, that the source of sovereignty and the authority of states is, or should be, reason and reason alone, and that the best state is that which is based upon the most intelligent inquiry into the purpose of human life. In the period of recorded history most states have blindly gone the blind way of superstition; few have followed the light of reason. But has this brought wisdom into human affairs? The answer is the Great War, nation after nation, in the glass of disaster, revealing its deep stupidity. Latest is America, paralyzed in mind, waiting for a flood of emotion to give it guidance, — for whatever has been the in- tention of our leaders, this has been the public 40 THF FEAR OF MACHINES temper. Behind us is England, blundering haplessly, almost grotesquely, into a struggle she should have foreseen and prepared for. France, with her initial trust in the Belgian buffer, Russia, massive in ignorance, Austria, no less massive in recklessness, — all in their measure show the same unintelligence: for they seem to have entered into the conflict with the notion that it was to be a game, played according to political rules, and eventuating in political defeats and victories, — an illusion now long dissolved in their own spent blood. But of them all none has suffered the delu- sion of a more colossal unintelligence than has Germany; none has so ghastlily grained the horror of unreason into the souls of men. The delusion is older than the War, which, indeed, is born of it; and it is a delusion doubly deceptive because veiled with the apparition of the reason it denies. I refer to that form of the divine right theory which Germany has made peculiarly her own, serv- ing as her conscious vindication of the War, and in no small part as its pretext. Citation of source is beyond necessity, since the apostles of the "over-individual state" and "the trans-individual national soul" have proclaimed their creed unto all ears. But it is worth while to point out that this mystical super-state, whose sacramental body is the transubstantiated flesh of its citizens, is not (as is often enough inferred) a modem replica- 41 THE FEAR OF MACHINES tion of the classical model. Greek and Roman lived and died pro patria; but in each case theirs was a fatherland looking directly and humanly to that good life of the citizen which their sages regarded as the end of statecraft. Socrates died out of fidelity to the law; and Vergil made law — sustaining the weak and abasing the arrogant — • the justification of Rome. Even Marcus Aurelius, Stoic of the Cosmopolis, announces: "My will is to my neighbor's as unrelated as my breath to his. Though we be, and in high degree, made for one another, yet in the inner self each has his own sovereign right. " The debate of the Athenian envoys with the Melians, on the verge of outrage, has been more than once cited as the ancient parallel to Germany's outrage upon Belgium; but even here there was no ghastly pretence of righteousness urged as excuse of cruelty; on the contrary, the Athenians employed (as William James remarked) a "sweet reasonableness" which is entirely open in its appeal to what is con- sciously brutal in human nature. "As for the gods," they said, "we expect to have quite as much of their favour as you: for we are not doing or claiming anything which goes beyond common opinion about divine or men's de- sires about human things. For of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will." The true parallel to the doctrine of the 42 THE FEAR OF MACHINES divine right of Kultur is the Muslim Allah ilah Allah! sung to the naked scimetar; or better, it is the benign blight spread by the pious Incas over Andean America. Indeed, there is no book which so brilliantly illuminates the pages of contemporary history — when the understanding of Germany is the prob- lem — as does the Royal Commentaries of Garcilasso. When Manco Capac received his commission from "Our Father, the Sun," the Divine One said to him: "I take care to go round the earth each day, that I may see the necessities that exist in the world, and supply them, as the sustainer and bene- factor of the heathen. I desire that you shall imitate this example as my children, sent to earth solely for the instruction and benefit of those men who live like beasts. And from this time I constitute and name you as kings and lords over all the tribes, that you may instruct them in your rational works and government." Naturally this large commis- sion from on high was given a liberal inter- pretation; and speedily we find Lloque Yupanqui, the third Inca, resolving that "arms and power" as well as "prayers and persuasion" should form an agent for the spread of the light. "But the natives of Ayaviri, " writes the chronicler, "were so stubborn and rebellious that neither prom- ises nor persuasion, nor the examples of the other subjugated Indians were of any avail. They all preferred to die defending their lib- 43 THE FEAR OF MACHINES erty. ... So they came forth to fight, with no wish to hear reason, obliging the Incas to arm their men rather in self-defence than for attack. " This was the prologue — the first * defensive conquest' by which the Children of the Sun obeyed that inner Drang which, in its epilogue, clamped their tyranny over civi- lized South America, obliterating those peo- ples who "had their own gods with whom they were at accord, desiring no other," and converting the valleys into cemeteries of lost art. Superstition of this type — asserting the inspiration of a reason that is above reason — is the last refinement of the barbarous soul. We see it in the Germany of to-day, issuing like a murk Jinni at the summons of the Lord of the Lamp, to horrify mankind. In it is no trace of the Greek devotion to the law of human nature (fair or foul) ; none of the Ro- man reverence for the leges regies, jus gentium, and mos pads, that totum sub leges mitteret orbem. Rather it embodies all the monstrosity and frightfulness of human instincts when recog- nizing no excess in their satisfaction, and of brutish credulity made only the more hateful by its assumption of the mask of rationality. When men pose as gods, humanity is lost. In a recent play (Dunsaney's The Gods of the Mountain) a woman pleads with the beggar who would be god : 44 THE FEAR OF MACHINES "Master, my child was bitten in the throat by a death-adder at noon. Spare him, master; he still breathes, but slowly." "Is he indeed your child.?" "He is surely my child, master.'* "Was it your wont to thwart him in his play, while he was strong and well.?" "I never thwarted him, master." "Whose child is death.?" "Death is the child of the gods." "Do you that never thwarted your child in his play ask this of the gods.?" "Master!" "Weep not. For all the houses that men have builded are the playfields of this child of the gods. " III The Greeks were the first democrats, and the Greeks best understood the virtues of democracy. Virtue, they said, is a mean be- tween indulgence and abnegation, — as we might say, between impulse and automatism, — and the anchorage of virtue is self-knowl- edge, self-control, and self-trust. Autocracies take away individual responsibility, sub- stituting the dark commands of imperious rulers, who sardonically hide their own mean appetites behind a pious countenance. But democracies, which grant responsibility with- out a corresponding appeal to reason, kindling indulgent impulse rather than stimulating the labor of thought, play with a dreadful fire. Irmptive and explosive passion, not the 45 THE FEAR OF MACHINES dry and stringent truth, guides their behaviour which is rather to be described as a gambling with human nature than as a true poHtic. Fortunately, as there is a mean in private conduct, which is private virtue, so there is a mean in political conduct, which is demo- cratic virtue. It is founded upon faith in human nature, but upon that part of human nature which is most like daylight, man's reason. It abjures fear of human instruments be they corporations or armies, because it understands their use and its own purposes in employing them. It banishes superstitious reverence for impulse, because it recognizes in intelligent will a safer guide. It owns no loyalty save to truth; it knows no liberty save in its own exercise; it champions no equality that is not proportionate with the good. For its maintenance this democratic virtue de- mands of the democratic citizen that he keep a militant vigil over his citizenship. In the moral world there is no laissez-faire: respon- sibility is relentless. Virtue, like life, is an equilibrium with a high center of gravity; and human societies, like upright human bodies, must preserve their precarious balance by unceasing effort. Nay, the truest image of the democratic state is that which the battle-field affords in the flight and contest of the aviators; for the salvation of democracy depends upon that same combination of un- flagging activity and alert judgment which makes the aviator's duty so perilous and so 46 THE FEAR OF MACHINES inspiring. As with aviators, so with democ- racies, destruction is swift and easy; and as with aviators safety is measured by the power of the machine and the sagacity of the train- ing, so in democracies there is no security save in strong engines guided by clear vision and hands trained beyond trembling. And back of these, and supporting all, what makes both aviators and citizens is belief in the manliness of men. The United States is at war, and in a just cause. If the even hand of justice be main- tained, the war, though it will surely be hard, will be no lasting evil. Our peril is not lest we shall not fight effectively. Our deeper peril is lest we do not think cleanly, answering the justice of our cause with just action, and purifying our judgment of others by as stern and true a judgment of ourselves. The Greeks were the first democrats, and over the shrine of the god of enlightenment they placed the word — FNQei 2ATT0N March, IQ17. 47 ROUSSEAU AND POLITI- CAL HUMANITARIANISM THERE is a dramatic propriety as well as a scholarly interest attaching to the ap- pearance of Vaughan's edition of The Political Writings of Rousseau} The work was published in 191 5, nearly a year after the outbreak of the War, which, as the editor tells us in his preface, came upon the eve of the completion of his undertaking; hamper- ingly with respect to one detail, for he had planned to devote August, 1914, to a trip to Cracow, there to collate his text with the manuscript of the Gouvernement de Pologne, discovery of which had been announced in 191 2. The defect of such a detail (which some future printing may amend) rather empha- sizes the definitive character of Professor Vaughan's work, the objects of which are best stated in his own words: "to collect all the political writings of Rousseau in one body; to present a correct text of what he wrote; ^The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edited from the Original Manuscripts and Authentic Editions, with Introductions and Notes. C. E. Vaughan. Cambridge, 1915. 2 vols. 48 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM and to define his place in the history of political thought." These objects are meas- urably attained in the work offered to the public. There are, no doubt, in the non- political writings of Rousseau passages not here assembled which bear upon his political philosophizing (for the 'natural' and the 'political' man are not so separable in the process as in the product of Rousseau's reflection); but there is certainly nothing of importance for the understanding of his author's political thinking which Professor Vaughan has failed to include in his collection, while, in the way of positive virtue, this collec- tion adds fragments unpublished in editions of the collected works of Rousseau. The most interesting of these fragments is surely that on UHat de guerre, from the Neuchatel manu- script, though certain chapters in Book I of the first draft of the Contrat social are hardly second to this. The editor's further aim, to present a correct text of what Rous- seau actually wrote, has persuaded him into a minute scrupulosity in the notation of variants that would seem finical were its end less im- portant; for he has succeeded in correcting a vast number of obvious errors in the current texts, and in giving what is far the most accu- rate version of Rousseau's word and thought. Finally, in his general introduction, and in several minor articles, Professor Vaughan has contributed a study of Rousseau's place as a political thinker with which future students 49 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM of this field of speculation must squarely reckon. Even a cursory examination of this edition of Rousseau's Political Writings will establish the conviction that its editor has not only performed a task honourable to scholarship, but that he could not have per- formed it with so painstaking a devotion had his labours been animated by less sustaining a sentiment than complete faith in the per- manent importance of his subject's contribu- tion to human welfare. The Vaughan edition is a finely conceived monument to Rousseau, the thinker. And it is in this that lies the dramatic pro- priety of the appearance of the work at the present hour. Rousseau is not the founder of the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment; but he is the subtlest and the most influential exponent of that political idealism which is the Enlightenment's greatest contribution to human thought and to men's affairs, — the political idealism which gave to the period its particular humanitarian cast, and, indeed, added a special (and we hope, ineffaceable) colour to the meanings of the words ' humanity' and 'humane.' Rousseau was a citizen of the one small state which, in his day, stood in the wide world conspicuously for republicanism. His life fell in the yeasty years of the diffusion of democratic belief among the peoples of West- ern Europe, and none can be said to be pre- mier to Rousseau as an agent of this diffusion. 50 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM The political revolutions which, beginning in America and proceeding in France in the eighteenth century, were, in the nineteenth and early hours of the twentieth, to convert the greater portion of the world's states to republicanism, had already in Rousseau's lifetime made their first and most difficult move in the revolution of men's ideas in regard to polity. There are writers who tell us that the revolutions were the outcome, not of ideas, but of blind social instincts following the modellings of chance social environments; the contemporary apology for Teutonism, that it is the inevitable explosion of a pent-up geistliches gas is a notion of the same stripe; but such opinions must here be passed (some- what wearily, I confess) without controversy; the important fact remains, that, be they symptoms or causes, men's ideas are at least their conscious explanations of their actions. Now the soul of sound explanation is clear definition; and of such clarity Rousseau is master to a degree which makes him more than a father of the Revolution. Indeed, the greatest interest which attaches to a present- day examination of his doctrines is not as to whether they were the conscious impulses which French Revolutionists, in quoting them, believed them to be, but as to whether either the subtlety or the truth of Rousseau's theory has up to our time been understood by states- men or embodied in institutions. Our real concern with Rousseau is with the possible 51 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM discover}^ of a teacher of political truth for the great hour of to-day. The final version of the Contrat social was published in 1762. In 19 15 what will long be the standard reference edition of this and the related writings of its author appears in the midst of a stupendous war, — a war which is being consciously fought for the over- throw and for the maintenance of political principles which Rousseau defined more capably than has any other modern. This, in itself, is sufficient incentive for a keen- minded return to the study of those humani- tarian doctrines in which our democracies were nurtured. It may be a fact (though democrats cannot believe this) that the modern emanci- pation of peoples was founded in delusion, and has been leading on to disillusion, now at hand; but even in such case it were the caution of reason to discover how so great an error of nature could have infected men's minds. It can hardly be less than fact ^'as the trial of democracy shows) that the core of democratic truth is even now but vaguely touched by the most convincedly democratic peoples; and this being so, there were only denial of reason in remitting the great analysis. Who, indeed, can doubt that the decades which are to follow the close of the world's most terrible political war will see men turning avidly to the study of political theory, striving to discover some wisdom of thought which will enable them to reduce the courses of their 52 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM lives to order and to meet with mastering discipline such great upsurgings of brutish passion ? The task of a generation of thinkers is set relentlessly; the dial indicates the ap- pointed hour; philosophy must descend from the heights into the camps and towns of men. Is Rousseau still a guide in the field of dis- covery? Reputation assures him, at all events, a place beyond neglect. It is true that there are critics — concerned more with his per- sonality than with his thought — who see in him only a sentimentally romantic adventurer into the realm of ideas. On the other hand, the editor of this new edition of his political writings pays him such tribute as must challenge attention. Conceding Rousseau's shortcomings, still, he says, "there are two things which can never be forgotten. He gave men faith in their power to redress the wrongs of ages. And he held forth an ideal of civic life which has changed the face of Europe. Thanks to the Contrat social, the leaden rule of bureaucracy, hard though it be to break, is weakened and discredited. The ideal of a free people, united in one ' corporate self and working out one 'general will,' is coming, slowly but none the less surely, to take its place. That is the debt which the world owes to Rousseau. That is the glory which nothing can take from him." These claims command consideration, above all in an hour when no source of political truth can be allowed to pass untested. S3 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM II Theories of polity rest ultimately upon conceptions of human nature. These concep- tions may be no more than dim prepossessions — as when the elders of Israel come to Samuel demanding a king, ^'that we also may be like all the nations"; or they may be themselves conscious and elaborated theories, as when Plato astutely figures the ideal state as but the great projection of the virtues of the ideal man. But in all cases where we can speak of conscious politics, there is covert or evident some determining idea of what men are or of what they ought to be. In a fair sense, the history of both political institutions and politi- cal speculation is exemplary of Aristotle's rule: that the first step to the discovery of what a state ought to be is the discovery of what men and life ought to be. Broadly taken, with reference to this rela- tion of political to anthropic theory, there are but two radical conceptions of man, and, cor- respondingly, but two radically different classes of theories of statecraft. The first, and by odds the more ancient division of thought, conceives man theologically and the state theocratically; the second, new in the world with Hellenism, conceives man naturally and the state legally, — or, as we might say, it sees both man and state with near and human vision. Each of these types of theory, theological and naturalistic, has numerous 54 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM historical variants; nor are there wanting mixtures, borrowing from both, as in Aquinas and Hobbes, — though in the mixed examples it is not difficult to percieve which is the parent stem and which the graft. But allowing for these, the broad division still remains radical; indeed, the world is at war to-day because that division is ineifaceable. It were mere mythology to hark back to Frazer's sacred and sacramental kings for the beginnings of the theological theory. His- tory, from its twilight days onward, is writ with example. The Pharaoh who was son of Amon; the Israelitic king, anointed of the Lord; the Csesar whose genius was the sove- reignty of Rome; the Holy Emperor pro- claimed and crowned by the Pontiff of Christ- endom; the Hohenzollern Kaiser, "taking his crown from God alone, without intervention of peoples or parliaments," — all belong in the one series, and all rest their claims upon the assumption that God is the disposer of fates which men are too contemptible to mould for themselves. "The great Gods, Determiners of Destinies, making great my Kingdom, I, Shalmaneser, king of multitudes, hero of Ashur, ruler of the Four Zones, all the world kisses my feet 1 " So run the earlier chapters of the world's history. A dispatch from Berlin (August 2, 19 17) quotes Burgo- master Reicke, of Berlin, as saying: "We call for the benefit of the counsels of workingmen, but the word is quietly passed from the gov- 55 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANlSM ernment table, 'These fellows cannot be told all; just treat them like children,' What is wanted is ... a government of men who are not educated to believe that a bureau- crat necessarily knows better than an ordinary mortal." The difference between these two utterances — of the Assyrian king and the German burgomaster — is not so much dis- tance in time as distinction of the points of view of individuals viewing the same kind of political fact. The theological conception of the state implies necessarily the assumption of chosen rulers and a chosen people. In the earlier stages of the world's history, the ruler divinely elect was less concerned with the grounds of his elevation — usually divine descent or kinship — than with the fact and the obliga- tions he conceived it to entail: if kings were 'hostile to Ashur' or if the smoke of burning cities were a savour in the god's nostrils, the duty of the 'sons of Ashur' was defined. The wars of the Faithful (Christian or Muslim) against the Infidel (Muslim or Christian or Pagan) were not actuated by a different motive, — which is still in our own day, in the antithesis of white men and brown, more than a reminiscence. But such prejudices, in the course of time, come to be fortified with conscious theory. Already in the Jewish prophets is introduced the idea that the Chosen People endure suf- fering and captivity as the penalty of der- 56 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM eliction in worship. Christian theology ca- tholically affirming the demerit of mankind with the salvation of an elect few by act of grace, drew up the plan for a more sr.tisfyingly rational philosophy of the state. Man by nature is corrupt, anarchical, helpless of sal- vation; he is damned and without help from above must remain damned; only the Divine Grace can vouchsafe that help, and it does vouchsafe it in the two institutions. Church and State, which are its temporal vehicles; for man, prelate or communicant, monarch or subject, there is no duty save obedience; for the institution, civil or ecclesiastical, there is needed no sanction save its divine imposition. This is the conscious philosophy of Aquinas and Dante; it is the root of the conceptions of Calvin and of Hobbes; and it is not funda- mentally evaded even by such thinkers as Milton and Grotius. Indeed, from the reign of Constantine to Louis XIV and the last of the Stuarts, this philosophy was the moral bulwark of practically all European kingships. Of all the presentations of the theological theory of man and state, the most majestic is the De Monarchia. Dante's point of depart- ure is the finis universalis civilitatis humani generis, for he says, "it were folly to suppose that there is an end of this civilization and of that, and not one end for all. " The nature of this end is determined by human nature; creation exists not for the sake of the created beings (individual men), but for the proper 57 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM functioning of the creatures. With man, this operatio propria is the actualization of the potential intellect with which he alone among creatures is endowed. But this process can be effectively realized only under a universal peace, — "the best of all those things ordained for our blessedness"; which implies a ruler, to judge the contentions of men. Further, since the whole human race is ordained to a single end, this ruler must be one and single — "all parts should be subordinate to kingdoms; kingdoms themselves should be ordered with reference to a single prince," the emperor; and the whole civil world be thus reduced to hierarchy. Granting his contentions as to the meaning of life and the goal of civilization and assuming the validity of the historical argu- ments by which Dante would establish the claim of the German Emperor, his conception is at once grandiose and rationally sound. Certainly the mediaeval theory, with its dogmatic bluntness, is far more respectable than its psychologized ectypes of the Hegelian schools. Hegel's notion that history is a theodicy, a progressive manifestation of God in creation, is, of course, the mediaeval view. But when he and his kindred thinkers go on to expound their theodicies in terms of outer sense being moulded to inner form, that the latter may contemplate itself as structured from evaporated particularities (for when "the authority of rational aim is acknowledged, privileges and particularities melt away before ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM the common object of the state") and apexed by self-sufficient absolutes ("the government rests with the official world, and the personal decision of the monarch constitutes its apex") then we are far in the morass of the over- individual state. It is in this morass that half the civilized world is to-day embogged. Ill Over against this theological theory of man and the state is the naturalistic or humanistic theory classical in origin and rationalistic in form. It is implicit in the early traditions of Svise men' as lawgivers; it is conscious and express in the activities of sophists teaching an art of politics; it is quite open in the manneredly ingenuous remark of the Athenian envoys, "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. " Socrates, descending from the clouds to ask about justice, proposes to probe this theory to its truth; and Plato, carrying forward the investigation, discloses the essential truth. The Republic is not less instructive in its method than in its content. Plato begins by ex- posing current superficialities, — the shallow honesty of the merchant's son, the shallower kratopolity of the sophistic bully. He goes on to sketch the pattern of a state endowed with the virtues which most men concede, with justice and temperance and courage and wis- 59 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM dom, and he shows that these virtues, in the macropoHs, are but the true enlargement of the virtues of the micropoHs, which is the citizen's soul, and that citizenship itself is truly measured by the fairness and harmony with which these virtues are developed. Thereat, having completed the reduction from state to citizen, he reverses his procedure, asking subtly what is the nature of that good of which the virtues are the instruments; for if the virtues of the state are patterned in the virtues of the man, then the good which the state is meant to bring will be found pat- terned in the good which is the height of human nature. That good Plato finds to lie in knowledge, and in the kingship of philoso- phy; and having determined this, he turns once again to statecraft, judging states by the types of men which they engender and by which they are in return engendered. But the inquiry is still not ended. The ideal state exists for the manifestation of what is good in human nature; but the good that is in human nature is at the last definable only by the good that is discoverable in metaphysical nature, — that is the supreme sanction and the supreme sovereign, the revelation of which (using the language of myth) is the vision of Er. Plato's method here is simply and rationally empirical. The state is measured by human nature; human nature is the glass in which we must read universal nature: 'macropolis, 60 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM micropolis; microcosm, macrocosm.' In the course of the argument all the essential ideals of Greek polity are defined, directly or by im- plication. Justice is a harmony of the human virtues; and these virtues are civic for the reason that man is by nature and necessity a political animal. Law is the law of nature, reflected in human interpretations or insights, — for nature itself is humanistic. The sover- eign is that good which all men desire, and which intelligence may attain, — for in the world by which men are created the good is sovereign. Finally, liberty is the recognition of law, provided that law is founded upon knowledge of the good. As Aristotle has it, "the good man is the measure of everything." Plato's ideal polity is often described as being socialistic; but in truth neither he nor Aris- totle ever loses sight of the fact that the state exists only for the well-being of the indi- vidual, and in a supra-social, a metaphysical sense. Man is political, and the state should bring him realization of his political respon- sibilities; but he is also more than political, he is philosophical, and the state should leave hirn free to realize his philosophical possi- bilities. This does not mean the anarchy of personal lusts, — as so many moderns would make democracy to mean; it means instead the rational imitation of a pattern citizen, a type of human being, an ideal individual life, with a 'work' to do. Nor does it mean — as the Hegelizers infer — that the individual is 6i ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARJANISM to be absorbed in the state, the structure itself being the end. Plato has once for all divided himself from the collectivists in that divinest of his utterances: "In heaven there is laid up a pattern of it, which he who would may behold . . . but whether such an one exist or will ever exist on earth is no matter, for he will live after the manner of that city, rejecting all other. " To the ideal programme of Plato's Re- public there is a curious and striking parallel in the development of Roman law. This begins with the formulation of the customs and enact- ments of the early city in the jus civile, ex- pressing current and uncritical conceptions of duty. It proceeds, with the growth of the Republic's empire, to a recognition of the virtues of states as men empirically know them, expressed in the jus gentium. As a con- sequence of comparison, and a search for general principles, it seeks to define what is fundamentally true of human nature, and this is the jus naturale; and finally, in some Stoic rulers at least, there arises the conception of the metaphysical foundation of the natural law of mankind in their universal citizenship in the cosmopolis. The whole procedure is, as it were, a vast historical elucidation of Plato, beginning and ending, as did he, human- istically, and in the process establishing such a body of legal thought that the Persizing emperors (West and East seeking to introduce Oriental notions of monarchical divinity) 62 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM could not even colour, with their purples, its rational humanism. The root of that humanism is already vigor- ous in the Lex XII Tabularum. " If one sum- mon a man to court, let him go." "As the tongue shall have pronounced, so let it be." "As a man shall have appointed by his will, so let it be." Here are the definitions of responsibility, — responsibility of the citizen to the courts, of neighbour to neighbour, of a man to himself; and it is such responsibility that is the charter of human freedom. Under the Republic a law was regarded as an obliga- tion assumed voluntarily by the people: pop- ulus iuhet, 'the people bind themselves.' In Justinian's Digest the laws are regarded as binding because 'established by the decision of the people'; and the high point of Roman legal thinking is reached in Ulpian's definition of justice, which the Digest quotes, as " a con- stant and perpetual will to give to each his right." The will, the intelligence, the con- sciousness of the citizen, is court of last resort. To Roman jurisprudential philosophy Christianity brought its own peculiar addi- tion. On the ecclesiastical side, and especially in conjunction with feudalism, Christian the- ology went strongly to the fortifying of hier- archy, and in politics, to the vindication of divine rights. But another, and w4th this inconsistent, doctrine appears from the first. Christian theology necessarily insisted upon the freedom of the individual will. 63 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN! SM Lo maggior don, che Dio per sua larghezza fesse creando, ed alia sua bontate piu confo"mato, e quel ch' ei piu apprezza, fu della volonta la libertate,- di che le creature intelligent!, e tutte e sole furo e son dotate. Dante tries, in the De Monarchia, to twist this need for freedom of judgment to the cause of absolutism (only the judgment above greed can be free, and only the monarch can have this); but the incongruity is gaping. Milton is far more rational in employing the same theological premise to justify the free commonwealth. God gave Adam "freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had else been a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. . . . They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin. . . Suppose we could expel sin, " by removing temptation, "how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same." God, "though He commands us temperance, jus- tice, continence, yet pours out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives Ub minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety." Liberty of this parlous type represents a far cry from that freedom which Hegel makes the genius of the German world, — "an unlimited self-determination which has its own absolute form as its purport. " Of the Christian contribution there is no 64 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM more striking statement than that of Las Casas's "Memoir on the question as to the power of kings to ahenate their subjects, their cities, and their jurisdiction".^ Ail men are by the right of nature free, says Las Casas, — and his words have the ring of a trumpet. Reason and the civil law both recognize this truth. "The human species having everywhere the same reasoning nature, God has not willed that one man be born sub- ject to another, but that all should be equal — for, following St. Thomas, the essence of the intellectual faculty is not a thing relative from one man to another, but a moral being, ab- solute, essential, and necessarily pertaining to each individual; in sort that individual liberty is a right accorded by God himself, as an essential attribute of man — which is, in fact, the principle and source of natural right [jus naturale].'^ Las Casas, whose "Me- moir" is a veritable bill of rights, goes on to lay down the foundations of politics. A 'freeman' is "one who enjoys the power of exercising his free will as he understands it, in disposing of his person, his goods, his actions and his rights, without being submitted to the necessity of obtaining permission to do so from another man." "The free will of the nation is the unique efficient cause and the sole immediate and veritable source of all ^This "Memoir" is included in QLuvres de Las Casas, edited by J. A. Llorente (Paris, 1822). Llorente's French version is translated from the first published edition, Qucestio de imperatoria vel regia potestate, etc. (Speyer, 1571). 65 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM power of kings and princes"; and the nation, freely expressing its wish, is "also the sole veritable final cause and object of this trans- mission of power," whose object is "the ad- vantage or good of all." Power is delegated to rulers only with "natural reservations, not expressed by the men, conserving intact their independence and that of their goods, and the right of submitting only with their previous consent to deprivation of goods and the estab- lishment of imposts. " " Liberty is the greatest good a people can enjoy." The king "has no power to command what is contrary to the public good, because he has no authority except as minister of the law." Alienation can only be with "the consent of the nation, when for the good of the state or from political necessity such action is useful," for "the state is a moral body, " not a property. Las Casas is worth quoting at length, for we are not accustomed to think of a sixteenth- century Spanish friar as a formulator of the principles of American independence, none the less virile because his reasonings bear the flavour of scholasticism. Like Milton, he is in spirit of the Renaissance, in spirit a hu- manist, and more than a precursor of the humanitarians. Other Renaissance thinkers are humanistic without being humanitarian. Machiavelli, frankly cynical of morality, making the tyrant's lust the measure of political sagacity, is such an one. So also is Grotius, who can conceive of a people as made 66 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM up of individuals {populus est ex eorum cor- porum genere quod ex distantibus constat) bonded together by one habit and one spirit, but which, nevertheless, owes to its sover- eign only submission. And again so is Hobbes, whose introduction to the Levia- than is a treatise on man, in which he sets forth with unrelieved pessimism such a picture of human nature as only theology and anarchy could contrive, — the picture of the natural man mired in evils, for release from which the loss of liberty were a cheerful price. Back of all such thinking there is the lurking me- diaeval conviction that man is by nature cor- rupt, and that without grace from church and sovereign he is helplessly damned. There is, to be sure, one point with which this thought is in harmony with the Greek: the sovereign is still the good, — only here the good is of another world than this and of another nature than man's. IV Few changes in the history of thought are more quiet and fundamental than that be- tween the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The difference is not so much of content of ideas, as of temper. Hobbes to Locke, Montaigne to Montesquieu, Calvin to Rousseau, — everywhere the antithesis is sharp. The late Renaissance was intellect- ually eager, but spiritually it was still in the 67 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM shadow of the middle ages; it studied the thought of classical antiquity with zest, but with all its humanism, it failed to assimilate that first essential of classical humanism, — belief in the value of the immediate, cis- sepulchral life. It was thoroughly pessimistic of the world and the flesh, and it looked for- ward to Judgment far more with a gloomy gratification in the promise of just punish- ments than with any radiance of millennial hope. Such a belief, for example, as our modern one in progress was all out of its tune. The eighteenth century is the first period to recover something of Hellenic optimism. The Enlightenment is all aglow with rosy remi- niscence of the Golden Age and with rosier anticipations of Utopia. Man becomes trans- formed, and with his change of colour the whole universe alters its hue. Jesus had taught centuries before that the private soul of a common man is worth saving, — a doc- trine that rang strange in the ears of pagans; but the fruit of Eden had, in a sense, theo- logically soured this teaching, and feudalism, ecclesiastical and civil, had gone all against its political realization. Now, in curious coincidence, a return to worldliness brought also a conception of spiritual democracy. It is true the armory of democracy was stocked in the seventeenth century: natural law and the rights of man, the social contract, liberty, equality, consent of the governed, — all had been defined. But these arms could work no 68 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM revolution until they were seized upon by men invigorated by a faith in men; and such were the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Locke, quietly assuming that the law of nature is the law of reason and that men are reasonable seekers after the good, makes of the original compact, not as it had been with Hobbes an instrument for the abjuring of natural liberties, but their stay and guarantee. Montesquieu, dispassionately examining the legal concepts of all peoples in order to dis- cover a law of laws, as it were from men's commonsense of right, restored to mankind — so Voltaire phrased it — the title-deeds of society. And Rousseau, not dispassionately, but passionately believing in man, erected the whole idealism of his time into a great brief for democracy. The Discours sur rinegalite and the Con- trat social are the two prime documents of this brief. These two works, though pub- lished only a few years apart, have been taken as contraries: the Discourse as an extreme expression of individualism, the Social Contract as a championing of col- lectivism. The contrariety, however, is far more apparent than real. Narrowly viewed, the two essays are complementary, not con- flicting. Rousseau, being, like Plato, a phil- osopher of imagination, employs, like Plato, the language of myth: in the Discours sur rinegalite, as in the still earlier Discours sur les sciences et les arts, the my thus used 69 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM is of the aureate innocence of a Saturnian past; in the Contrat social it is a culture myth, the conversion of troglodytes into men. But if the subtler meaning of these myths be sought, it will be found that in both cases Rousseau is seeking to define the essential man; human nature is first taken in its indi- vidual aspect, and the consequences of its individualism are examined; it is taken again in its social aspect, and the consequences of this are followed out. It happens, as inevitably must be, that on the individual side the key to this nature is found to be emotion, — and Rousseau is thence viewed as a 'sentimental- ist'; it happens again, and inevitably, that reason is the key to the interpretation of the moral nature, — but Rousseau is rarely enough given the credit of his rationalism. The main contention of the two Discourses is identical. Both are concerned with the cause of inequality among men. The Dis- course on the Sciences and the Arts is de- voted to the inquiry as to whether their culti- vation has worked to a purification of morals, and Rousseau finds in the negative; their function has rather been to emphasize social complexities and to serve social inequalities: virtue, "the sublime science of simple souls," and conscience, heard "in the silence of the passions," — these furnish the sufficient phil- osophy of life to humble and equal men, unperturbed by the lure of renown. The Second Discourse attacks the same problem of 70 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM inequality, not from the point of view of such secondary agencies as the arts and sciences, but in search of its fundamental cause. This is private property: "The first who, having enclosed a bit of land, assumed to say, 'This is mine,' and found men simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society"; and thereafter, "slavery and wretch- edness germinate and grow with the harvests." The recognition of those primitive conventions which were the first laws the institution of the first magistrates: these steps follow, first as guarantees of equality, but eventually, in consequence of abuse, as sources of despotism. The last and worst degeneration oi society is reached when men " become willing to bear chains in order to impose them in their turn," when "the rich cease to be happy when the poor cease to be wretched," and when rulers "give to society an air of apparent concord while sowing the seeds of a real division." In other words, it is the perversion of the moral sense that is the ruin of society. For Rousseau rests his theory upon a clear- cut and fundamentally optimistic conception of human nature. What makes man man are his compassion for his fellows and his per- fectibility. The operations of the human soul anterior to reason are two: first, the instinct for well-being and self-preservation; second, the repugnance which men feel at the sight of suffering in other sensible beings, especially men. Pity is a disposition altogether appro- 71 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM priate to beings as feeble and subject to so many ills as are we, and it is the more useful in that it precedes all reflection (" it is not necessary to make a philosopher of man before making him man," — this is directed at Locke); and pity is the source of all the vir- tues. The golden rule of natural goodness is: "Achieve thy good with the least possible ill to others." There is, however, a danger in this virtue of compassion: it sentimentalizes the passions, above all the passion of love, and in sentimentalizing intensifies them. Thence is born a dark progeny, — jealousy, anger, blood-letting, — and the moral nature, even in discovering virtue, is found to be dis- covering vice. A similar peril attaches to human perfect- ibility. Perfectibility is the power which dis- tinguishes man from the animals, for the rea- son that it is based upon the distinctively human power of free choice. Illimitable progress is made possible by this faculty, which "resides as much in the species as in the individual." But Rousseau is wise enough to see that the same power which makes possible progress makes possible its opposite; the quality which opens the path to perfection opens likewise the brbad and easy decline. Particularly is this the case when the power of choice owns no master save the passions of the individual. Intellect and emotion mu- tually fortify and develop one another; it is by the activity of the passions that reason 72 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM perfects itself; the passions in turn draw their origin from our needs and their progress from our comprehensions. For the man and the race whose choices are governed by pas- sions — even when these are compassions — there is Httle prospect save for spiritual anarchy: such a rule of private desire we see monstrously enacted in the civilization that is up to now created. Is it a marvel that, view- ing what intelligence, as the servitor of the passions, has made of society, we should look wistfully backward to the moralless innocency of the first state of the soul? And seeing whither we are come, having discovered that society is being perverted under the leader- ship of private feelings, which not pity itself can universalize, is there no further discovery of a nature in man that can set his feet upon the pathway of perfection.'' This is essentially the question which is put by Rousseau's two Discourses. It is also the measure of their reputed pessimism, which is really no pessimism at all; for Rousseau is throughout an intense advocate of human merit, — of the value of the moral instinct, of the natural goodness of man, of the efficacy of human reason. He has, however, presented but one side, the individualistic side, of human nature; man is not merely private, he is also social and political in his nature; and it is in the analysis of our political nature that the corrective for the excesses of private indulg- ence of private passions must be found. It is 73 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM to the task of discovery that the Contrat social is devoted; in its theories the comple- mentary element is defined and human nature is, in idea at least, shown normally whole. The theory of a contractual organization of the first polities had been advanced by Hobbes as a justification of the indefeasible- ness of the powers of the sovereign, abjured by the contractors in their act. By Locke a like theory had been used as a sort of charter of rights, pertaining to men by nature good and reasonable, who by their contract reserved to themselves intact their natural liberties. It was employed by Rousseau, mythically (for with him the compact was clearly not conceived as an historical event), in a very different sense: as a convenient and vivid figure by which to express that society is at once deliberate and mutual in character, the creation of rational beings endowed with an appetitus societatis (no mere gregarious instinct, but a political sense). In the Second Discourse Rousseau speaks of the research into the nature of "the fundamental pact of all govern- ment" as yet to make, provisionally stating that in character it is a voluntary obligation to observe laws. The Contrat social is the obvious carrying on of this research, directed to the discovery of some principle of the unifi- cation of "what law permits and interest pre- scribes, to the end that justice and utility be found not divided." More particularly, the problem of the contract is : "To find a form of 74 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIAN ISM association which defends and protects with the whole force of the association the person and the goods of each member, and by which each, uniting with all, obeys only himself, and remains as free as before." The solution of this problem is found in the doctrine of the volonU generale^ and of its primacy with respect to the particular will of the individual. The terms of the contract reduce to: "Each of us mutually places his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." Thus is formed the body poli- tic, which by this very act gets its unity, or moi commun, its life and its will. Passively conceived, it is a state; actively, a sovereign; as compared with others, a power. The asso- ciates are collectively a people; as sharing its sovereignty, citizens; as under its laws, sub- jects. The act of association is thus a recip- rocal engagement of the public with all its members, each individual holding a double relation. He is a member of the sovereign with respect to individuals, a member of the state with respect to the sovereign. The au- thority of public deliberation rises directly from these relationships, but it does not extend to a control of sovereignty itself, which cannot impose an unbreakable law upon itself; even Waughan points out (Vol. I, pp. 423-33) that Rousseau probably owes the suggestion of the idea of the general will to Diderot's article in U encyclopidie on " Droit naturel," here reprinted. 75 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM the social contract has no sanction save its own sanity. Further, the sovereign can have no interest contrary to the best interest of its members, for which reason it has no need of guarantees from its members. It is their collective interest. Individual men may have individual wills opposing the general will (in which as social beings they participate); and this, of course, is destructive to the body poli- tic. Hence, that the social pact be not vain, it belongs to the engagement, tacitly, that force may be used to compel obedience — ce qui ne signifie autre chose sinon qu'on le forcera d'etre libre. Law is the formal expression of the general will (which, because it is general, necessitates that all laws be universal in form and intent). "When the whole people decrees for all the people, it considers only itself; and if a rela- tion is then formed, it is of the entire object from one point of view to the entire object from another point of view, with no division of the whole. The matter of enactment is then general, as is the will which enacts. This act I call law." In short, laws, ne sont que des registres de nos volontes ; and any state ruled by laws (that is, general rather than individual will) is thereby republican in genius. In a passage of the Economie politique Rous- seau says: "There are two infallible rules of conduct . . . the one is the spirit of the law, which should serve in the decision of a case which has not been foreseen; the other is the 76 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM general will, source and supplement of all laws, and which ought always to be consulted in default of them." This is clearly the prin- ciple in accordance with which democracies grow. It is an easy matter to misinterpret Rous- seau's doctrine of the general will, especially in the direction of collectivism. In the first place, there is nothing mystical or emotional about it; it is thoroughly rationalistic. The moi commun is never a *mob soul' nor is it ever the 'self of an 'over-individual state'; and the volonte generate is always a true will, the result of a rational choice and the ex- pression of a conscious responsibility; in this Rousseau is a follower of Dante and Milton and the Christian theologians. In a significant passage of the first draft of the Social Con- tractj its author says: "The general will is in each individual a pure act of the under- standing which reasons in the silence of the passions as to what man should demand of his fellows and as to what his fellows have a right to demand of him." At the close of the First Discourse Rousseau had said that the voice of conscience, teaching the Right, must be heard " in the silence of the passions." In the course of the Second he had ascribed to the species even more than to the individual that power of free choice which is the essence of rea- son and the source of human perfectibility. In the first draft of the Social Contract he had stated — following Locke — that the law 77 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM of nature (as applied to man) is the law of reason. Finally, in the authorized version of this document, he comes to the conclusion that natural liberty, which has no bournes excepting the powers of the individual, is no true liberty; true liberty is civil liberty, limited by the general will. Here is moral freedom, based on self-control; and in truly Platonic phrase he adds, "the impulsion of appetite alone is slavery, while obedience to the law which one prescribes for oneself is freedom." Self-prescription of law is political sanity, and in a passage behind which surely stands the image of the Socrates of the Crito, Rousseau tells how a man, as citizen and sovereign, inflicts upon himself the pun- ishments which, as erring man, he has incurred under the law. The change from the natural to the civil state means the enthronement of reason. But are there advantages in this change? Yes, says Rousseau; duty replaces impulse, right succeeds appetite, reason rules inclination, and the whole good of human nature receives nev/ possibilities of development. "Instead of destroying a natural equality, the funda- mental pact substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for the physical inequality with which nature endows men; and while capable of inequality in force or genius, they become equal by convention and right." "If one ask precisely in what consists the greatest good of all, which should be the end of all legisla- 78 ROUSSEAU AND HUMAN ITARIANISM tion, it will be found to reduce to two prime objects, liberty and equality. Liberty, since all particular dependency is but so much power taken from the body of the state; equality, because liberty can not subsist without it." Here we are back again to classical grounds, moving in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. The good is the sover- eign, and the sanction and instrument of the good is that faculty of reason which first makes men of us, and then, in freeing us from the rule of passion, makes us truly free. Classical, too, is the optimistic view of human nature implied in the doctrine of per- fectibility. The first part of the earlier Dis- course opens: "It is a grand and beautiful spectacle to see man issue, as it were, from naught by his proper efforts, dissipate by the light of his reason the shadows in which nature has enveloped him, elevate himself above himself, mount in the ardor of his spirit even to celestial regions, traverse with a giant's pace, like unto the sun, the vast expanse of the universe, and finally, what is yet greater and more difficult, enter within himself in order there to study man, to know his nature, his duties, and his end." The latter phrase, the study of man, represents Rousseau's concep- tion of his own task : in its execution he probed and condemned the unbalanced leadership of passions and ambitions; even when these lead to the development of science and art and the establishment of polities, they are not com- 79 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM parable in goodness with simple virtues; the good that is the realization of right human living must come through the cultivation of the powers of understanding, at once imper- sonal and universal. With a soundly Gallic sagacity Rousseau saw that the 'general will' is founded in understanding of affairs, what the Greeks called phronesis — a something much nearer to our 'common sense' than to the thing we name 'public sentiment'; and he saw, too, that there must be back of this, as its ultimate sanction, a faith in the powers of men to achieve their own good, and a uni- verse which justifies this faith. In this sense he was spokesman of the rationalistic belief in human progress which was characteristic of his century, and which found its perhaps supreme expression — if but for the reason that its author was, when he wrote, a pro- scribed and hunted man — ■ in the words of Condorcet: "In past experience, in observa- tion of the progress so far made by science and by civilization, in the analysis of the march of the human spirit and of the develop- ment of its faculties, we find the most power- ful motives to believe that nature has put no term to our hopes." V Rousseau closes the Contrat social with the brief announcement that the external rela- tions of states constitute a subject too vast 80 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM for his short Hfe. There is evidence (dis- cussed by the editor in a note) that he did, however, outline a work on federation, and that the manuscript of the outline was de- stroyed by a friend to whom he had com- mitted it. For such notions as we have as to Rousseau's theories of international relations we are confined to stray passages of his published works and to inferences from the general character of his political philosophy. But the study of even this meager material is not without reward. In the first place Rousseau regarded the republic as the highest form of state, and he regarded it as essentially a form adapted to the small state; he is, therefore, quite with the Greeks in idealizing the small democracy, or aristodemocracy (to borrow a new term). In the ideal state every member should know every other member: that is the formula, which, with attendant qualities, is expounded in Contrai social (II, x), and with greater length and pic- turesqueness in the dedication to the Sec- ond Discourse. This dedication is to his native Geneva, and to certain passages of it our own day has replied with a cruel irony: *'I would choose," says Rousseau, "for my nativity ... a country deterred by a happy powerlessness from the ferocious love of con- quests, and guaranteed by a position yet more happy from the fear of itself becoming the conquest of another state; a free city, placed between several peoples among whom none ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM has interest in invading it, while each is interested in preventing its invasion by others. . . . Whose citizens, therefore, if they follow the exercise of arms, do so rather to re- tain among them that warlike ardour and hery courage which sit so well with liberty and nou- rish the taste for it, rather than from any necessity of self-defense " — altogether such as yours of Geneva, whose happiness is assured; for "honourable treaties fix your limits, as- sure your rights, and safeguard your repose." With Belgium and Servia under their eyes, the men of Geneva to-day can hardly share their tow^nsman's confidence !^ Not every state is physically adapted to the ideal form. The true size of a state should be determined by the relation of the popula- tion to the possibilities of nourishment af- forded by the territories, not merely by census or square miles. There is in every body politic ^It should be noted that while Rousseau's ideal of the feasible republic is of the small state, yet the conception of a republican fed- eration of Europe appealed powerfully to him, as a vision. In his Jugement upon the Projet de paix perpetuelle of the Abbe of Saint- Pierre, he remarks that to realize the Abbe's European republic for a single day would be enough to ensure its eternal duration. The real interests of both princes and peoples are in such federation, but their apparent interests turn sovereigns " away form the empire of Law to submit to that of Fortune"; rulers, like senseless pilots, though they drive their ship upon the rocks, prefer the vain show of commanding their servants, to the safe anchorage; while ministers must keep their princes embroiled to render themselves necessary — choosing to lose the state, if need be, rather than their positions. Thus, though the project of the Abbe is wise, his means of executing it issue from the simplicity of his heart. "He honestly imagines that it is only necessary to assemble a Congress, and there propose his Arti- cles, in order that they should be signed and all would be done, " — which is to judge as an infant. Rousseau's Jugement abounds with caustic phrases pertinent to our day. 82 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM a maximum of power which it should not pass, and from which it often departs in grow- ing in size. The relation of population to food supply is the true measure of this maximum power. The vigour born of good government rather than the resources furnished by a great territory is the source of welfare. Every people so placed that its only alternatives are commerce or war is weak in itself. "There have been states so constituted that the neces- sity of conquest entered into their very con- stitution, so that to maintain themselves they were forced to expand unceasingly. Perhaps they have even felicitated themselves on this happy necessity, which showed them, more- over, with the term of their aggrandizement, the momemt of their inevitable fall." In the fragment of Uetat de guerre, Rousseau outlines a kind of law of compensation be- tween states, tending to equalize large and small: "It is necessary, in order that a state subsist, that the vivacity of its passions supplement that of its movements, and that its will intensify as much as its power relaxes. It is the law of conservation which nature herself establishes among species, maintain- ing them all, in spite of their inequalities. It is also, to speak in passing, the reason why small states have proportionally more vigour than large ones. For public sensibility does not increase with territory; the more this ex- tends, the more the will weakens and move- ments become enfeebled; and the great body, 83 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM surcharged with its own weight, sinks lan- guidly into decay." It is worth remarking that the biological analogy employed here and so generally by Rousseau is not with him a source of self- deception: he is too sagacious to surrender his imagination to the delusion that the life of a nation is but the life of an individual writ large, — a delusion horrible in its consequences when those who suifer from it conceive it to be their duty to strike down the senescent elders whose heirs they conceive themselves to be. It is true that in the Economie poli- tique, after refuting the notion that the nation is a larger family, Rousseau draws a Platonic likeness of it as an organism, — ani- mal body and members; but in U Hat de guerre, he makes no less explicit the differ- ence. Man, the animal, is fundamentally independent of his similars; the limits of his growth are fixed by nature; his life is short, his years are counted, and even his passions have their measures. The state, on the con- trary, is an artificial body (which means that it is artificed and sustained by human reason); it has no determined measure; its growth is indefinite; and, indeed, its safety demands that it outgrow its neighbours. "The in- equality of men has bournes set by the hand of nature; that of societies can grow end- lessly until the one shall have absorbed them all." This is the source of monstrosity in states, 84 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM and above all of the monstrosity of war. Rous- seau leaves us in no doubt as to war: it has in it nothing natural and nothing reasonable; it is wholly monstrous. In the brief treatment in the Social Contract^ he tells us that war is " a relation of things, not men, " a relation "in which individuals are enemies only accident- ally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not at all as members of a fatherland, but as its defenders. " The paragraph in which this theme was to have been developed in DHat de guerre was apparently not written, but the definition of war which he does give is quite in harmony: "War of Power with Power" is "the effect of a mutual, constant, and manifest disposition to destroy the enemy state, or to enfeeble it by all possible means; this disposition reduced to act is war proper; when it remains without effect it is only the state of war." The important point is that war is essentially a relation of powers or states, and that its animosities are (or should be) directed only to the injury of such artificial bodies, — never to the destruction of men as human beings. Rules of conduct of war follow from its nature. War gives no rights not necessary to its end. "In open war a just prince seizes all that belongs to the public; but he respects the person and the goods of individuals: he respects those rights upon which his own are founded. "^ It may be imagined that Rousseau * Contrat Social, I, iv.; italics mine. 85 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM gives short shrift to the 'might makes right' formula: all it can mean is the annihilation of right. And here we are brought again to the fun- damental note upon which the whole of Rous- seau's thought turns. Right is somehow ele- mental, not perhaps in man as man, but certainly in man as humane. It is the true expression of man's political nature, and no polity which balks its expression is good. By its nature, as founded in reason, it is capable of defeat or perversion; but properly nurtured it is the greatest of blessings vouchsafed mor- tals; compared with the man who is in the highest sense politic, the moralless natural man is vacantly brutish. "The passage from the state of nature to the civil state" — there are few passages in Rousseau finer than this — "produced in man a very remarkable change, substituting in his conduct justice for instinct, and giving to his actions the morality which hitherto they had wanted. It is then only that, the voice of duty succeeding to physical im- pulse and right to appetite, man, who up to then had regard only for himself, found him- self forced to act upon other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his in- clinations. Although in this state he deprived himself of many advantages which he held from nature, he gained others so great — his faculties developed, his ideas broadened, his sentiments ennobled, his whole soul elevated — that, if the abuse of this new condition were 86 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM not often to degrade him below that whence he had issued, he ought to bless without ceas- ing the happy moment which had seized him up once for all, and, from a stupid and limited animal, had made of him an intelligent being and a man." Rousseau, like Dante, saw in the state a source of salvation; but with Rousseau this salvation must be won, not by miracle from above, but by grace of human reason and the sense of right: and to the fatherland which encourages the exercise of the one and insists upon the responsibilities of the other, he felt that the citizen should return every service of patriotism. I must be forgiven one more quo- tation, because it is so splendidly pertinent to our day and hour: "We begin properly to become men only after having been citizens: whence may be seen what should be thought of those pretended cosmopolites who, justify- ing their love of country by their love of humankind, vaunt love of the world in order to obtain the privilege of loving no one. " VI In the cycle of thought Rousseau's position stands clear. He is a humanist and a rational- ist, and in genius he is nearer akin to Plato and Aristotle than to any other thinker. Be- cause he is a humanist, he is a democrat; but his rationalism leads him to avoid the great pitfall of democracy — individualism 87 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM of passion and desire. Like other democrats of his time, he stands for the rights of man; but the man he has in mind is the political man, whose right is in the exercise of his rea- son. It is in reason (not in passion) that men have a life in common and a common will directed to the ends that reason defines. This community (let me repeat) of self and will — moi comviun, volonte generale — is no mystical or sacramental spirit from the skies: it is something that belongs to each man in sever- alty, by reason of that participation in the work of society which develops his own social powers. And Rousseau is quite as indifferent as Plato to the actualization of Utopia; if the society be such as to give the citizen a vision of the ideal city — so that he can order his own house after the manner of that city — it will have achieved its high purpose. The society which does this, which reveals to the actual citizen an ideal citizen whose conduct can be the pattern of his own, is the essential democracy. The ideas of Rousseau have inspired much in political thinking and not a little in con- duct. Have the possibilities of his teachings been exhausted.^ A slight examination of the progress of democracy will instruct us. In the century and a half since Rousseau's day, democracies have multiplied in number, but they have not deepened in understanding. In many particulars the development has been away from a rational individualism and in ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM the direction of an anarchic indlviduaUsm. Hedonism in ethics (in its utilitarian form) has become well-nigh universal; and hedon- ism, which makes of feeling the good, is utterly- destructive of rational morality, and hence of a polity whose genius is right. Even m.ore perniciously irrational (since it is the covert support of all hedonism) has been the doctrine of laisser faire, as applied to society. Two great and gratuitous assumptions — of the beneficence of free competition in the economic world and of the beneficence of a free struggle for existence in the biological world — have m.2i6.Q laisser faire theories seem plausible. But the law of supply and demand and the law of the survival of the fittest are both mechanical; both, therefore, persuade to the abrogation of reason. To what depths of immorality the latter law can lead, the orgies of Machtpol'itik in our own day reveal. Undoubtedly, the un- derlying optimistic belief in the inevitableness of human progress toward the good, born with the eighteenth century and carried over through the nineteenth, is what has made these assumptions so convincing. Rousseau, at any rate, suffered no illusion on this point; he saw with perfect clarity that the agencies which may lead to human betterment, not only can contribute, but too often have contributed to man's debasement: only by diligence of the reason can we save ourselves from the peril. In yet another particular we have missed a truth which Rousseau saw. It is quite appar- 89 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM ent that the EnHghtenment, in the flush of its humanitarian zeal, over-emphasized native human goodness. This was a not unnatural reaction from the elder theological condemna- tion of man. To us (booked in anthropology) there is more humour than poetry in eigh- teenth-century vignettes of poor Lo; but it is hale to recall that in a preceding century Paul III felt it necessary to issue a bull pro- claiming that American Indians are men, and not brutes. Under nineteenth-century scru- tiny the image of the Arcadian savage has dissolved, and, indeed, doctrinaires of evo- lution have swung the pendulum too far, picturing primitive man as worse and lower than he probably merits. But evolutionary teaching has left him at least in potentia hu- mane, and it is on this potentiality that we have erected a humanitarianism that is mawkishly false. It is directed not only to every kind of man, but to every individual, no matter what his case; and it is occupied with the prepossession that the world, in some sort, 'owes' to each individual his measure of private gratification. This is what democracy is commonly understood to stand for. Rous- seau, with his conception of the rigour of duty, and, before all, with his understanding that society exists not for the individual mortal, but for the type of citizen, — with this understanding, is clearly out of such webs of sentimentality. His response to the issue is again an exhortation to the reason, which 90 ROUSSEAU AND HUMANITARIANISM makes of law an expression of the universal and generalizes the will itself. Clearly Rousseau's polity has no more been tried out than has Plato's, — which it so re- sembles. But for us to-day — in a welter of thought hardly less tragic than is that of events — there is an imperative question, upon answer to which hangs the possibility of moving further in the direction of democracy. Is the humanitarian view metaphysically true.^ Can reason be trusted? Is human morality and right more than illusion? There is a great sector of humanity fighting squarely in the negative belief, still asserting the ancient contention that there is no help save in di- vinity and no right save the divine right of the chosen. For us who have grown up to abhor this belief it is easy to refute it with prejudice; but the only refutation that can be lastingly persuasive must come through the discovery, by democracies, of a means to rear a rationally intelligent citizenship, each mem- ber thereof patterning after the universal model which their combinedly instructed wills shape for all. August, igij. 91 TRIAL BY COMBAT AND THE TRIBUNAL OF GOD I A REMARKABLE book is being read to-day in France. It is called Uex- pansio7t de V Alleniagne^ and its author is a Frenchman, Captain Henri Andrillon. The book, which was published shortly before the War, is an earnest effort to gauge the forces, physical and moral, which underlie the threat of German domination, and by analysis of the peril to forearm the author's country- men to meet it. Captain Andrillon is a loyal soldier and patriot. His style is detached and dispassionate; he lets his facts speak for themselves, or, if he deals with theories and deductions, he presents them with a logical directness that leaves the impression of a philosophic indifference to all save the truth. There is no atmosphere of the tribune about Captain Andrillon, no political extravagance, no flushed and noisy chauvinism; he writes as, since the War has come, Frenchmen have shown us they can fight: quietly and with a head for the business in hand. On the whole. The Expansion of Germany seems to me the fair counterpart of Germany and the Q2 TRIAL BY COMBAT Next War^ and Captain Andrillon himself a good Gallic equivalent for General von Bem- hardi. On the physical and historical side of Cap- tain Andrillon's argument, I shall not dwell. He picture's Germany's material preparations for war, military and economic, and he ana- lyzes astutely her diplomatic policies looking to the same end. But all of these he very properly subordinates to the conscious and highly developed moral ideal of which they are but the outward symptom. The key to recent German history is German sentiment, as he sees it; and he finds this sentiment to be curiously well organized and united. With the main features of the morality which Captain Andrillon depicts we had al- ready become familiar. At its foundation lies that belief in the natural superiority of the Germanic race and of Germanic institutions to other races and institutions, whose political expression is Pan-Germanism. Our author cites the German historian Giesebrecht: "Dominion belongs to Germany because she is a chosen nation, a noble race, to whom it falls to act toward her neighbours as is the right and duty of all men endowed with more spirit or force to act upon surrounding indi- viduals less well endowed"; and he quotes again from one of the leaders of Pan-Ger- manism, Herr Schonerer: "We are not only men, we are more, because we are Teutons, because we are Germans." This belief re- 93 TRIAL BY COMBAT ceived, as it were, Its official sanction in the utterances of the reigning Kaiser: "The genius of Germany aspires to the empire of the world," he said in 1902; and in 1907: "The German people will be the block of granite upon which Our Lord can raise and complete the civilization of the world. Then will be realized the word of the poet: " An deutschem Wesen " Wird einmal noch die Welt genesen." Very likely William II was thinking, in these utterances, of the peaceful conquests of commerce and science quite as much as of the triumphs of war, but the background of the thought is clearly that of a people whose * national industry is war,' as has been said of Prussia. "The great questions of the time," Bismarck had said in 1862, "will not be de- cided by talk or by the decisions of majori- ties . . . but by iron and blood." And this dogma of iron and blood became the marrow of Germany's aggressive sentiment. Its out- ward dress, however, was still cast in the form of a moral philosophy. The simplest state- ment of it is the phrase of Deputy Schwerin in the Prussian Chamber in 1863, summariz- ing Bismarck's policy: Macht geht vor Recht — "Might before Right; say what you will, we have the power and we will put our theory into practice. " But this simple form was too baldly blunt for philosophic Germany. It required that parodoxical air of thought which Nietzsche brought to the problem of conduct 94 TRIAL BY COMBAT really to make the idea carry. Neitzsche, with his theory of the superb Uebermensch (that "great blond Beast" in which every Teuton must perforce see his own idealized self) magnificently appropriating whatever is desirable of the world's good, — Nietzsche, with his Superman, supplied just the needed image to make the philosophic German realize his mighty destiny. And Captain Andrillon finds the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of the German ideal in that phrase which Nietzsche had designed for the title of an unfinished book: "The Will to Power" the will to rule, cost what it may. II But it is not in the substance of the German ideal, as Captain Andrillon sees it, nor even in its truthfulness as representing the senti- ment of the German people, that I am pri- marily interested, but rather in the lesson which he draws from it for his own France. The world is moved, history is made, he says, by ideals; it is ideals that engender the power which moulds nations out of peoples. Thus France, the French nationality of to-day, is the creation of the humanitarian ideal of the eighteenth century. The belief that all men are born free and equal, the belief in the natu- ral rights and dignity of the individual, the belief in the brotherhood of mankind: these were the great tenets of the humanitarian 95 TRIAL BY COMBAT school. "The heroic revolution of 1879 was born of a dream of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, common to all Frenchmen," says Captain Andrillon; and in this dream the French nation still lives: the Frenchman still puts his humanity above his nationality, his manhood above his citizenship. Is this dream, is this humanitarianism, an illusion after all? asks Captain Andrillon. Above all, is it as a moral ideal inferior in force and impetus to the German ideal, the Will to Power.? He answers both of these questions with an emphatic affirmative. The state of liberty, equality, and fraternity dreamed of by the French of 1789 was in opposition to the natural law of progress, as sketched by the Darwinian biologists. The idea of it has filled France with Utopian idealists and dreaming pacifists; like a disease they have sapped the manly strength of the nation, — and he more than hints that this disease has been cleverly fed and spread by German intriguers. "The quest of dominion, war, are the fatal conse- quence of human nature," he says; "... and in the inevitable day of conflict, though the pacific peoples sometimes defend themselves with heroism, they are invariably van- quished." The German ideal is of more prac- tical value than the French because it rests directly and unaffectedly upon a fundamental law of nature: the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. But while the German ideal is incontestably 96 TRIAL BY COMBAT of greater practical value than the humani- tarian, is it morally of more worth? — for Captain Andrillon well knows that there are men who prefer death to subjugation, or to preach the gospel in chains rather than to abjure the faith. Nevertheless, even in this regard the Germans have the better of it. It is a great error, he says, to deny to force a moral value, or to place the two things in opposition to one another, as is so often done in France: force against right, justice against force. History shows us that "in all evolution the triumphs of progress are only the triumphs of force; in the social life in particular, the collectivities which have survived are the collectivities militarily, economically, intel- lectually and morally the most perfect, the col- lectivities which have best known how, at the opportune moment, to assemble all their forces and give to them an invincible power; these have survived, and they have survived because this was justice, because they have had not the power but the right. History shows us that if there has never been right without force, there has equally never been durable force without right, nor veritable right that has not ended by acquiring the force necessary for its triumph. " "To be sure," he continues, "we must recognize that the German point of view is not irreproachable from a philosophic and moral point of view; the rule of the strongest, the survival of the fittest, war: all these create 97 TRIAL BY COMBAT for the weak, and indeed for all humanity, a dolorous destiny. But if this ideal satisfies neither the reason nor the sensibility of the honest man, this is because he is not in har- mony with the necessities of universal life, and because the realities of the universe are not themselves in perfect accord with all the dreams of the spirit and all the desires of the heart. This ideal fails to satisfy us because universal evolution, if it has rationality, has such a rationality as neither the intellect nor the heart of man may know. And inasmuch as it is not given to men to change the nature of things, inasmuch as the will to live peace- ably is incompatible with the will to live, there can be only one moral law possible for those great peoples who do not wish to succumb in the universal struggle: that of effort with a view to the possession of force." It is on these grounds that Captain An- drillon urges his native France to abandon her humanitarian tradition, and to adopt as her own that Will to Power in whose Ger- manic manifestation her existence lies threat- ened. Ill I have dwelt upon Captain Andrillon's book for the reason that it gives such a clear and contrasting picture of the ideals which are the stake in the Great War. It presents, too, the spectacle of a highly intelligent and 98 TRIAL BY COMBAT thoroughly sincere man deciding against the ideals which have been the tradition of Euro- pean civilization and which his own nation has brought to their fullest expression. Pa- triotism, philosophy, his own sense of honour, are obviously hurt by this decision, but reason and the truth of the world as he sees it will not permit of any other conclusion: the slow cen- turies which have cumulatively pitted the conceptions of law, justice, and humanity against the doctrine of force, have been wrong, he decides; they have only served to imperil the civilization they express; ere it be too late let us advert to the simple and brutal maxim that ^ might makes right,' and save what we cherish by forcing our way into the ranks of the mighty. No word of mine is needed to point how directly such a conversion affects our own higher interests. We have been educated in the belief in the superiority of law and justice to mere force, in a kind of religious venera- tion for democracy and humanity. Have we been blindly, nay, perilously so educated? Are our ideals, social, national, philosophical, all founded in error and delusion.'' Are they all fraught with the peril of false security and poisoned with self-destruction .f* Is Darwinism true of human society as well as of the bestial world .f* Is Nietzsche's Will to Power to be the fundamental moral maxim, the Golden Rule, of the culture of the future? Are we to erect his Uebermensch, his "great blond Beast," 99 TRIAL BY COMBAT as the image of human salvation to replace the Christus crucifixus ? Doubtless to many of us the issue seems too preposterous for serious discussion; but it is no part of safety tO' avert the gaze from present dangers. Pitiless neces- sity demands of us that we play the part of men, and face the truth, however pitiless. IV As I read Captain Andrillon's book, I thought of Plato and the Platonic Socrates, and of the great arguments about justice in which Plato makes such easy disposal of the Sophists who in his day were saying that power is the greatest good and that the only right is the right of the stronger, — for there were plenty of Nietzsches in the Athens of Pericles and Creon. Was it too easy, Plato's answer to Callicles and Thrasymachus, — too easy to be true.^ And the great tradition of law and justice which rings back to Plato's voice, is it, also, wrong .^ Are we deceived about God? Plato's doctrine of justice has the grandeur of simplicity. In states and societies, justice, as he views it, is order and harmony: it is the law of simplicity in life, of restraint in ambi- tion, of proportionality in desire; it is the law that each man shall have what is his own, his equity in the world's good, and that the well- being of every man shall consist in his partici- pation in the well-being of the whole, — • the lOO TRIAL BY COMBAT whole state, nation, humanity. But this jus- tice of states, Plato held, is only the external manifestation of that prior justice which is the harmony of man's soul. Justice within the soul is a proportionality of the virtues, of courage and temperance and wisdom; it is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, just as injustice is the soul's disease and weakness and deformity; truth is its armour and love of truth its defence. But of what good is this law-and-order justice, of what profit, if a man perish .f' This is the reiterant sophistic question; What gain in being just, if a man die for it.^ Callicles — and here he gives Nietzsche's whole text — cites the divergence of the rule of nature and the rule of men's law: The rule of nature, he' says, is the rule of the stronger, and the good of nature is simply the power to gratify desire, and the only dishonour is to suffer helpless injury. The rule of men's law, on the other hand, is the rule of weakness; human law is the device of the weak to protect themselves against the strong, and their praise of equality before the law is their adulation of their own inferiority. In a similarly contemptuous spirit Nietzsche speaks of the Church which has made of "the love story the one real interest which binds all classes together," and the Deputy Schwerin enunciates his modern ver- sion of the rule of nature, — Macht geht vor Recht. The just man is of all men the most defenceless, sneers Callicles, for he will not lOI TRIAL BY COMBAT commit injustice even to save himself: "For suppose, my dear Socrates," he says, "that some one were to take you, or any one of your sort, off to prison, declaring that you had done wrong when you had done no wrong, you must allow that you would not know what to do: there you would stand, giddy and gaping, and not having a word to say; and when you went up before the court, even if the accuser were a poor creature and not good for much, you would die if he were disposed to claim the penalty of death." Socrates has three answers which he makes to Callicles — the three answers which are Plato's reply to the Sophists of all time. The first is an ironical retort in kind. "O my wise Callicles," he says, "right you say is on the side of might: very well then, agreeing, right is on the side of law and justice, for the demos which makes the laws enforces them against the few who would break and defile them; the consensus of mankind not only applauds jus- tice, but makes it powerful." This, I say, is irony in the mouth of Socrates; but it may become a very terrible and fateful reality if spoken by the Allied nations against that Germany which has so lightly flouted their con- ception of international right: " We will take you at your own rule," they may say; "the law of life is the law of battle; let the fit survive ! " But the Platonic Socrates would have stopped short of this, for his mind was set on other things. "True, O Callicles, there is a law 1 02 TRIAL BY COMBAT of nature which seems often at variance with the law of men; and it may even be that the law of nature will require of a man that he die for his humanity's sake. But of evils, death is not the greatest, nor are all arts but arts of self-preservation. Humanity requires of a man not that he live only, but that he live well; and a little of righteous living out- weighs all the extravagances of depravity; God forbid me the spectacle of the patriarch m vice 1 I" Furthermore, — and this is Socrates' last point, — there is an eternity in righteousness which makes it stronger than any power of a day. In the Crito, when Socrates is in prison, facing death, and is urged to escape, he hears the laws of his country, under which he has been condemned, saying: "Listen, Socrates, to us who have brought you up. Think not of life and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice first, that you may be justified before the princes of the world below. . . . Depart a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men." In the Gorgias Socrates tells in a myth of the administration of justice by the lords of death. Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus are seated in the ghostly meadows at the parting of the ways which lead, the one to grim Tartarus, the other to the Isles of the Blest, passing upon the souls that come before them the judgments of that law which is the justice of God. And no man, says Socrates, 103 TRIAL BY COMBAT ^'who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong; for to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of evils." The vision of Er, the son of Armenius, repeats the conception on a cosmic scale. There at the world's centre he beheld the throne of Neces- sity, upon whose knee rests the spindle-whorl of the universe; beside her are the white- robed Fates, Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, spinning out the threads of men's destinies, which are the threads of eternal justice. Plato's images in these tales are the images of pagan myth, but his meaning is the mean- ing which after him the whole Christian world avowed as its creed: that the issues of human history and the struggles of men's souls are not decided by the triumphs of a day, but come for their final appraisement before the tribunal of God. V But Plato, the idealist, and Socrates, the martyr, are these after all the men who are to set for us measures of conduct.^ In a world where Realpolitik is so often and so bitterly asserted can we afford to rest our causes with the dim justifications of eternity.? Men's lips do full oft eloquently belie their deeds: the praise of virtue is easier than her service; the hands of the mighty are seldom clean, and the wrath of the Lord is long delayed. We 104 TRIAL BY COMBAT have a number of harsh maxims: a bird in hand; might makes right; necessity knows no law, — wisdom at its kernel, won in the hard- ship of living. Is it not best to stick to the safe and sure realities — unpleasant as they may be — for what we shall do, if not for what we shall praise? History has given us at least a partial an- swer, and in Plato's favour. The whole fabric of European civilization rests for its support upon the structure of Roman law. And this law, not only in spirit but in source, goes back to Plato for its crucial definitions. Jus est ars boni et aequi, law is the art of the good and the fair, — the equitable, as we say: this is Celsus' phrase for that external bond which unites men in formal societies; and Ulpian it is who, in the very image of Plato, defines justice as "the constant and perpetual will to render to everyone his right and due." Law is the art of discovering the good; and justice is the soul's self-mastery: these are the sentiments which the Platonic Socrates is forever advo- cating, and they are the principles which Roman law made into the foundation of a world-civilization. And law with the Romans, while in the beginning it represented the narrowly national institutions of the city of Rome, in the end came to be the statement of the rights of man. Beyond the boundaries of the jus civile, the law of the city, the Roman jurist recognized a jus gentium, sanctioned by the customs of 105 TRIAL BY COMBAT mankind, and yet beyond this a jus naturale, grounded in the eternal nature of men as human beings, in the divinely implanted instincts of mankind; by the law of the city and even by an international law of races a man might be held as a slave, but by the un- dying law of human nature man was born free. It is no matter of wonder that such a concep- tion of law should have made possible the establishment of progressive states, or that mediaeval thinkers should have identified the jus naturale with the law of God, or that it should have suggested to thinkers of a later day the great doctrine of the rights of man, — a doctrine in whose heredity our own na- tion was born. But it would be unfair and untrue to say that this is the sole conception of law which has been and is being tried out by European civilization. For the states of Western Europe have grown up in the barbarian and feudal law of the Germanic conquerors of the Ro- mans, as well as in the Roman law. The essence of this Germanic law is the privilege of the strong. In the Salic code the fine for slaying a Roman is half that for slaying a Frank, and in the Anglo-Saxon code of Aethel- berht the wite for slaying a carl is only six per cent of that for a freeman's murder. The whole principle of feudal law is the subser- vience of the weak to the strong; the feudal hierarchy took form as the expression of the need of the feeble for protection against the 1 06 TRIAL BY COMBAT powerful and the rapacious. A man was not his own man, nor, as under Roman law, a state's citizen, but he was his lord's man; and his whole place in society was determined by his overlord's personal ascendancy. Cor- respondingly, rights were mainly the rights of the suzerain, natural rights which the vassal had surrendered in seeking protection. Even in its noblest embodiment, in the law of chivalry, the strong is still the protector of the weak, and the righteousness of the cause of the afflicted damosel lay ever at the peril of the uncertain strength of her knight's right arm. The whole essence of the law is the privi- lege of the strong. No historic contrast could be sharper, I imagine, than that of the Greek, with his love for the rhetorical pleadings of the courts, or the Roman with his passion for reasoned justice, with the Teuton's dull sus- picion of verbal laws and decisions and his hardy determination to fight out his differ- ences, man to man. VI And it is just this contrast which is to-day presented to us in the new guise of inter- national relations. Within civilized states the principles of Roman law and Greek justice have come to be the recognized principles of social organization; citizens no longer go about with sidearms; and the last resort of the code of honour and the duel is i.n the 107 TRIAL BY COMBAT military caste of militaristic empires. But in the external relations of states with states no similar development has as yet been achieved. To be sure there are customs of nations, un- certain in definition and frail in observance, which have been honoured with the name of International Law; but the only sanction that can give validity to such a law niust be a general agreement as to what constitutes the natural right of humanity; international law, if it is to prevail, must found itself in a con- vincing philosophy of nature, just as the jus gentium of the Romans was founded m their conception of the jus naturale. And what philosophy of nature will inodern peoples and modern nations find convincing? Will it be the Darwinian law of the battle of life, and the righteous survival of the blood- letter, strong in thews or strong in craft.? Will it be the law of the unthinking beasts, applied, as Nietzsche would apply it, to think- ing men and thinking nations,— a Kultur- krieg, knowing no rule but its own necessities and no need but conquest? The thing seems to me monstrous and horrible, with the very monstrosity and horror of that Titanism which the Greeks threw back into the dim and law- less era of Earth's parturitions. And yet it is the very principle upon which RealpoUtik rests; the very principle which Captain An- drillon, coolly convinced of its truth, urges his own countrymen to adopt in place of their hereditary doctrine of the lights of man; the io8 TRIAL BY COMBAT very principle which to-day is being tried out in Europe by combat, in the ancient Ger- manic fashion. But to save us from this, what substitute can be offered that will actively appeal to the truth-loving intelligence? Darwinism has taken a terrible toll of men's faith, and surely this is because it has at its core a convincing truth. Aye, truth it has; and Captain An- drillon is right when he says that "the reali- ties of the universe are not in perfect accord with all the dreams of the spirit and all the desires of the heart." He is right: nature and human nature, fact and reason, passion and intellect, are often out of accord with one another. Plato saw this with unwavering eyes, and he made it the compass of his phil- osophy: nought is more certain, he held, than the conflict of sense and idea; nought is more sure than the imperfection of unredeemed nature; nought is more inevitable than the partial defeat of justice in the world of affairs. And yet, he maintained, justice alone is worth living for; justice alone represents the godlike in man's soul; and whatever the cost in serv- ice, be it life itself, justice is the only secure possession which a man's soul may bring before the tribunal of God. I have said that the progress of civilization, in spite of momentary surrenders, has been in the support of Plato. Nothing shows this more steadily than the roll of the world's heroes. These are not the Caesars and Napo- 109 TRIAL BY COMBAT Icons of history, not the Supermen of War; but they are men who, like Socrates, feared the laws of death more than the laws of life, and so preferred to live well rather than to live long. Socrates, Giordano Bruno, St. Peter and St. Paul, Jesus of Nazareth, — such are the nobles of our race, whose very names cause the hearts of men to beat high with the pride of manhood; and in the tale of the cen- turies they have been justified in the emula- tions of their disciples long after the empires of the warlords have dissolved and vanished. But there is still a question: Can the law which we apply to human individuals be ap- plied also to human states .f" Can the law of justice ever become international, so that a state, a nation, even a race and civilization, may prefer death to dishonour.'' So far as the internal aifairs of nations are concerned, the scale has turned in favour of Plato, in favour of human nature as against Titanism and brute nature, and not all the dogma of Darwin and Nietzsche can reverse it: but is this true also of nations .''... One cannot answer the question simply, for the world is at war over it; and however the die falls, no man knows what creed, whether the creed of passion, or the creed of reason, will be in the blood of the victor. But I can point to one great and undeniable triumph of the spirit of justice eternal, which the War has already created. Heroic Belgium, choosing defeat that is well-nigh death rather than the fatness and no TRIAL BY COMBAT ease of a dishonoured servitude, is the very image among the nations of to-day of those quahties which have heretofore given us heroes among men. "What our geographical frontiers will be tomorrow I know not," writes the Abbe Noel in an article on the Soul of Bel- gium. " But I do know that our moral position in the world will henceforth be other than it was. In the most terrible crisis of history we have suddenly found ourselves confronted by a duty which we little expected. Yet, nour- ished as it was in reverence for right, the nation understood without a moment's hesi- tation, and as one man, that this duty was sacred, and instantly grappled it with all the energy of its loyal and believing soul. In presence of brutal aggression the old instinct of freedom asserted itself with the energy of other days, and Belgium, hardly perceiving what had happened, was plunged into a world- war for right and for liberty. She it is who personifies this cause, and to her has fallen the honour of suffering martyrdom on its behalf. She lies wounded, panting, but fight- ing on. All the nations bend over her with their love and veneration. Tomorrow, when Force shall have yielded to Justice, B-^lgium will cherish the right to speak and to act in the new world which is coming to birth. " So writes the Abbe Noel; and whatever may be the immediate outcome of the present trial by combat, do we not feel assured in our hearts that he speaks the living truth as it III TRIAL BY COMBAT will be pronounced in the final judgment before the tribunal of God? Aprils igij. 112 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS THE conception of justice is grounded in the compromise of conflicting ends. It arises in the midst of a many, out of the bendings and insistencies of more or less antag- onistic wills; indeed, justice is the essential virtue and the proper excellence of a plural- istic world. Whether it be regarded as an equality of privileges or of rewards, or,_ with Plato, as a harmony of interests, justice in every case gets its meaning from adjustments of real or putative dissensions: the just judge is a mediator of mutually exclusive aims; the just man is one who is able to subject his own will to a reason which can see eye to eye with his fellows. Thus, adjustment, harmonization, con- cordance, are the product and character of active justice; while its correlative passive quality is the virtue of obedience, — obedi- ence to law, human or divine, the recognition and observance of rights. Each of these qualities, active adjustments ajid passive obedience, implies surrender or at least devia- tion of purpose and aim. They are qualities which presuppose a unity not completely unified, an organism not yet perfected, within 113 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS which discontinuous interests actively quarrel or passively succumb. Obviously, the conception of justice is founded in the recognition of conflicting in- terests, conflicting ends and aims. So also the adjudications in which justice finds its expression are adjudications of ends and aims. The whole idea falls within the domain of teleology, and clearly its interpretation must be teleological. Yet here there enters in a nice distinction. The teleology of which justice is the form is not of the simple and elegant philosophical type; it does not represent a direct playing of the imperfect reality into the perfect pat- tern, of the hampered present into the com- petent future; it has no logical smoothness, no mathematical inevitability. Rather, its pro- gressions are by jolts and hitches; its wisdoms are insecure; and its previsions are glamoured with uncertainties. It is by no accident that the image of justice is blindfold; she is a fumbler in the dark after the true way. Let us consider the material factors of her activity. First, there is the conflict of ends and aims; and this conflict is always realistic: it is the result of the actual encounter of defi- nite projects in course of conscious execution; it is a matter of fact, and the factual agencies are concretely combative human wills, each with its purpose clear cut and its resources of thought pragmatically applied to this pur- pose. Second, there is the adjudication of in- 114 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS terests. But it is perfectly plain that this ad- judication is and can be made upon no such realistic grounds as condition the conflict. It is and must be putative in character, — that is, divorced from organic fact. The interests which the adjudication defines are not the conscious ends of the conscious actions of litigous men; they are judicially determined and judicially defined, — that is, in deliberate disregard of pragmatical states of mind. The adjudication expresses no end that is sought, but one that ought to he sought; and hence it becomes an expression of rights, not of facts. It is this peculiar separation of the judicial from the pragmatical mind, of the intellect from the will, which gives to justice its char- acter of uncertainty and divagation; ends are defined, but no impulses are created for their realization. What, then, can be the sanction of these abstract rights which are proclaimed to be the governors of conduct and whose minis- tration is named justice ? . . . Let us first re- capitulate the tokens of a right, {a) A right is a prospect, not a status, — moral values lie not in possession, but in uses, {b) It is a prospect which is (i) realized in no individual consciousness, and is, hence, ill-defined, or is (2) realized only in a judicial, third-party con- sciousness, and has, hence, no impulse to exe- cution, (c) It is thus essentially theoretic; it can never be concrete (in an active world). (d) And it derives its theoretic intelligibility "5 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS just from the fact of its detachment from action: its sanction is abstract reason. The sanction of rights is reason; but we are obviously little advanced by such a conclusion unless we can show upon what foundations this reason establishes itself. Here it seems clear that we must draw our inferences, as we should in a science, from the usages of the reason involved. We must consider the custom of judicial thought and infer therefrom the logic of justice. From such a point of view there may be dis- criminated three general maxims, or axioms, underlying this type of thought, and forming, as it were, the presuppositions of the logic sought for. I would state these axioms as follows : 1. Justicial reason must be teleological in form. That is, it must be concerned with final causes, and must be organized with reference to ends and aims recognized as authoritative by the judicial mind. This means that it must be temporal, historical, biological, if you like, in character; and conversely, it means that this reason cannot rest upon structural analy- sis of society. The legal instinct for precedent is warranted by the temporal character of justice; and it is quite fantastical to suppose that sociology can ever replace history in the interpretation of law. 2. Justicial reason must define attainable ends. It is the common sense of mankind that a just adjudication of conflicting interests ii6 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS must substitute for the desires denied other realizable desires, commended in their stead. It is no portion of justice to be merely nuga- tory; wherever it denies present attainment, it must point the way to new possibility. I am aware that vengeful or punitive justice might be regarded as an exception to this rule, but only, I think, when a partial view is taken of the conflict involved,— it is the irreconcil- ability of the wicked, rather than his wicked- ness, which is punished. Furthermore, the conception of justice as punitive disappears with the growth of enlightenment; and again it is not a little curious that society invariably feels that justice is better done where the criminal acquiesces, by confession or other- wise, in his own punishment. Certainly, in all that is fundamental, justice is conceived as a reformatory process, expurgating only in order better to create. 3. Justicial reason rests upon the assump- tion that all proper desire is for the good. It is not enough that judicial decisions define ends, and ends that are attainable; they must also be ends felt to be good. This is without prejudice as to the definition of the good; for I think it holds for all conceptions of value. Historically, and for the analysis of justice, such conceptions might be thrown into two general types, of which the first finds the essence of goodness in mortal life and human ends, while the second discovers it only in the desire of a will for which human conditions are 117 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS transcended and mortal purposes are inci- dental. To the first type would belong the classical conception of an earthly imperium collectively created by mankind, as the su- preme good; or, again, the humanitarian notion of individual happiness distributively apportioned; or, yet more modern, the Nietz- schean notion of an evolutional aristogony producing its supermen to be the bliss of a new idolatry. To the second type would be- long all transcendental and cosmical justifi- cations of the world, which are so often, as is Neo-Platonism and Buddhism and Chris- tianity, pessimistic of merely mortal possi- bilities. But whatever the conception of good- ness or whatever its philosophical emplace- ment it is still the key to all justification; whether the legislator and the judge be an archon of an earthly city or a divine ruler of the universe, he must raise his eyes to the pattern of the good in his administration of justice. If we hold in one view these axioms of jus- ticial reason, — first, that it be temporal and teleological, second, that it define practicable ends, and third, that these ends be confessedly good, — there will emerge, I take it, the single philosophical assumption upon which they all rest. Law in human institutions is not an ex- pression of belief in the uniformity of human nature, as natural law is an expression of belief in the uniformity of physical nature; it is not an analysis of structure: rather, it is an ex- ii8 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS pression of faith in the indefinite melioration of man's nature, in his progress toward per- fection. Whether this progress be conceived as a betterment of states or an evolution of types, as the slow round of the wheel of ex- istence or as a soul's parlous pilgrimage of the flesh, man is in every sense a viator, a wayfarer, whose uncertain advance is guided by the beacon of the Good, whose errancies are pun- ished by its obscuration. Rights exist only as special illuminations of goodness; laws only as guides to rectitude. And law and right and justice alike find their fundamental sanction, their ultima ratio, in the assumption of human progress. The assumption of human progress is to the logic of morals what the assumption of the uni- formity of nature is to the logic of_ science. Like the assumption of uniformity it is un- provable, and as in' the case of the assumption of uniformity there are many facts of experi- ence that appear to go against it. Both as- sumptions are, in fact, articles of faith; neither is obvious fact, and neither rests upon com- pelling reason. Nevertheless, each is the foun- dation for all the rationality that is possible in a whole department of human thought,— the assumption of uniformity in the structural analysis of the world, the assumption of prog- ress in its teleological analysis. Science and morals respectively are the births of these two great fiducial articles of thought. But how, it may be asked, is such a remote 119 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS generalization as faith in progress to be applied to the actual administration of justice in a concrete and contentious human society? The question is answered by the historic fact. Just as the natural sciences advance by the method of trial and error, hypothesis and approxima- tion, with the assumption of uniformity as their lode-star, so morals, following the hypo- theses of justicial reason, make their advances by the method of trial and error, governed by the constant assumption of progress. This is its procedure, as history shows; and while the meaning of good varies from age to age, so that it is now conceived as earthly and human, now as cosmical and divine, there yet is in the idea of progress a constant content repre- sented by that buoyancy of life which still makes effort worth while. Particular applications of justice are, as in the case of science, the consequence of par- ticular hypotheses. Such hypotheses of pro- gress, in severalty, are the rights which repre- sent the ends and aims recognized by the judi- cial consciousness of mankind as tending toward the good. As I have said hitherto they are theoretic in character, for the reason that the practical needs of life blind to the ulterior bearings of conduct; reason, whether moral or scientific, feels the need of detachment from the concrete fact. It should be said, too, that we are no more certain of the enduring quality of moral hypotheses than we are of that of scientific hypotheses; both are liable to ab- I20 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS solute error; the enthusiastic rights of one generation may be Utopian fancies to the next. Nevertheless, there is in actuality some ob- jective validation of rights. Putatively, ends may be as many as there are individuals in the world; actually no such anarchy is the case. It is means rather than ends that com- monly vary, instrumental rather than final goods; all men desire Fortune, but the modes of wooing her are as many as there are men. If we ignore eccentricities in moral science as we do in physical science, the number of rights which men actually recognize will be found to be surprisingly few: a simple Decla- ration will sum them up for a group of cen- turies. Laws and institutions are the reflections of such hypothetical rights in historical hum.an societies. Human laws do not state pro- cedures, as do natural laws, but purposes, — such purposes as have become, as it were, phenomenally realized. Sometimes a law may outlast its realization, and survive as a form or rote which is socially dead; and this chance is no doubt the source of the legalist's repu- tation for dry-as-dust conservatism; but the essential function of the laws of a state is to express the norm of progress, as conceived in its day and generation. Thus laws, which are the forms of the ad- ministration of justice, rest upon rights, which are the theoretic aims of justice; and 121 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS law and right and justice are all subsumptions of that general faith in progress which is to moral science what faith in uniformity is to natural science. Corollary to this: there is a hierarchy of rights being defined by the course of history which leads logically to an essential right as the theoretic end of progress; and similarly, there is a hierarchy of laws ex- pressing the structure of social evolution, and leading (for the mind shrewd enough to dis- cover it) to some law of progress as universal as is the law of gravitation. The business of the legal historian is to reconstruct the desires which underlie the lawsof thepast ; the business of the legal philosopher is to divine the at- tainable good which will satisfy man's instinct for progress; while the business of the judge is to weigh contemporary hypotheses of right in the light of past desire and attainable good, and pronounceupontheirmoral truth or falsity. Can we define justice in a more individual sense, as what is due to this man or that.f* Clearly, it is the individuaV s equity in human progress. The formula may seem vague, but I think that it should not be found unfruitful either as a principle of law or a maxim of legislation. At least it points out that justice belongs primarily to man's theoretic nature, that it must find its satisfactions, not in the gratification of the passional or the appetitive, soul, but in that of the intellective. Only when life and life's situations are made reason- able to men is justice done. 122 JUSTICE AND PROGRESS Finall)'^, if to what I have had to say it should be objected that I have added little to Plato's idea of justice, I would only reply that there is little to add. December, 1914. 123 AMERICANISM FOUR great historical documents, mark- ing progressive epochs in our national history, give the essential definition of Americanism in politics. First is the Declara- tion of Independence, signed July 4, 1776, proclaiming the principles by which the United States justify their independence of European domination. Second is President Monroe's message to Congress, of December 2, 1823, announcing the right of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere to pursue their political destinies without interference from Old World powers. Third is Lincoln's memorial address at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863, in which the rights of Americans to their own conti- nents are affirmed to be inalienably democrat- ical, and without democracy to be forfeit. Fourth is the message delivered by President Wilson at the joint session of the two Houses of Congress, April 2, 1917, asserting the value of the democratical polity to the whole terri- torial world and the right to it of the entire human race. These documents are not themselves causes of political conduct in any primary sense. Rather, each is a summary of contemporary 124 AMERICANISM political conviction, — from which fact arises the height of their significance as expression of the political faith of America. It is cer- tainly true that this faith has been clarified and invigorated by the fine intelligence of the expression; for more than to any other form of state, public intelligence is necessary to democracy. Nevertheless, as in every other form of state, the final sanction of govern- ment is the faith of the citizen, which is the impulse for that conduct whereof, in democ- racies, intelligence alone can set the pattern. The patterns of Americanism are its public utterances, with the four that have been men- tioned in the stations of preeminence. Out of each of these documents may be chosen phrases which serve as texts of their fuller meaning. "All men are created equal . . . unalienable rights . . . life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness": this is the core of the Declaration of Independence, voicing in eighteenth-century speech that belief of demo- crats in men's right to the self-responsible making of their own laws which is fundamental in our polity. It is true that this formal mean- ing of the pronouncement has received many material alterations in the course of a century of history (though none, certainly, that weaken the strength of the form).; and among them, not the least, a vast extension of the meaning of "all men" and a profound com- plexification of the doctrine of "rights." The men who signed the Declaration, though their 125 AMERICANISM minds were broad with the morning, were yet but conscious rebels. What they felt was less the tyranny of the Old World than the inde- pendence of the New, and what they de- manded was the right of free experimentation in lands unspoiled. The true foundation of the rights of man as they knew them was their own self-confidence in their own political sagacity. The beginning of American liberty was the commanding acceptance of respon- sibility. The Declaration proclaimed America's right to try out Democracy; the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed both the success of the experi- ment and the belligerent intention to broaden its territorial marches. " The American conti- nents^ by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain^ are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers." The italicized phrase is the import- ant one: it proclaims again the acceptance of responsibility, no longer for experiment, but for huge expansion. The Monroe Doctrine, in effect, established a greater Mason and Dixon's line, having the natural seas for its delineations. Unless history shall show greater consequences from President Wilson's war message, it is the most ambitious political proclamation ever made effective. In its own consciousness the United States was no longer, as De Tocqueville and other sympathetic Eu- ropeans regarded it, merely an unexpectedly 126 AMERICANISM fruitful trial of precarious political theory; it was now confident and aggressive, with am- bitions outpassing the grandiosities of em- perors, — and incidentally and immediately, defying emperors and their ambitions; for the direct occasion of Monroe's message was the threat of the Holy Alliance for the re-sub- jection of South America and the Russian threat of expansion in North America. The truly arrogant pretentiousness of the Monroe Doctrine is best realized when we contrast the sparseness of the human population in the Western Hemisphere with the relatively crowded condition of the Eastern: virtually, since the democratic faith was but meagerly represented in the Old World at that time, it was a demand from an insignificant minority among men that they be possessed of a third of the world. Certainly, such a demand could never have received any general recognition had it not been coupled with a free invitation to all European peoples to colonize America in every sense save the political; the convincing corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was the open door to immigrants. It may be remarked that the situation is not greatly changed to-day. The Americas are still the most sparsely pop- ulated of the great habitable areas of our globe; the Monroe Doctrine is still in force. But the test of its strength is to come not from Europe but from Asia. The real issue, before Americans and Europeans alike, is now whether, in the interests of political inde- 127 AMERICANISM pendence, the Western Hemisphere must not, and in fairness, open the doors of immigration to the Oriental. Can the Caucasian West pre- empt this virginal domain to the lasting exclu- sion of the congested East ? What is the mean- ing of "all men" in our Declaration? Lincoln's Gettysburg address represents cognizance of the same fundamental problem from the angle of internal organization; it is, as it were, the conscious self-measurement of the New World polity in the glass of its own ideals. The speech looks back to the nation's beginnings, and, in a sense, it is a final re- affirmation of what Monroe had before affirmed : that the experimental stage of American democracy was passed, and that thenceforth, bulwarked by America, "gov- ernment of the people, for the people, and by the people" should not perish from the earth. It affirmed this, not in view ojf external threat, but in the presence of internal; in effect stat- ing that America could not tolerate from any group of its own people the formation and perpetuation of an oligarchical or other form of anti-democratical state, that democracy alone should be free to develop in the Western Hemisphere, for the very reason that de- mocracy is imperilled by non-democratical neighbours. The address was, in short, an apostolic profession that democracy is con- vinced of its own righteousness, and is intol- erant of all dangerous rivals. Supporting this profession there was a pro- 128 AMERICANISM founder meaning than the ostensible one of territorial union and political unity. The meaning of "all men" still called for defini- tion, and Lincoln could not use the word "people" in any cant sense. He had long be- fore proclaimed that the nation could not en- dure half slave and half free; he well knew that the crux of the war was the slave ques- tion; and no man could have been wiselier conscious than he of the fact that the settle- ment of that question for freedom must mean ultimately a redefinition of "people" and a new conception of American citizenship. The United States had liberally welcomed Euro- peans of many tongues and complexions, who should be the making of its people; now it was ready to take into the body politic millions of that race which is most antipodal to the Euro- pean. The enfranchisement of the American blacks is the most heroic act of political faith in history. True, the problem of readjust- ment has none of the simplicity which the idealists of that time dreamed it to have; it is a problem that now is and will long con- tinue with us. But the faith that was in the Declaration and that forms the heart of Americanism to-day, faith in the civic nobility and therefore in the civic rights of all nature which we can call human, received in the enfranchisement of the Negroes its extreme attestation. From that time forward Ameri- cans could face the world, conscious that they had made themselves clean with their first 129 AMERICANISM profession. Race questions and class ques- tions — as distinguished from questions of formal politics — will long continue to vex us, and eventually the Mongol problem will be huger than the Negro; but by implication all of these were settled, and not only for us, but for all democratical peoples, when our Civil War came to its issue. The civic man is hence- forth of no preferred complexion and of no recognized caste, — at least, this is now a fixed article in our American faith in a "govern- ment of the people": Americanism cannot be for "all men" in any lesser sense than for "men of all kindreds." The Revolutionary War established the privilege of democracy in the New World. A mature generation later that privilege was converted into an aggressive right, balking the ambitious pretensions of the Caesars of that day in respect to the two Western con- tinents. Another generation matured, and the Civil War marked the purification of democracy in its own house, and a final clear- conscious recognition of the uttermost inten- tion of the term democracy. Now a third generation has matured and passed, and in a war outmeasuring all those that men have fought, the United States is called once more, not only to stand for its political faith, but to expand the meaning of that faith. The stand and the expansion have both been made, and (true to the genius of his nation) the President has given their meaning in a penetrating 130 AMERICANISM phrase. "The world must be made safe for democracy; its peace must be planted upon tested foundations of political liberty." The World! Here, indeed, is expansion; our globe has shrunk too small for democratic and autocratic states to subsist together, nor can Ocean herself constrain them in separation. Democracy has issued her final defiance to all the citadels of absolutism, proclaiming no longer her right to independence, nor merely her right to her own free field, but now her purposed supremacy in all fields and over all polities. Here is arrogance of pretension out- matching Monroe's, whose broad-limned compromise breaks futile, like the old com- promises of North and South. Democracy claims for herself no lesser thing than the world. The new declaration is fittingly accom- panied by a re-affirmation of the old. The "tested foundations of political liberty" refer us once again to the trial which our national history has given to our national faith, proudly asserting that we have passed the trial with triumph, and that the high self- confidence of the authors of the Declaration has been justified to their sons' sons. But more than this, the new declaration, like those which have preceded it, adds new meaning to the whole national faith. Our fight, said the President, is for the liberation of the world's peoples, " the German people included, " there- in asserting the right of democracy to a kind 131 AMERICANISM of spiritual colonization, even in antagonistic lands. The assertion of such a right, unless it were the deepest of convictions, could only be the most incredible effrontery; and if con- viction, it can have for its meaning naught save a new definition of "all men." Hence- forth, the word "people" must include not merely men of all external complexions, but men of all internal complexions, not merely men of all classes, but men of all polities, — and for the reason that there is but one true form of the true human polity, and that is the democratical form. The faith that underlies such an assumption is prodigious; and it is in that faith that we are fighting, for it is the core of Americanism. Fighting, and at the same time watching and listening with an eager and amazing confidence for the first signs of response from the German people; for the President spoke only what all Ameri- cans in their hearts believe, when he said that our war is with institutions and not people Americanism has received its definition in four great documents. Three of these have been issued upon the occasion of great wars, and the fourth, for near a century, has been as distinctly belligerent in character as the mailed list or the jangling saber. Americanism is, obviously, no pacifist faith. But it is, none the less, a faith. It is a faith vast in its pre- tensions beyond all dreams of autocrats; and it is a faith, despite its century of trial, little justified by what has transpired in human 132 AMERICANISM history. Yet in the face of autocrats and of history, it is inwardly unshaken and serene, reUgious in its confidence, miraculous in its hopes. Its foundation is something more constraining than experience and far more compelling than reason; for its foundation is an inner light, which for us is like a revela- tion, showing as in an apocalypse the common humanity of "all men." Americanism is a faith that men have died for, and that men are dying for to-day, — whether it be a mad- ness or divinity that hath touched them with it. December, 1917. 133 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE BITTER thoughts are in the minds of members of minorities nowadays, even where their lips are guarded against bitter words. War breeds intolerance: its business is stern, and its measures are severe; with the same harsh pressure it drafts men to fight and shuts the mouth of opposition; its high enterprise demands concentrated co- operation and renders at once impossible the social laxity and bickering normal to times of peace. Freedom of action, of speech, even of conscience, all are subjected to violent shift by military undertaking and its regime, and as a result of the shift men become suddenly and rawly conscious of the interference with their custom, — and, in democratic countries, jeal- ously sensitive of their rights. Dark prophets have long been saying that the Allies will crush militarism only by becoming militaristic, that a defeated Germany will seize the victor's iron and weld therefrom the fetters of civic liberty. Since the United States entered the war the ugly boding is swollen: where is our pride of free speech .f* Where is our tolerance of opin- ion.? Where is our good-humoured compan- 134 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE ionableness and partisanship without ran- cour? A world 'safe for democracy' were hollow indeed if the safety be secured at the cost of that liberty of the individual which is democracy's soul. Six months of being at war — six months of mounting suspicions and sharpening in- quisition on the part of the public, of raids and suppressions on the part of officials, and of rumour of secret service astounding honest ears — has made every American realize the hitch between his peace-trained theory of the state's activities and its belligerent practice. Naturally, there have been accusations of in- tolerance, and preaching of tolerance; cer- tainly, too, suppression has produced _ can- kerous ingrowths of disloyalty. But, with it all, has there been (what a sane treatment calls for) that diagnosis of the powers and purposes of the state, in time of war, which shall enable us to set rational limits to tolerance, prevent- ing officials — through understanding — from overstepping their country's need, and satis- fying citizens of the justice of official action and the safety of their rights.? Assuredly, the symptoms call for a verdict. In times of peace the limits of tolerance are defined by custom. In democracies laws are made and conduct is controlled by temporary majorities. It is the fact that these majorities are temporary, that they submit their rule periodically and frequently to electoral tests that define party strength, which gives a sense 135 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE of public fairness and insures the equilibrium of the state. Furthermore, the minority has always at its disposal certain recognized means of converting itself into a majority, — chief among them free speech and free party organi- zation. The system thus rests upon the assumption of perpetual differences — of ' issues ' — relative to the control of the con- duct of citizens; and indeed, if these 'issues' did not exist, democratic government would cease. An agreement to disagree (within limits) is thus the very core of institutional democracy; and the thing we call 'demo- cratic tolerance' is our name for the range of disagreement which we normally permit. For tolerance, even in times of peace, has clear limits. There are acts and conditions that cannot be tolerated and society still en- dure. We recognize readily a human duty to be intolerant of, and to suppress and ex- tinguish even at a cost of force and blood- shed, crime and sin: our criminal code is the profession of such an intention. Less con- sciously, but more tyrannously, the burden of a public will is imposed upon the individual in multitudes of details of our economic and social life, which we bear, for the most part, comfortably, — as we wear collars and shoes, not realizing that they are fetters. All this is quite as it should be: if we would be men, we must recognize moral obligation and acqui- esce in social restraint. In time of war the latitudes of difference 136 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE which we permit in the midst of peace are stringently narrowed; and it is this narrowing of the latitude of action to which we are ac- customed that stirs sensibility and arouses the jealous suspicion of outraged rights. Nor is war the only condition which entails such consequences; other perils, as pestilence and flood and even the humanly created discom- forts of economic strife, call for their own types of limitation of privilege and readjust- ment of rights. In them all is a certain com- mon character: they represent, as compared with the normal life of society, a sharp sim- plification of social ends and a great com- pression of social endeavour. The presence of peril acts immediately to define the near and major task of the body politic; the complex and divergent activities of normal times be- come temporarily but emphatically sub- ordinated to the great activity of the preserva- tion of their condition, and, as a consequence, the main force of society sweeps into a single channel. Small wonder if the swollen majority becomes tyrannous, for its effort is at once more intense and backed by huger power than in the ordinary. Under ordinary conditions most men will accept as a reasonable rule of political con- duct that opposition to the will of the ma- jority should extend to its policies, but not to its execution of them until the majority has been reversed by election. This is the rule of 'politics,' of parliamentarism; it is the asser- ^17 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE tion that laws are the friends of the citizen, or, with Aristotle, that "men should not deem it slavery to live under the constitution, for it is their salvation." This rule, from the side of the government in power, is equivalent to the statement that it will tolerate all opposi- tion which does not interfere with the execu- tion of the tasks decided upon by the ruling majority. In brief, the range of tolerance is directly proportional to the demands of effi- cient government. This is the rule of political conduct in nor- mal peace. In time of peril, war, or pestilence, it should be not different in principle, much as its practice must necessarily differ. But there is a complication. In the presence of pestilence there is an almost unanimous fear and willingness to submit to governmental guidance. War is man-made, and it is difficult to define its partisanships by national boun- daries. Nor is its threat so transient; there is fear of post-bellum alterations, modifying the whole order of life, — a fear, on the whole, justified by history. Men, therefore, do not submit to military regimentation with the same resignation with which they undergo sanitary regulation. Passion poisons reason; copperheadism develops into political disease; and, on the side of the government, the legiti- mate limitation of individual privilege in accordance with the needs of efficient action is too readily replaced by a vengeful con- straint, which is the only true intolerance. 138 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE In the United States to-day we have not as yet come to a bad pass, either in regard to the draft or to free speech. The will of the majority is unambiguous; the causes of the war are generally felt as justifying causes and the government is generally believed to be honest and competent. But this is not to say that we have no problem, nor that it is not developing. There is a minority, composed of the resentful ignorant and the embittered opposition; and the majority have not in- variably shown the tact and judgment in the exercise of their prerogative which would diminish the resentment and the ignorance. Certainly, the condition is not malignant, but before it has the opportunity of becoming so, there is needed such clear thinking-out and clear expression of our national policies as shall reassure the doubting and comfort the opposition with respect to that one point in which they are entitled to assurance, — the preservation of their minority rights. The practical problem is twofold. On the part of the minority it calls for individual self-restraint. Its members should remember not only that they owe all citizenship rights to the state, but that they owe to it their essential humanity as well; for, as Rousseau shrewdly remarked, not only is man a political animal, but he is never truly man except as political. From this it follows that human 'personal liberty' is liberty of the civic person, and must be defined by civic relations; and 139 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE again it follows that that relation of communi- cation which is 'freedom of speech' does not mean the right to unlimited hearings nor to command of the public ear. Further, the member of the minority should bear in mind that the contract of citizenship is not lightly drawn; it is signed, as it were, when the first ballot is cast, and its terms are such (as once more Rousseau notes) that the citizen binds himself to take what punishment the rules of its operation may bring upon him. He will remember, perhaps, that such a personality as Socrates chose, as the lesser evil, to die under an unjust condemnation rather than break his country's laws. With such precepts and example he should not find conformity hard, — provided always that he is convinced that the other member to the contract is acting in good faith. The obverse of the problem is the obliga- tion of the majority. First and clearly, it is the duty of the government to be frank as to its policies and as free as the performance of its task will permit in its statement of current fact: news-doctoring in the interests of policy is the straight road to damnation, as Germany is illustrating. In living up to this duty, our government at present stands square; the prestige which the United States has attained is almost entirely due to the frankness with which the President has stated our policies. Nevertheless, there is a form of assurance, internal rather than external, 140 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE which the times demand and which the gov- ernment has not given. War is an unusual national enterprise, calling for an unusual majority supporting the government that is waging it, — a majority by no means repre- sented by the alignment of the parties of nor- mal times of peace. In European democracies this fact has been reflected in the formation of coalition ministries. Our cabinet is no responsible ministry; nevertheless, the ob- vious fact that the war party in America is enormously bulkier than the controlling poli- tical faction ought to have been recognized — should now be recognized — by the formation of at least a bi-partisan cabinet, comprising those men of the two parties who most com- mand the public confidence. The reason for doing this — here as in Europe — is less for the conduct of the military enterprise than for the reassurance of the citizenry at home. For the best guarantee that our government can give, not only that we are engaged in war for no meanly political ends, but that the peace rights of our citizens are not to be imperilled by any post-bellum militarism, is the respon- sible participation in the national councils of the broadest representation possible. This would be a governmental pledge of faith. Thus the limits of democratic tolerance appear in the nature of democratic govern- ment. It is not, however, out of place to note that Christian charity may add a virtue of even political value. Christianity teaches that no 141 THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE man in the flesh is beyond hope of redemption; hence, it is infinitely charitable of sinners, though never of sin. Similarly, tolerance, as a virtue, extends to men, never to their mis- deeds; and above all, it extends to the ignor- ance of men. Applied to the present, this means that we should hate injustice and atro- city, but not Germans. Certainly it is difficult to direct the emotions in abstracto, but if we can succeed in doing so we shall have given ourselves the deepest possible assurance of the security of our national ideals. October, igij. 142 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY IN NO other name do men so readily fight as in the name of Hberty. There is in hu- man nature a profound and inexpungable love of the freedom which men instinctively hold to be natural with that nature, and there is required no more than the threat of restric- tion for this love to emerge ideally in the senti- ment of liberty and the will to sacrifice for it all other goods. No iron of oppression, no luxury of servitude made soft, not even the benefits of a solicitously paternal master, can compensate for freedom denied; the manna of the wilderness, salted with freedom, is more preciously savoured than all the wheat and honey of Goshen. But though the sentiment of liberty be thus deep and moving, the understanding of it is rare, and its realization is rarer still. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau's aphorism is the reflec- tion of paradoxical fact; history is as much a tale of embondment as of liberation; or perhaps it should be described as a tale of the ceaseless breaking of bonds that reset themselves so soon as broken, — for of all equilibria liberty is the most perilously in- secure. Can it be — we are forced to ask our- 143 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY selves such questions — that men are fooled about themselves, so that the love of freedom which comes so naturally to expression, is, in fact, a symptom of diseased rather than of healthy human nature? Or are there, as many have taught, natural masters and master races to whom this gift of liberty comes by endow- ment, so that they alone can be free, and this only at the expense of subjects and subject peoples out of whose subjection the master's freedom grows? Or, finally, and most ter- ribly, is liberty itself of such cruel essence that it must be secured by fratricide, — war its everlasting offspring? In a day such as ours these questions can- not be dismissed with the prosperous opti- mism of comfort-loving minds : facts do themselves propound them. Earth's nations are at war, and all are fighting in the name of liberty. War was first declared by a Father- land that announced itself threatened, on the specious plea that attack is the surest de- fence; and the war has throughout been accompanied by proclamations of the liberties that are its ends, — the right of great races to achieve their destinies unhampered; the right of small nations to maintain their independ- ence; and, by both sides, the right to free seas. Liberty is what all are fighting for; but clearly this liberty is no single thing, or there would be no war. Behind the sameness in plea there is a difference in cause; and now that America, too, has joined in the war, 144 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY and, like the others, with utterance of the name of liberty, it behooves Americans to judge with understanding for what kind of liberty they are fighting. Is it a liberty which must be realized through the subjection of others, or is it a liberty which all men may freely share, — a liberty truly democratic? And if it be the latter, are we deceived in fighting for it? In a way, the second question is the easier to answer; for we can see the hostile view more simply than we can understand our own. Germany has repeatedly and atrociously violated all our instincts of political right, and she has done this with a barefaced uncon- sciousness of offence that but makes more sheer the crevasse separating Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon convictions. So abruptly have we been startled that we have been inclined to ascribe German conduct to arrogant insult and deliberate diabolism; but here we have overshot, for German expression itself makes naively and convincingly clear that our antag- onism is justified by no such shallow diiference. It is intellectual in root, and is therefore more hopeless than mere moral perversion. In a speech delivered on the occasion of the emperor's birthday last January, Adolf Wer- muth, lord mayor of Berlin, is reported as saying: "In conjunction with the bells of peace will ring the bells of liberty, for no- body's harm and for everybody's joy. Liberty means that disorder is inferior to order. Lib- ESSENTIAL LIBERTY erty opens the way for energies making for progress, and it also is capable of being con- centrated in common work. Liberty is order." This utterance is, of course, no closet philos- ophy; it is frank oratory; but it shows how inevitably there rises to the lips of the official German the expression of the ideals of the will-compelling state. Order is admirable only when it is provisional and instrumental, and provisional of and instrumental to the good. In this sense it may be an element in liberty, that element, namely, which repre- sents the security for the individual of the right of judgment. But order in itself is the very antipode of liberty: the lock-step of chained convicts, the mechanical agreement of military movements, — these represent order, but they do not represent freedom. Intolerance of opposition with its correlative of blind obedience are the fundamentals of mere order, and they are the fundamentals, too, of the thing that in militaristic societies masquerades as liberty. The spectacle of the German machine setting out to war in August, 1914, is the most terrible in history; for it showed in a whole nation abnegation of rea- son and betrayal of human nature. That the Germans believed, with mystical fervour, in their own social order, their civilization, their Kultur, is beyond doubt; insincerity is not one of their sins; but that they should have made of this belief the essence of their concep- tion of liberty serves but to measure the fear- 146 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY ful gap which parts them from democracies. But while it is easy to see the fault in what we would avoid, it is not so easy to discover the virtue of what we prize. The essence of liberty is illusive of analysis, possibly because the thing itself is so passionately a part of the colour of life. Nevertheless, no time so calls for a steadying sense of the reality as does the season of peril. Then, indeed, if we are to re- main men, we must think. In an hour when men's eyes are fascinated by a near and terrible spectacle, even the mention of times remote must draw forth breaths of impatience. Yet the sanity of conduct is its subjection to measure, and it is only through the remote that measure can be applied to the present. Among the first who consciously spoke of liberty, Aristotle is clearest. Liberty in democracies, he says, has two marks: equality of power and the privi- lege to live as one pleases. Neither of these characters can be fully realized, for equality of individuals necessarily gives way to ma- jority rule, while the desires of men often con- flict, so that if the one desire be realized the other must be defeated. A liberty which should rest upon equality of power could only exist by a compact of individuals or by a co- alition of states, involving mutual surrenders, such as appear in willing submission to the will of the majority. A liberty which should realize the satisfaction of desire, or, as we might say, the unrestricted pursuit of happi- 147 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY ness, could be possible only to the few, — ex- cept it be in the beatific company of perfectly socialized angels. Human conditions are such as to make liberty in this Aristotelian sense impossible. But there is another conception of liberty, expressed by the two greatest of Christian poets, adding an inner and Christian element to the objective, pagan notion. Both Dante and Milton make the essence of liberty to be rational choice; the only true human freedom is freedom of the reason-guided will. This conception turns not upon powers and privi- leges, but upon rights and responsibilities. The responsibilities flow from the rights, in- separably; and the rights flow from human nature. But the human nature which the poets see so endowed is not the animal and passional nature of man, but the rational nature, divinely created — so they believed — to lift men above brutish lusts. Liberty with them meant fidelity to reason, because reason alone can guide men to goodness. It is true that there is a radical difference in the appli- cation of this conception by the two: Dante, the medisevalist, beheld in reason a universal thing, only to be discovered in acquiescence to authority; Milton, looking beyond the Renaissance into the Enlightenment, found it individualized in men of conscience. But both struck to the heart of the problem: if there be such thing as a natural right to lib- erty, it belongs not to every breeze of passion 148 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY that may move men, but to that part of their natures which marks them as men; and this the reflection of all ages has afhrmed to be man's reason. It follows, quite simply, that the right to liberty is proportionate to reason; and again that devotion to the cause of liberty is not devotion to the whims of individual, or indeed of aggregate men, but purely a devo- tion to human nature on its humane side. Those who fight for liberty, in this Christian sense, are fighting for the right of reason- guided conduct. It should not require demonstration that the safety of reason is in democracy. Mach- iavelli remarks that it is easier to inspire a belief in a people than to maintain them in it; therefore, he argues, the wise prince should be prepared to enforce a belief which is ad- vantageous to his tyranny, if the people seem to be wearying of it. Recitations of the creed and oaths of loyalty find their most important use in centralized and tyrannical powers, where also they find their complement in In- quisitions and trials for lese-majeste. It is in democracies that freedom of speech is cher- ished, not so much that the uttered word is sacred as that it is the sole (even if oft-per- verted) instrument for the expression and maintenance of reason. Intolerance of private judgment is deadly to freedom. To be sure, if our moral reason were as secure of its de- ductions as is our mathematical reason, so that a demonstration once made were made 149 ESSENTIAL LIBERTY for all time, no tolerance would be in place. But it is just this security that fails us, and recognizing our mutual fallibility of judge- ment, in democracies we are tolerant of con- tradiction in thought and expression even while we demand a certain uniformity of conduct; enough, at least, to insure respect for mutual differences. Democratic liberty means, then, tolerance of individual judgement, for the sake of the cultivation of reason; it does not mean licence to individual appetite. Necessarily, it is to some degree anarchistic; it is founded on the assumption of individual differences and upon the intention to give these differences the freest play possible without mutual destruc- tion. It does not extend to conduct, except where conduct involves no mutual interfer- ence; so that it rests upon a final assumption of law. Were reason sure, tolerance would be no virtue and law would be without excep- tion; a perfect order would replace the anar- chy and an inviolable organization would be supreme over individual choice. If liberty could be spoken of in connection with such an order, it could be only the liberty of a uni- versal persuasion. The saints in Paradise have such a persuasion; on Earth it is unknown, — at least, outside of Germany. November, 1917. 150 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION I *' "W THAT can I say to my son, in the years W that are to come, of the honour of his country in 1914 and 1915? I ask my- self this question again and again. What can I say to my son of a country, great in strength and influence, that looked upon the bullying of Serbia with indifferent eyes, that permitted the rape of Belgium with no word of protest, that hardly ventured to raise its voice when its own citizens were massacred upon the high seas, and that could only listen 'with sympathetic attention' to the death cries of more than half a million unarmed people? To the vain struggle for liberty of the Ger- mans of '48 America responded with a full heart; the Magyar Kossuth was with us almost a national hero; but in the years 1914-15, we saw people after people deprived of happiness and of liberty and of life itself, and remained unmoved. Oblivious of our great Declaration, forgetful of the meaning of our nationality, we put cash into our coffers and like cowards surrendered the nobility of 151 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION our birthright. It is this that we must tell our sons and our sons' sons." The above is the concluding paragraph of a letter which the writer of this article pub- lished In a Nebraska daily at the time when the Armenian massacres were at their apogee. President Wilson, said the despatches of the day, was listening to the reports "with sym- pathetic attention"; but nothing was done, as nothing of moment had been done on any of the many previous occasions when the feel- ings of thousands of Americans were deeply outraged by the drunken barbarity of Ger- manic warfare. Thousands of Americans, shocked at the crimes against humanity, felt their nation's honour to be at stake, and they called for and expected from their government action that never came. For they were not the thousands that represent the sentiment of the United States to-day; Anglo-Saxons, for the more part, they were, children of the makers of the United States, and no doubt they repre- sented and represent the ideals in which the nation was founded and the traditions which it has created; but the nation as it exists to- day Is something far other than they had so quaintly dreamed it to be, something far less simple, far more complex, and tainted with an inner monstrosity which no brief period of years can purify away. The war has brought self-revelation to each of the contending nations; and if one 152 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION may judge by the expressions • — religious in their enthusiasms — coming from the peoples of these nations, the war is bringing also to each its purification of character, its katharsis^ which, however tragic, is still noble. To the United States the war has also been the occca- sion of self-revelation, so that we see ourselves with unillusioned eyes; but the day of the purification is beyond the ken of our genera- tion. Friends of America, especially in France and England, have been quick (almost too quick) to explain us to ourselves and to condone, in a measure, what seems to so many, among them and among us, our national turpitude. But even when the interpretation comes from so sympathetic and gifted a writer as Mr. Gilbert Murray^ in our ears it rings thin and remote. Americans — and I speak now for those w^ho represent America's literate tradi- tion — are not happy about their nation's conduct, and most of them are in a daze about the nation's self. We are not what we had supposed ourselves to be; and the great prob- lem which confronts us, as a people, is to dis- cover what manner of spiritual being our country has. II The second autumn of the war had come. Here in Nebraska it was hard to realize. Ne- ^The United States and the War (pamphlet), London, 1916. AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION braska is a land of glorious sunlight in the fall months, and the granaries were heavy with wheat and the fields thick with ripening maize. Everywhere men were building, better- ing, beautifying homes and properties; every- where there was plenty, honest work and hearty food. In the centre of a great conti- nent, walled by a thousand miles, in every direction, from the perils of the sea, and by great seas from the contentions of nations, Nebraska was safe and prosperous, — the top o' the world ! It is true that to many of us the noise of the war came faintly, and its red horror loomed, mirage-like, beyond the seas' horizons; when we greeted one another there was a reserva- tion behind the smile, and welcomes were classified by sympathies that burst into ex- pression where the company was congenial, — for the great war in Europe has socially divided Americans as internal issues rarely do. But all of us had our daily tasks — the tasks of peace — to perform; and routine readily dulls emotion. Sops to our conscience were raising funds for the Belgians, making Red Cross supplies, and boxing comforts for the French soldiers; but even these activities fell in the intermissions, so to speak, of the normal forgetfulness of occupied lives. It was on one of the brightest of these au- tumn days that I drove down the country to revisit the village where I had lived as a boy and which, as a youth, I had left twenty years 154 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION before. As I recalled my boyhood, I could not but contemplate the changed appearance^ of the countryside. In my earliest recollection of it there were miles and miles of rolling prairie, grass-grown and treeless. Such had been the land for countless centuries before my father and the men of his generation had come into it, to change its face once for all. I could remember, too, how beautiful in those early days the prairies looked of autumn nights, banded in every direction by moving ribbons of fire; for the homesteaders were adventurous rather than provident men, and they cleared their land for tillage with the easy extravagance of pioneers. The country was still very beautiful, but in a new fashion; the virgin prairie was all gone; in its place were tilled fields and secluded pastures, and the rolling hills were varied in every direc- tion by upstanding groves and orchards planted by the hand of man. And what the country had become one realized that it must remain for centuries, aye, for millenia, to come: a generation of men, armed with hammer and plough, had swept over its sur- face, and converted the hunting grounds of the countless past into the farmsteads of the not less countless future. They were great ad- venturers, these men; and they left their mark upon Time. They were not the generation whose children were to inherit the land they trans- formed. I can remember, as a boy, how all the AMERICA'S SELF-RE\^LATION boys of the village and the country round about grew up with the idea that as men they were to go 'out West' to make fortunes for themselves; it never occurred to us that we might remain where our fathers had settled: had not these fathers, in their day, gone West in the search of fortune, and should the sons do less? It was the normal feeling that life is a matter of pioneering, and I am sure that any boy who entertained the notion of settling once for all where he was born was openly despised by his comrades. And as a matter of fact, most of them did go West, boys and girls, too. They went to the higher plains, where men fight drought; they went to the mountains; they went to the western sea. Their homes are in the Rockies, on the Pacific Coast, in Canada, Alaska, Mex- ico, South America, while Hawaii, the Philip- pines, Porto Rico know them, not a few, — boys, and girls, too, for the spirit of the quest is born wath no sex; it is of the blood and of the race. The village of my boyhood was peopled mostly by Anglo-Saxons. There were New Englanders, like my father and my two uncles; there was a colony from central New York, with beliefs about spirits and spirit-rappings; there were Southerners, Carolinians, Mis- sourians; and there were men bom in the Middle States when these states were frontiers. I remember an eccentric Frenchman, prob- ably a habitant irom Quebec; and I remember 156 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION the old man who kept a tavern, the nucleus of the village, in the days when freighters and Indians were the interests of life: he used to open the polls on election days with the cry which the Norman heralds used at the medi- aeval tourneys — 'OyezI oyez!' — though I am sure that he, no more than I, had no un- derstanding of the term. But even then the Germans were coming in, and as I grew up I saw the Anglo-Saxons steadily giving way before them — with their closer thrift and, as we felt, inferior way of life. The men who had broken the soil were not to reap its harvests; and in 191 5, when I revisited the village, I found just two old men, retired from activity, of the American stock. Externally the village appeared much the same, except that the trees were more grown and the houses looked, as it were, better seated. But internally, said the old men, it was a different place; there was no longer any of that visionary magnification of mind which in the old days made its citizens feel that theirs was a town of destiny, that must one day become a metropolis; there was no longer any inner agitation. The village had settled down to be just what it is, a country hamlet, — a German country hamlet. I asked my friends how lay their sympathies in the matter of the War; they answered, "Oh, we are for the Allies, strongly; but we say nothing about it^ here everyone is the other way." 157 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION III The village which I have described is in a significant sense typical of the country. Here in Nebraska we have German communities, Bohemian communities, Danish and Swedish communities; but one pricks up one's ears when one gets word of an American commu- nity, and if a village or district is so spoken of it is likely to turn out to be in the western part of the state, where pioneer conditions have not yet faded away. Not that all Anglo- Saxons are pioneers, even when born to the tradition; thousands of them are in the larger towns and cities, and still more thousands form a perpetual drift through the settlements of the less shifting elements. On the whole they control the literate expression of the country, and doubtless they represent its greatest property interests. But even if our Fifth Avenues and Back Bays are Anglo- Saxon in character, this does not argue that our social sub-structure is of the same stuff. In the cities, no less than in the country, the homogeneous quarters are given over to stranger peoples; there are Italian, Jewish, Irish, German, Polish quarters; there are Syrian, Chinese, Japanese centres; but one never hears of an American centre or quarter. Of course, one will say, 'But the whole is American'; and so it is, in its polyglot fashion; but so it is not in the sense that it is governed by, or even comprehends, the ideals that 158, AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION America has hitherto represented. The Anglo- Saxon element is our pioneer element, but, like a thin foundation wash, it is being gradu- ally obliterated by the masses of solid colour that are to form the ultimate picture. If it serve the purposes of the wash, to give unity and harmony to the whole in the day of the completion, it will have done the most that can be expected. These foreign-born communities, each after its kind, tend to become centres of distinctive ideas and ideals. Partly these are accepta- tions of American thoughts and ways; partly they are adaptations to the new requirements of life in an adopted land; partly they are transplantations from the Old World. Mid the currents and counter-currents of their fluid Anglo-Saxon environment these local solidarities are slowly abraded, slowly trans- formed; but their resisting powers are great, reinforced by differences of language and religion, and often by the leadership of in- tellectuals — pastors and editors — whose ideal is the maintenance of Old World tradi- tions, — upon which, indeed, their own office depends. In states, such as those of the Union, having easy naturalization and a republican govern- ment, such communities need not be numer- ous in order to hold the balance of electoral power. Their very homogeneity and seclu- siveness give them political unity; the Anglo- Saxon idea of the ballot as fundamentally a 159 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION certificate of freedom is hard to master, espe- cially when the foreigner is taught (usually by politicians of his own race) that this ballot is an instrument to be used in his self-interest. In America we speak of the Irish, the Italian, the German, the Bohemian vote, but never of the Anglo-Saxon vote; and out of the con- dition so indicated springs the fact that in our representative government it is the Anglo- Saxon alone who is never represented. It becomes the whole art of the politician to play to the foreign vote which in his particular district holds the balance of power; and as this play must be not merely preliminary to ofhce, but must be continued while he is in office, it transpires that everywhere the for- eigner finds representation of his 'interests' easy. It happens, too, that the expression of opinion by the press and by the literate public (literate, I mean, in the native American tra- dition) becomes relatively less important: its apparent value is always much greater than its real value, — at least, so far as political conduct is concerned. It is surely a feeling for this truth that underlies President Wil- son's remark before the Gridiron Club, in February, 1916: "I would a great deal rather know what they are talking about around quiet firesides all over the country than what they are talking about in the cloak- rooms of Congress. I would a great deal rather know what the men on the trains and by the wayside and in the shops and on the 160 AMERICA'S SELF-REVEI ATION farms are thinking about and yearning for than hear any of the vociferous proclamations of policy which it is so easy to hear, and so easy to read by picking up any scrap of printed paper." Democracies are notoriously suspicious of literacy; printed paper seems to imply studied reflection, and the vox populi never expresses itself so, — at least, not when the language is King's English. IV All this represents a change in American society, and a complexification of it. Not the least important phase of this is the diminution of the importance of the British tradition. I can remember, in my boyhood, how orators were still 'twisting the Lion's tail,' and to the exhilaration of all. That is long since passed, and not wholly to England's advantage. The Anglo-Saxon American comprehended and enjoyed the trope; it fitted in with his con- ception of the importance of Britain, magnify- ing the daring of his own country. To the newer American the figure is lost; he comes from the Continent, with respect to which the British Isles are 'outlying'; nor is the Ameri- can Revolution for him a speaking symbol: he remembers the far bloodier wars of the Old World. There isnolongerpoliticalcapital inthe old-style oratory, and the 'Lion's tail,' along with the 'bloody shirt' belongs to the past. England has diminished in American eyes, i6i AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION with the passing years and the rising tide of Continental immigration. But Europe as a whole has increased in moment. Europe has always been for us Americans — though we be for three centuries native born — what Rome was for the Medisevalist, a seat of higher in- telligence and hoary marvels. Just as, as boys, we grew up with the expectation of going West to seek our fortunes, so as schoolboys we im- bibed the hope that — the fortune once made — we might go some day to 'Europe' to 'get culture. ' Americans are not conceited about their attainment in the refinements of life, — however much they may believe in the ad- venturous opportunities of the New World. And in this respect the later immigrants are like the earlier. Indeed, they are sometimes almost officiously ready to instruct us, pre- suming on their own more recent contact with the fount of culture; and in particular to free us from the notion that insular Britain represented any essential part of the European gift. Even before the War had spawned Fatherland, Mr. George Sylvester Viereck had announced himself as the emancipator of American letters from Puritanism, and as the apostle of a free and unabashed Conti- nentalism; while since the War began, Hugo Muensterberg has more than once tactfully reminded us that he remains upon our shores, not from heart's choice, but as a missionary of culture, self-exiled from the land of its realization: "It was an exquisite pleasure to .162 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION meet this English minister. . . . And in the twinkling of his eyes was all the time that harmless, delicious superciliousness which the cultured Englishman in contact with another educated European never forgets when he talks about America." The 'other educated European' was, of course, in this case, Hugo Aduensterberg. It is by the Germans most that the lesson of culture has been given us, partly because of their upstanding conviction that it is theirs to give, partly because so many Americans, especially of the teaching class, have been educated in Germany and share the German conviction. But other nationalities have not been backward in showing us ourselves as they see us, — not always backward, nor deli- cate. I remember meeting a Scotsman once: "Ah, you have a Scot's name," said he; and I, responding with shy geniality, "Yes, and it is from Scotland." "Your father.^" he asked. "No," I acknowledged, "it has been here for some two hundred years." "Oh," said he (and I cannot forget the fine tone of it), "the good of it's long since gone!" I know, too, of a group of American college girls taking boat at Rotterdam; an English boy, with his father, on deck as they embarked, remarked, "I say, father, I didn't know we had taken passage on a cattle-ship!" Fortunately one of the girls had an English cousin whose fine hospitality had given them a better insight into British character. Not all Americans are 163 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION so fortunate; and I am of the opinion that among educated Americans generally the French are, of all Europeans, the most highly esteemed, — for the French never insult us, though they may look upon us with a polite amusement, of which we are neither uncon- scious nor resentful. But there is another reason for our liking for the French, and I think a more fundamental one. With much truth, and probably with some exaggeration of the truth because of America's association with France during the Revolution, the American feels that the ideals in which his government was founded are French in parentage, — the doctrine of the rights of man, the creed of freedom and equal- ity, the whole political humanitarianism of the eighteenth century. There is no great European country which is represented among us by a thinner stream of immigration than is France; in the United States we never hear of a ' French vote, ' — or if we hear of it, what is meant is the vote of the descendants of the French colonists in Quebec or Louisiana, as long in America as any of us. Yet France has probably a stronger hold on us than has any other European nation, and for the reason that we feel that we share her ideals more than those of any other. No doubt, our gov- ernment is actually more English than French, but partly the manner in which the United States were born and partly the fact of the English monarchy have prevented the real- 164 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION ization of this. In any case, the element of interest in our ideal history is the gradual strengthening of our sympathies with France and the weakening of our sense of dependence upon England and England's culture. Blood is certainly thicker than water; and to-day Anglo-Saxon blood in America beats with the hope of British victory. But year by year America is less and less Anglo-Saxon; the blood thins and fuses. Yet there is a bond which is stronger and more lasting than the tie of blood-kinship; and this is the bond of common ideals. It is the bond which in the past has held us to, and drawn us closer to France; it is the bond which in the future will surely draw us and hold us to all those nations which love justice and freedom and respect human rights; and it is a bond which, stringent in our midst to-day, is holding us in division, — for, in the hour of our self-revela- tion, we have discovered that many who call themselves citizens of the United States and share the rights of our polity have no respect for the tradition in which it was founded, no faith for the principles for which it has stood. V It took the great War to bring us our self- revelation. The chasm in our midst existed, no doubt, long before; but I think neither party realized it, for the native Americans were naively unsuspicious, and it was to the i6s AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION interest of the newcomers to acquire an understanding of the native Americans; to the difficulties in the way of such an under- standing, it was easy to credit all the differ- ences that were felt. As a boy, raised among German boys, I was dimly conscious that their tradition, in sport and school, was not altogether that of their American playfellows; and in later years I noticed something of a similar feeling among men in politics, — but boys and men alike ascribed this to slowness and dullness and Old World conservatism, regarding it as an infirmity rather than as an intention. It is true that we were aware that the Scandinavians, for example, 'Ameri- canized' much more rapidly and whole- heartedly than the Germans; and this might have caused reflection. Certain other events might have aroused us, — the incident of Manila Bay, — but the Germans in America, though grieved, were loyal, and we never really took the Kaiser seriously. More sig- nificant, perhaps, were internal incidents. In a city of the Middle West, environed by many German communities, an annual 'Ger- man Day' was set as a fete, the celebration being given into the charge of the local branch of the German-American Alliance, though the thing was made possible by cash grants from the commercial club of the city. The fete was celebrated with music, with orations in Ger- man and in English, and with a street pageant consisting of floats representing Teutonic 1 66 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION knights in armour, squires in blond wigs and velvets, dames and peasant girls, — Siegfrieds, Loreleis, and Marguerites, all a bit tawdry and dusty, and all set off with the red, white, and black and imperial eagles. Naturally, the celebration seemed exotic and unin- telligible to native Americans, and the com- mercial club, in order to save it from utter ruin, approached the German-American Alli- ance with the proposal that the fete be changed into a *Day of All Nations,' for the immigrants from every country. The pro- posal was indignantly rejected: the day was to be 'German Day' or the Germans would have no part in it, — and so the fete was dis- continued. This was a year or so before the War. But nothing of all this really affected us ; since, for one thing, we all knew scores of men of German birth and descent who were and are as complete Americans as any of us. It took the War to bring to us a sense of the division in our midst. Since the War has come, German-Ameri- cans among us have been wont to ascribe the American sympathy with the Allies quite as much to our 'prejudice' against them as to ' English lies. ' If the prejudice existed, Ameri- cans, I am sure, were utterly unaware of it. No nationality in the United States has been more continuously and fervidly praised, by politicians, professors, and press in equal measure, than have the Germans; and I think that this praise represented a real respect for 167 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION the economic value of the German commu- nities as well as for the reputation of German learning. Indeed, when the War broke out, it came to us with a shock of incredibility; in spite of talk, we believed the Germans in- capable of it, and the guilt of Germany, in forcing war, was only conceded when Belgium was raped and the diplomatic correspondence (German and English) made the case palpable to all reason. The flood of pronunciamentos and propagandist literature from German sources, which immediately followed, dis- pelled the last lingering doubt that here we were face to face with a theory and conduct of statecraft which we had supposed impos- sible for a civilized people. But a second and even more shocking reve- lation was in store for us. With a naivete which now seems pathetic we turned to our German-American fellow-citizens with the full expectation that they would view the crime as we viewed it. In numberless cases this expectation was justified, but not at all for the great mass of the Germanic popula- tion: the local conservative communities, with their own press and their own pastors, were on the other side. We began to hear strange rumours. A German laundress tells her mis- tress that her pastor says the Americans must be brought to their senses if the Germans have to use force for it. Another asks if it is really true that the Germans and Americans are to fight; and soon there are quite ridiculous tales i68 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION of armouries in the basements of Lutheran churches. Of greater moment were the ex- pressions of the German press and of German leaders: public men were assailed with a venom far beyond anything that is aroused by our internal politics; professors who expressed sympathy with the Allies were lectured, with ill-concealed threats; and perhaps most sig- nificant of all, these leaders of Germanism ceased speaking of themselves as 'Americans,' — 'those Americans,' they would say, with obvious sense of their division from their fellow-citizens. When the Lusitania was sunk a German-American who had been for many years a voter in the United States and a poli- tical leader among his own people was heard to say: "I hope every American aboard was drowned." To be sure, there is another side to the pic- ture. An old German farmer, Prussian by birth, was prodded by his neighbours for seeming apathy in the cause. He answered: " What has the Kaiser ever done for me ? Hard work and little pay. America has given me a home." A lawyer overheard a group of German clients, in his anteroom, scoring the Americans. Finally, one who had kept silent broke out: "You men are fools! What did you come to America for.? I came here to live and to be an American. I do not even let my children talk German, and my wife and I, we try to talk English in the home." The rest were silenced. I know two German teachers 169 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION of German. One of them came to America as a youth, and he has since visited Germany. He says: "I am an American. All that is behind me. They do not understand us over there." He is deeply grieved for the Father- land which he deeply loves, but he feels that reason and righteousness demand an Allied victory. The other is the son of a German of '48, who came to America to escape militar- ism; he has never seen Europe, but German blood and German literature have won him altogether to the cause of the Empire: "It has taken the War," he told a colleague, "to make me realize that I am not an American." Still another is a professor of science, German by birth and education up through the doctor- ate: "Of all countries," he said, "I prefer to live in America; next come England, France, Italy; I prefer Germany, I think, to Russia." I know American sons of German-American fathers and American brothers of German- American brothers, but these are only symbols of the division that cleaves the nation, — as are, too, those occasional Anglo-Saxon Ameri- cans, men educated in German science or art, whose sympathies are with the Central Powers. VI The division exists; the war has made us realize it; what, then, is its true character and meaning? Partly, no doubt, it is the reflection of a wholly natural veneration for the land 170 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION that was the home of one's ancestors and the parent of one's own aspirations. If 'blood is thicker than water, ' there is surely no reason why German blood should be thinner than English blood; and in the hour of the Father- land's stupendous effort, what German heart can fail to be thrilled by it? If this were all, Americans would have no cause for a deep uneasiness: a few years of peace would heal the division. But it is not all. The thing that stirs us is the discovery of a radical divergence of political and national ideals. As I have said, the United States was founded, and has been nurtured, in the hu- manitarian tradition, — the tradition which, through France, harks back to the republican- ism of Rome and the democracy of Athens. The Germans come to us with the tradition of feudalism and aristocracy unbroken, and with the addition of a modern and conscious philosophy of the state. What that philosophy is in its European expression, all men now know. What it is in its New World reflection I may best indicate by illustration. Shortly after the opening of the war I gave several public talks on the issue as it appeared to me, and on its consequences and meanings for America, Following one of these, I received a letter from a leader among the German-Amer- icans, a man of the finest German type, culti- vated in taste, read in history and letters, an at- torney by profession and acquainted with the development of the law. I quotefromthis letter : 171 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION ... I have read several of your recent addresses and letters and have been agreeably touched by the se- riousness and sympathetic thoughtfulness of their tone. I discover in them also a note of depression, of doubt, of mournfulness, that indicates the ferment you are undergoing. You seem to be passionately striving to rise out of the tragedy into peace, to escape from the sad minor into the triumphant major. In mingled doubt and hope you turn your eyes to Christianity. The question arises: What do you mean by that term.'' Lessing once said that Christianity had been tried for eighteen hundred years, but the religion of Christ never. Traditional, historic Christianity, that patchwork, that motley garment, seems to me much more man-made than war. War is simple, elemental, intelligible. Reasoning inductively, one finds it as nat- ural as other forms of human activity. In fact, if we admit the necessity of the state, I do not see how we can escape admitting the necessity of war. The state has no soul to save. Power is its aim, its need; force its ultima ratio. Pitt said, "English diplomacy is Eng- lish trade." He was a great man and spoke bluntly, as great men do. What he said of England in Napoleon's time is just as true of England to-day, though English statesmen of to-day have not Pitt's size and bluntness and pretend that England entered upon this war as the champion of morality and democracy. . . . There has been more agitation in the last dozen years in behalf of peace than in all times preceding, and we see it followed by the greatest war in history. Put so- called Christianity to the proof, and ask yourself then what you have a right to expect of it. It has caused many, many wars; so far as I am informed, it has not prevented one. . . . 'Power is the aim of the state, force its ultima ratio.'' To Americans this is a strange- sounding doctrine. In our day we have sinned in the employment of force, as other nations 172 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION have; but we have never been led to this em- ployment by a philosophy of force; and I think we may point with pardonable satis- faction to one notable instance in which we have resisted the temptation to take all that our strength might claim: I mean the case of Cuba after the Spanish War. We had then with us two parties: one claiming the eco- nomic good of conquest, the other asserting the inw^ard good of honour — and the latter won. To-day we have two similar parties, whereof the one is proclaiming that the final reason of states is power, while the other in- sists that justice and the law are for the curb- ing of the arrogant and the protection of the weak. VII To the future belongs the issue, an imperial- istic or a democratic United States of America. To the present belongs the problem of a start toward the solution of this issue. It is small wonder that Americans of every complexion to-day find their country full of division and complication, uncertainty and puzzle. Noth- ing could better illustrate this than the spotty and enigmatical election of 1916. Of the two presidential candidates, the one stood for a record that had pleased ne"ther party (I mean neither of the real parties in the land, the sub-political parties); the other stood for an attempt to please all diversities of opinion. ^72 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION Numberless voters were in doubt as to how to vote even within a few days of election, hoping that something decisive would put one man or the other squarely upon one side or the other. German-Americans were anxious to prove their strength, and Fatherland, fearful of predic- tion, comically argued that if Hughes were elected it would be because of punishment meted out to Wilson by German-American votes, that if Wilson were successful it would be because Roosevelt was the millstone that had drowned Hughes. In Nebraska, I heard say, the German-Americans were instructed to vote for Hughes; but the state went tre- mendously for Wilson, — for the reason, as rumour hath it, that the German farmers roundly asserted that Wilson had brought good prices and good times with his administra- tion, and for Wilson they would vote. But the election has settled nothing, and Wilson is president by happy chance, so far as men can see. What he will do with his second administration none can foresee. But one thing seems evident, that, like most Americans, he is puzzled by the political en- vironment; and many of us think, too, that his conception of his own office is fatally weak. " I do not know what they [the people] are thinking about," he said in May, 1916; "I have the most imperfect means of finding out, and yet I have got to act as if I knew. That is the burden of it, and I tell you, gentle- men, it is a pretty serious burden, particu- 174 AMERICAS SELF-REVELATION larly if you look upon the office as I do — that I am not put there to do what I please. . . . I am put there to interpret, to register, to suggest, and more than that, and much greater than that, to be suggested to." Undoubtedly in an ideal democracy, where the national conceptions were homogeneous and division only existed on the minor ques- tion of the ways and means of realization, such a theory of the executive office is com- plete and satisfying. But in a nation such as is the United States, made up of communities and elements having disparate and unamal- gamated ideals of the task of the nation and the meaning of nationality, no notion of office could be more mischievous. In moral issues we must have leaders and partizans, for moral ideals are the creation of thinking men, not of collective groups, — Socrates, Plato, Savon- arola, Lincoln, — such men create ideals in expressing them. President Wilson was far better inspired when he said (in the month following the above): "I have not read his- tory without observing that the greatest forces in the world, and the only permanent forces, are the moral forces." This is essential truth. Its supplement is that moral forces are called into expression by moral leaders and are actualized only under the inspiration of moral leadership. The deep need of the United States to-day is for men who, them- selves having an understanding of justice and a passionate love of it, are able to impart 175 AMERICA'S SELF-REVELATION both the understanding and the love to those citizens-in-tutelage who are with us but as yet not wholly of us, to the end that the nation may yet stand conscious and whole in its Americanism. November, igi6. 176 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC A LETTER TO STUDENTS STUDENTS and professors returning to the University of Nebraska this fall will see little change in the outward aspect of things. The college yard and buildings are the yard and buildings of former years; the sights of the town are the familiar sights. Except that Nebraska is blessed with a peace- ful abundance which gives us all a more than ordinary feeling of security, this year is ex- ternally like the years of the past; and the students' duties, we may suppose, will follow the routine which time has made familiar. And yet an intense, if unseen, change has taken place. We may fall into customary grooves, but the spirit with which we do Note. — ^The papers here entitled "Letters to the Public"" were originally addressed to the students of the University of Nebraska, and they are, doubtless, even more obviously seasonable and local than the other contents of this volume. Certainly, they pretend to no novelty of idea; but as certain of the ideas which they do express seem to the author imoortant enough to deserve expression many times and on varied occasions, they are here included. There is, too, a possible interest attaching to the records of a developing concep- tion of the meaning of the war. 177 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC so will be unlike that of any former year. The problems of life, and above all, the problems of education, have suddenly presented an aspect which they never wore before, and student and professor alike is face to face with issues calling for every intellectual effort of which each is capable. Outwardly we cannot realize this European War; inwardly it is yet vague to us; but the certainty that it is bound to alter the whole course of our lives, individual and national, few will deny. Perhaps the most far-reaching feature of the conflict, and certainly its deepest significance to us, is hardly indicated in the daily news. I mean its relation to the main- tenance and progress of those arts and sciences which are the heart and life of our civilization. Men are prone to gauge progress by its outer glories, — feats of engineering, expansion of commerce, stabilization of governments; but we should never forget that behind the bridge is the mathematical formula, supporting com- merce is scientific investigation, and nourish- ing statecraft is the wisdom which comes from the preservation of human experience in human history. Without the intellectual sub- structure the outward pomp of our culture would vanish like a mirage. And what does this war mean for the in- tellect of the world.'' France, England, and Germany have carried this earth's intellectual burdens and achieved its intellectual tri- umphs for the past five centuries. The train- 178 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC ing of a mind is not accomplished in a day; its gift to society is the slow labour of years. Can anyone doubt that whatever the outcome of the present war in a political way its effects upon the trained minds of Western Europe can be only disastrous? The higher works of peace, when peace is restored, will suffer more terribly than all else. Science, scholarship, literature, art, these must give way to the more pressing needs of political and economic and social reconstruction; the machine must be rebuilt before its product can be manu- factured, the garden must be regrown before its fruits can be forthcoming. Partly this will be due to economic stress, for mental achieve- ment is only possible in well-provisioned societies; partly it will be due to actual loss of trained minds, the young men of university training whose lives are lost or maimed, the gifted children to whom education must be denied, the many hundreds of men whose nervous and mental strength will be per- manently weakened by the stress of war; and in part it will be due to the fact that Europe will require all its surviving intellectual powers to repair its immediate ills. France, exhausted by the Napoleonic wars, required the long leth- argy of the reign of Louis Philippe to partially regain its lost spiritual energy. Can any man think that the present war will not be far more deadly to the spirit of modern Europe? And in view of this, what is our part? America is ill-prepared to become the bearer 179 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC of the light of culture; it is to no trained runner that the torch is cast. Yet it is obvious that the race is to us. For the next generation, perhaps for the next century, or five centuries, we must stand in the forefront of progress, performing a great, if not the greater share of the world's mental labours — this, if the work is to be performed at all. It would be the idlest of conceits for us to suppose that we can succeed in such a task without the most intense and serious effort; we are as yet far from the van of progress, and must achieve what the other nations are losing before we can pass them; the immediate future of the world, despite our best, is certain to be a period of retrogression; nevertheless, if we persist, we may hope eventually to save the loss, and better it with gain. In any case, the duty of effort is clear. But what is the first step } It is one the students must take — a step for our youth. I have already said that the training of minds is slow. It is slowest of all for work in those fields which require long and impersonal effort; for work in science and scholarship and the patient analysis of his- tory. Without work of this character, civiliza- tion must perish; hitherto, we have borrowed its fruits from generous fatherlands; now we must mature them by our own toils. The task of the generation calls for a certain amount of abnegation of personal interest and prospect; it calls for a willingness on the part of our 1 80 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC young men and women to undertake the most labourious paths of knowledge, to prepare themselves with even a painful thoroughness for handling problems for which no preparation can be altogether adequate, and finally to find their contentment not in immediate advantage to themselves but in the final gain of the race. We have fed upon the sugars of culture; let us now make its honest bread. For each individual the problem of the ad- vantageous route must be a private problem. Each must decide, from the best light of his own reason and the best thoughts of friends and advisers, in what immediate direction his studies shall work. The main requirements from the individual are, first, a willingness to give oneself wholly to the evident need, and second, a resolve to act only upon the maturest judgement which nature concedes. Starting with such a spirit, the right way will sooner or later be found. But while all is thus general, I wish none the less to indicate one great gap in our national preparation for the task that is ours, — as I think, the greatest gap. More than any great folk we are in need of men and women with a clear sense of the sources and promptings of our civilization, with a developed historical sense, in its richest meaning. What differ- entiates civilized man from the savage is the civilized man's knowledge of his own history; such knowledge is the only sure anchor of culture. We cannot know ourselves until we i8i LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC know the past, not only of those who were our physical fathers, but above all of those people who have given us our spiritual heritage. This is no light or easy study. It calls for knowledge of languages, ancient and modern; it calls for devotion to political, economic, and social history, and to the logical analysis of fact; it calls for familiarity with the litera- tures, arts, and philosophies of Western peo- ples, from Greek and Hebrew to the English and German; and it calls for a power of effective use of this knowledge. Not all is open to one student, though he give a lifetime to the field; but if many students, from many angles, give earnest effort to this central task of preserving, as living thought, the hard- earned experience of generations, then indeed we may be certain that whether America's addition to the world's culture be great or little, it will yet have won the gratitude of future generations by preserving in time of threatening darkness man's most precious wisdom. September, 1914. II THE WAR AND MEN'S IDEALS. To-day the United States is a judge among nations. Never before has a neutral people been so urgently called upon by belligerents to 182 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC judge the righteousness of their cause. France has laid before our Government formal pro- tests. Belgium has sent an embassy to our shores. The leading men of Great Britain have addressed us through the press. Germany has gone even farther. Her ambassador in this country has been her public pleader. German scholars have addressed formal statements to Americans. In this country and abroad Ger- man organizations are sending broadcast among us special pleas for the sympathy of the people of the United States. The whole belligerent world is appealing to us to sit in judgement upon the causes for which they are fighting, and the whole world expects from us the judge's decision. In this fact, indeed, is to be found the one bright promise which the war holds; each of the warring nations is fighting for what it believes to be the right; each is appealing to us in full confidence that our decision will express our conviction of right. The war is a war of men's ideals. In view of this appeal, what is our duty.f" That we cannot refrain, as a people, from pro- nouncing our judgement should be clear to every man. That in so doing we must act with judicial uprightness and impartiality all worthy men will concede. Parenthetically, this seems to me all that President Wilson's public caution was intended to convey; I mention this because in some quarters in this state the President's plea for the true spirit of neutrality is apparently taken to be a com- 183 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC mand to silence, spiritual as well as verbal. What, then, does an impartial judgement demand of us? Three things, before all: (i) That we should get at the truth, get the historic facts that led up to the war and affect its course. (2) That we should endeavour to under- stand the cause of each belligerent power and people as that cause is felt in the belligerent lands. Judicial fairness can only follow sym- pathetic understanding. (3) That we should estimate the probable consequences of the several possible outcomes of the war upon civilization as a whole. That is, we must render our decision with a view to the good of humanity as a whole, to the civiliza- tion of the future as well as that of the past. The first question divides into two parts, which have unfortunately been too often con- fused in the public mind: namely, {a) What is the immediate, {b) What is the remote his- torical cause of this war.^ The first of these queries, as to the immediate cause of the war, has been already answered, as I believe, to the full satisfaction of the American people. It has been answered by the warring nations themselves; for in the diplomatic correspond- ence as published by England, Germany, and Russia we have so many official briefs for the cases of these nations. These briefs are in essential agreement as to the facts; they mu- tually verify one another, and hence we have no reason to doubt their evidence. It is the 184 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC consensus of the great journals of the United States that these documents establish the fact that Germany precipitated the present war as her only defence of principles which she regarded as sacred. But a mere answer as to the immediate does not fix the ultimate responsibility for the war. None of the warring nations, save it be Servia, rests its case wholly upon the evidence of the official papers. Thus it is clear from Russia's promises to Poland that the temper of Russia is, as the Germans say, Pan-Slavic, and that she hopes to maintain the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe in individual autonomy under the Czar's suzerainty. France is actuated not only by the need of self-preservation, under attack, but by a desire to recover what a pre- vious war lost to her. England's savage as- sault upon Prussian militarism shows that she too recognizes other reasons than the violation of Belgian neutrality for her attitude; indeed, England never pretended that this was her only casus belli; her minister informed Germany as early as July 29 (White Papers, No. 89) that if France became involved Eng- land could not stand aside. Finally, Germany, most of all, in her many defences of the right- eousness of the war, throws the blame for it upon conditions precedent to the immediate occasion. As impartial judges (and I believe that the intelligent people of the United States have been and are impartial in their judgement), 185 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC we must endeavour to get at the soul and right of each national contention. Sympa- thetic understanding is, as I have stated, the second requisite of impartial judgement. This is difficult to achieve, but it is our really im- portant task; all else is but symptomatic. To begin in the East, Russia's attitude is not difficult to comprehend. Pan-Slavism awoke as a response to Pan-Germanism, as a reply to German dominion of Slavic peoples and even more to the contempt for the Slavs which the Germans are not always slow in expressing. No Germanic state is dominated by the Slavs; several Slavic states are ruled by Germans. In the light of this fact and of the further fact of the nationalistic revivals of the past half-century, Pan-Slavism is in- telligible, whether or no we sympathize with Russia; and the adequacy of the cause for war, from the Russian standpoint, — namely, the attempt of a Germanic state to dominate a Slavic,^ — is clear. That the reduction of Servia "to the status of a vassal" was the real issue in the eyes of both Servia and Russia is fully proved by the Prince Regent of Servia's appeal to the Czar (Orange Papers, No. 6), by the objection of Servia to those Austrian demands which involved the nullification of the Servian constitution (paragraphs i, 4, and 6 of the Servian reply to Austria), and by the explicit statements of the Russian premier (Orange Papers, No. 25; English White Papers, No. 139). 186 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC So much for the attitude of Russia. The attitudes of Austria, Servia, France, and Bel- gium are also clearly intelligible. Each of these states was directly threatened with de- struction and responded with an effort at self- preservation. It is as natural for a state to wish to preserve its political freedom and cul- tural independence as for an individual to wish to preserve his life. Such a motive all men comprehend. It is the attitudes of England and Germany that are really crucial from the American point of view. The Pan-Slavism of Russia and the nationalism of the attacked states are rela- tively simple and comprehensible motives. Even the warring nations seem to recognize this. The one conspicuous misunderstanding in this present war is as between England and Germany, and the degree of this misunder- standing is reflected in the intensity of the animosity which these two nations entertain for one another. English feeling against Aus- tria is slight; it is all directed against the German Government and the ideals the English believe this government to stand for. Similarly, German hatred of England in the present conflict is far more intense than is even her loathing for the Slavs, while to France she Is relatively kindly. Now, each of these powers, England and Germany, is proclaim- ing this war to be a war in defence of civi- lization; their fundamental difference is ob- viously a difference in their conceptions of 187 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC civilization. In the claims of both on this question we must find the materials for our final judgement. First, a caution. Let us not judge either nation from the vituperation heaped upon it by the other. No sane American believes that England is, as the Germans say, a lie- factory, governed only by envy, deceit, and malice. No sane American believes that Ger- many's war is, as some of the English seem to hold, merely the expression of a military caste dominated by a malignant thirst for English blood and lust of English gold. On the con- trary, we all believe that each nation is fight- ing with an ardent and whole-souled convic- tion of the righteousness of its cause. So be- lieving, it is our obvious duty to accept the statements of the representative men of each nation as to what they are fighting for. Each side is free to present, and is presenting its case without damage from the other. Between them we must decide. What, then, is the cause of each, as each understands it? Here I can only present an opinion — my private opinion — formed from the several manifestoes of the two peoples. England's contentions, as expressed by her scholars and statesmen, I should formulate in some such propositions as these: (i) Small states have a right to independent development. That is, the culture of the world, on the whole, profits by local diversifications. This is the main point of James Bryce's recent i88 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC discussion of England's cause. It is the ex- plicit statement of the group of Oxford scholars who have published their analysis of Why We Are at War. An article in the London Times of September 17 states it as follows: "There is, for nations as for men, an everlasting orthodoxy of doctrine that becomes clearer as they live by it. . . . Now the essence of the orthodox doctrine, both for men and for nations, is that they should not ask themselves whether they are inferior or superior in any respect to this or that people, but that they should have their own idea of excellence and pursue that without rivalry, or envy, or con- tempt. " This, as we shall see, is the direct op- posite of the view of the public men of Ger- many, — at any rate, of those now conspicuous. (2) Treaty pledges should be subject to the same code as is the word of the individual. This is not maintained because all treaties are good, but for the reason that the English be- lieve that the world's growing respect for treaties (and I suppose no Englishman will deny that this respect is a recent growth for his own as for other countries) is furnishing us our only real advance toward a world-polity in which war shall be of the past. "The faith of treaties is the only solid foundation on which the temple of peace can be built up," says James Bryce, and we have no reason to doubt that he and other Englishmen believe this. (3) Democracies, the rulership of the people LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC of the world, can only be developed from the locality outwards. The world cannot be de- mocratized by empire, but only by the slow growth of national self-consciousnesses. That the British Empire is a kind of anomaly, the English concede (just as is our own dominion over the Filipinos); but they point to the fact that decentralization, the recognition of local rights and local modes of thought — home rule in Ireland, native art in India, etc. — are gradually redeeming the Empire of its own faults, inherited from the past. In other words, the British empire of to-day is not the British empire of 1776. Such are the English ideals as the English state them. I confess that the German motive is not equally clear to me. Certain aspects of it are, however, obvious, and I will try to sum- marize them, trusting for my evidence to the published statements of the protagonists of Germany's cause. (i) Germany stands for firm belief in higher and lower cultures, and the intense assurance that German culture is by right of quality a higher and dominating culture. This is evi- denced by the German White Paper itself which reprints newspaper criticism of Servians of every class, officials, professors, teachers, and guarantees to Austria an entirely free hand in her action against Servia. Rudolf Eucken, the great philosopher, characterizes Slavic antipathy to Germany as the " rage and hatred of a lower culture against a higher." 190 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC Professor Muensterberg, the Kaiser's Harvard friend, says: "This is a war of Russian bru- tahty against German culture, — Germany is fighting the battle of western civilization against the Slav and barbarism." (2) Germany stands for the belief that a growing nation has rights greater than are the rights established by the law of nations, — that is, that assurances secured from strong peoples by alien and weaker states are sub- ordinate to the necessities of a growing people. "We demand our place in the sun," is the Kaiser's picturesque statement of this doc- trine, which was long ago put more baldly by Bismarck: "The time for neutral states is past. You (Crispi) can see that in the case of Switzerland where they arrest my agents. The state, like the individual, must be re- sponsible for its actions," {Crispi Memoirs^ May, 1889). Professor Muensterberg aims to give a biological-sociological formulation of the same doctrine: "The world's progress has depended at all times upon the expansive ascendency of the sound, strong, solid, and able nations and the shrinking of those which have lost their healthy qualities and have become unfit and decadent." (3) A third German conviction, what the British really mean by Prussian militarism, is represented by a group of doctrines difficult to characterize simply. For example, the Kaiser's. statement that "the army is the main tower of strength for my country, the main 191 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC pillar supporting the Prussian throne, to which God in his wisdom has called me. " Or again, Treitschke's oft-quoted statement that "God will see to it that war always recurs as a dras- tic medicine for the human race. " All of these conceptions might be summed up under the phrase Pan-Germanism, understood no longer as a purely political conception of the unification of the German peoples, but as an intense, Hebrew-like conviction that Germany is a chosen nation and the German people a chosen people for the redemption of the world. The case is before you as I see it and as I believe most Americans see it. Each people is appealing, with all the sincerity at its com- mand, for our judgement of the righteousness of its cause. Our answer can only be given in the strength of our social and political con- victions, in the light of our judgement as to what should be the future of the human race. Shall ours be a world state, dominated by the spirit and ideals of the German people, by a Pax Germanica and a Lex Germanica, or shall it be a confederacy of races and peoples in emulous and uneven strife for the achieve- ment of the best gift, the highest excellence? Shall there be a world empire or a world de- mocracy? I believe that our treatment of Cuba and Mexico, our promises to the Fili- pinos, have indicated the only answer that we can give. October, 191 4. 192 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC III THE WAR AND EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION. What we commonly speak of as 'European civilization ' is the body of political ideas and institutions, social and economic customs, lit- eratures, arts, and sciences, which, originating and developed in Europe, have now been spread by conquest, commerce, colonization, and pros- elytizing over the greater part of the habitable earth. The Christian religion is the most uni- versal and characteristic feature of this civi- lization; which is hence often spoken of as 'Christian civilization,' or briefly as 'Christen- dom. ' The only civilizations greatly competing with the Christian for the control of the human race are the Buddhist and the Muslim, both centralized in the southern half of the continent of Asia. So far as the political control of the globe or the general development of human institutions is concerned, these Asiatic cul- tures are at the present day of little import- ance; they are not conspicuously expansive in either a material or an intellectual sense; they have been, in fact, for_ a range of cen- turies quiescent or retrogressive. Seen by the eye of ages, we live in the world's Christian era. . . If we ask more narrowly after the origm and character of European civilization, we can point to a few great historic movements. 193 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC European culture took its rise in the eastern Mediterranean, in close contact with Egypt and the great Asiatic states of antiquity. It first received its distinctively European character in what Herodotus calls the quarrel of Europe and Asia, — the wars of the city states of ancient Greece to preserve their in- dependence against the threatening domina- tion of Asiatic Persians. The success of this defence of the freedom of Hellas crystallized Greek national consciousness and presaged the splendid development of Hellenic intellect which makes the fifth century before Christ secularly the greatest of the world's centuries. On the foundations of this Hellenic civiliza- tion of antiquity rests all that is best and most characteristic in Europe's art, literature, science, and philosophy; and indeed the stu- dent of Greek thought is continuously im- pressed with the fact that already in its first bloom it defined for us the salient outlines of all our significant ideas; we have done little more than add illustration to the truths the Greeks discovered. Nevertheless, European civilization owes to antiquity two elements which the Greeks could not contribute, — - the two elements which alone have made the uni- versalizing of Greek thought possible. From Rome it has derived the great conception of a formal civil law; the conception that men are not merely the toys of a whimsical nature or the tools of a responsible providence, but that they are themselves givers of law and makers 194 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC of institutions, — and this is an idea which, I believe, has never touched any other civiUza- tion. From Judea, a country which was only by accident of geography Asiatic, for its whole historical influence has been westward, Europe derived the Christian religion, which in a special sense it has made the seal and sanction of its culture. These three, Greek thought, Roman law, the Christian religion, have from antiquity given the civilization of Europe its distinctive character. The heritage of antiquity — the soul of European culture — has been given its modern form — the body of that culture — by two groups of nations of western Europe, the Latin nations and the Teutonic nations. Let me point out that this division is more strik- ingly linguistic than racial. While in a broad way it is true that the Teutons are northerly and blond, and the Latins southerly and bru- net, nevertheless, it has long been recog- nized by ethnologists that there are no pure races in Europe, and that the region from the valley of the Po to the Baltic and westward through the British Isles is peopled by a hope- less criss-cross of human breeds; the most that can be said of one section or another is that it shows a predominant strain of this blood or that. Among these Latin and Teutonic nations, four have emerged in the progress of time as the especial standard-bearers of Europe's civilization. These are, of course, Italy, 195 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC France, England, and Germany. In men- tioning these four, I do not wish to be thought unmindful of what other states have done, — Spain, Scandinavia, and the Slavonic countries, — but I think it certain that no student of the history of culture will seriously contest the assertion that all the most signifi- cant elements of European culture as it exists to-day are represented by the speakers of Italian, French, German, and English. If evi- dence be needed, the mere fact that these four languages are to-day the universally recognized languages of learning, and that some acquaintance with each of them is de- manded of everyone who pretends to scholar- ship, should set the matter at rest. If we ask what is the distinctive contribu- tion of each of these nations to the world's culture, the answer is not immediate. Prob- ably it may be best thrown in perspective by falling back upon our broader linguistic dis- tinction. The Latin nations, Italy and France, have been and are the world's leaders and teachers in the fine arts — architecture, paint- ing, sculpture. These two nations have also been the form-givers of western culture; litera- ture, drama, science, politics, personal and public manners, even food and dress, have derived whatever of elegance and urbanity they possess from Italy and France. Finally, it is to these two countries again that we owe our most penetrating political and social philosophy. Italian humanism and French 196 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC humanitarianism have deeply coloured all modern life, and have opened the way to the conception of a civilization catholic of all mankind. It can hardly be denied that the Teutonic gift is outwardly less imposing. Its first and, as I think, its noblest contribution has been its love of truth. If the Latins have given us the forms of culture, surely its spiritual sub- stance is to be found in that stubborn inde- pendence of spirit which has created British political freedom and which was the soul of the German reformation of religion. Chris- tianity was the first great democratic move- ment in human history — indeed, the only great democratic movement. Yet the Latins could only make of it a kind of other-world empire, a city of God; it remained for the countrymen of Wyclif and Luther to derive from Christian teachings that democracy of life which in Germany has taken the form of an intellectual, in England of a political free- dom. The same Teutonic love of the substance of truth is to be seen again, I think, in the distinctive character of English and German science and letters; in science the Germans have been noted above other peoples for labourious and painstaking compilation, for research; the English have been the founders of the experimental method. In literature, neither German nor Briton has attained Latin elegance and lucidity, while for majesty and richness of thought only one Latinic poet, 197 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC Dante, has approached Shakespeare or Milton or Goethe. The substance of the practical Hfe, too, has been immensely furthered by the commerce, manufactures, and inventions of England and Germany. It would be uselessly invidious to try to cast up the several accounts of these nations, to say which is first, which should be last in the estimation of humanity. As culture groups they are of nearly equal age; the tenth and eleventh centuries of our era saw each of them assuming its special cast. From the point of view of world history — in comparison, say, to Persian or Hindu or Chinese — all of them are young; and there is neither point nor truth in calling any one of them decadent. To-day, all four represent the frontal of civilization, and it would be calamitous indeed to suppose that any one of them had passed its period of helpfulness to mankind. And yet the events of this year of our Lord 1914 cannot but cause a thinking man to ask himself whether this very calamity may not have befallen not merely one, but all of these peoples; whether the present fratricidal war of European countries may not mark the close of the period of Europe's leadership of the civilization of the world, and hence the begin- ning of a New World epoch. I do not wish to appear as a prophet of evil, but it becomes every man to face the truth. War is an agency of destruction. It destroys vigorous human life; it destroys men's handi- ig8 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC work; it drains the generation engaged in it of energy and power; and in using up the wealth, the capital of the world, it depletes the energy of immediately succeeding genera- tions, for wealth capitalized is merely the out- ward symbol of that power for work passed from generation to generation which makes human progress possible; capital is the poten- tial energy of mankind. War destroys all of these things, — life, work, power for work; this, I think, is undeniable. It is true that war, in a certain sense, may be the preserver of mankind. Nations are justified, we believe, in waging war for the preservation of human freedom; they are justified in waging war in defence of the truth, and in defence of that special form of truth which is the nation's troth or plighted word; they may be justified, again, in waging an offensive war for the propagation of ideals which they hold to be deeply sacred, and which must else suffer defeat. All of these causes are recognized by mankind as justifying the appeal to arms, for they are deemed to be causes grounded in the inalienable rights of the human soul. Nev- ertheless, it is to be noted that each of these causes is a defensive, not a constructive cause. War cannot create, though it may preserve; and the sense in which war is justifiable to the moral intelligence is exactly the sense in which surgery, amputation, is justifiable for the health of the human body; it preserves life, even while it depletes and mutilates it. War, 199 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC in its best light, is still a destructive agency. The degree of destruction which the present war will entail, no man can foresee. Even if it is waged until one or more of the great states is forever crushed, as the combatants mu- tually threaten, its full effects can hardly be- come apparent in our own generation. Civi- lizations are measured by centuries; they do not die in a day. After this war is ended, we shall certainly see the various European states, now engaged in mutual injury, working mutually for the repair of this injury. There will be houses and bridges and roads to be re- built; countries to be rehabilitated and re- populated; an immense and engrossing eco- nomic activity. There will be a resumption of educational and scientific activities, though the immediately practical nature of the re- construction called for will insure that these activities be practical rather than theoretical, in the nature of applications rather than of discoveries. There may be, also, the creation of a vivid art, literary and pictorial, directly inspired by the combat; though, like all art so inspired, its values must be historical rather than eternal. All of these activities are likely to follow this war, and to present to us the spectacle of a Europe energetically active, aggressive at once in politics, economics, and letters. And yet such an activity, — for the man who can see beneath the superficial moil, who can see his own day in the perspective of God's years, — such an activity may be noth- 200 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC ing more, and is all too likely to be nothing more than the iridescence of the decay of European civilization. The shell of culture will remain, glittering and beautiful, but the living spirit will have been stolen away. Such, I say, may be the result, and in some degree must be the result of the present war. People have rallied from disastrous wars in the past (though we must not forget that people have also been destroyed by them, and whole civilizations buried for centuries), and Europe may in a degree rally from this war. But it is inconceivable that she can be re- stored in her entirety; something of her old pre-eminence will certainly be lost to her, in all probability forever. Never before have such numbers of men, such quantities of wealth, been devoted to destructive combat; and while it is true that the world and Europe are more populous and wealthier than ever before, it is altogether probable that a war waged in the murderous spirit of this combat entails a consumption of resources, in life, wealth, energy, out of all proportion to the natural increase of these energies. We must face an era of a physically and spiritually im- poverished Europe. In view of this, what is our duty.? What is our task as a nation and as individuals ? What is our position in time and space, — in the history and geography of this planet. Earth.? We must face an era of a physically and spir- itually impoverished Europe. . . . Can I utter 20 1 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC graver words, or invite to soberer thought? Heretofore, for all the higher needs of human- ity, we have lived upon the patrimony of Europe. We have turned to her for our sci- ence, our art, our letters, our political and social thought; she has been at once parent and mentor, the giver of gifts spiritual, for which we have returned the natural duties of offspring. If I may enlarge upon the figure, we have been like a youth sent out to try the world, relying upon a stipend from home. But the time for these things is past; hence- forth we must be dependent upon our own powers; the struggle of maturity, the creative struggle, is before us. What is our position in space and time, — in Earth's geography, conceived as a distribu- tion of civilizations, and in Earth's history, conceived as the unfoldment of man's better powers? If you will form to the mind's eye a conception of our globe's surface, you will have before you the configuration of those continents and seas which are the theatres of men's affairs. Europe is the least of the con- tinents; her civilization has been the civiliza- tion of the least of the intercontinental seas, the Mediterranean. Is it thinkable that the habitable globe can be forever dominated from European centres; that a London or a Berlin can play for the whole world the part that Rome so long played for Europe itself? The question is answered in the asking; and it is answered again by the world-map itself. On 202 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC this world-map it is evident at once that America, and more particularly that part of America where its northern and southern continents thin to an almost symbolic union, — from the map it is evident that America is the key to the strategy of the seas. What this means in the large, a little imagination will foresee; the seas are the burden-bearers of mankind; they have made commerce possible, on a world scale; and commerce is but the outer sign of that inward traffic of the spirit, that communion of man with man, nation with nation, which is the supreme agent of human progress. Civilization has never, in the world's history, had its centres far from the littoral, and I cannot but think that the Panama Canal, in bringing the littorals of the nations nearer to one another than they have ever been before, as near together as they ever can be brought, marks the last great shift in the geographic centre of civilization. The two great events of our generation are the opening of this canal and the contemporary debacle of Europe, events which have a strangely dra- matic relation to one another, the one as mark- ing the beginning of a new, the other as mark- ing the decay of an old centre of civilization. But geography is not the sole determinant of men's destinies, nor of the greatness of nations. We should view our position as a sobering responsibility rather than as an assurance of vainglory. That the American continent is one day to be the seat of a great 203 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC civilization, I have no doubt; that that civi- lization is to be the achievement of our race, that it is to be the continuation and fruition of the civilization of Europe, I hope; but we can be certain only of this, that if our race fails, some other will succeed, as we have suc- ceeded the Indian, to our geographical heri- tage. And let us view the task before us with a mind humbly aware of deep insufficiencies. As a people, we cannot pretend to have at- tained the level of civilization which yester- day was Europe's; as I have said, spiritually we have been living upon the European patri- mony of our race. Furthermore, a student of the history of culture must, it seems to me, concede that intellectually Europe herself is only now attaining to the level of her own Hellenic source. It is a saying of scholars that not until the nineteenth century did the in- telligence of Europe reach a point where it could comprehend the intelligence of the Greeks, and it is not pretended that the crea- tive powers of the average Italian or French- man or Englishman or German of our day can vie with those of the average Athenian of the age of Pericles. It has taken Europe more than two millenia to rise to a point of culture where it can comprehendingly view its own high source. This my own study of philosophy daily confirms into conviction, and if the total spectacle of European history is thus one of an essential decline, intellectually, where indeed must we put our own place, still in parental 20 ]. LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC leading-strings? Let us not cant of progress until we have proven our powers of compre- hension. And now let me say a word in regard to the concrete problems which we must face. I said above that, after this war, we shall in all prob- ability be presented with the spectacle of a Europe intensely active in its economic, sci- entific, and literary life. But if, as seems to me certainly necessary, this life is largely recon- structive rather than constructive; if its eco- nomics is an effort to replace wasted capital, its science devoted to material problems and local applications, its literature and art and scholarship historical and retrospective rather than creative and prophetic in character, — • if these altogether probable outcomes occupy what is then left of European energy, we must not be duped by the outward spectacle into the feeling that it stands for an inward and positive progress. Let us rather remember that the task of an advancing civilization is the immensely laborious one of intellectual and spiritual discovery; that theoretic, not practical, science is the true gauge of even economic progress; that literature and art must have eternal values for the human soul if they are to measure up to the greatness of the past; and finally that the painful and often thankless labour of scholarship is the one sure guarantee of the spiritual freedom of mankind. For more than two thousand years Europe has pointed earth's way in these ac- 20 1; LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC tivities. Now it is ours, if our race have the spirit, to succeed to the parent's toils. November y 1914. IV THE WAR AND CHRISTIANITY. Europe's other name is Christendom. Her civilization is the Christian civilization, and the soul of that civilization and its most uni- versal trait is the Christian religion which all European nations profess. A general war which involves the four most powerful Euro- pean nations, and the greater and most highly civilized portion of her inhabitants, such a war, when hugely waged between these na- tions themselves, Christian against Christian, cannot but appear to the rest of the world as a fearful test of the fundamental soundness of Europe's culture, and especially as a test, as by fire, of the genuineness and vitality of the Christian religion. In the war in Europe Christianity is on trial before the world. One of the phases of this war which has been taken up by our American press in a cynical or an ironical mood has been the com- mon appeal of the warring nations to the one Christian god. The royal and imperial heads of these states have each and all sent forth their soldiers to fight, trusting to the Almighty God, the God of their Fathers, the God of 206 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC righteousness, for victory and salvation; and to many Americans there has seemed to be a kind of blasphemy in this, or at least an in- sincerity. For myself, I see in it no insincerity, no trace of mere formalism. When the aged Emperor of Austria asked the Pope to bless the arms of his country, whose rule for cen- turies bore the proud title of Holy Roman Empire, I believe him to have been deeply sincere. When the King of England com- manded his soldiers to fear only the Lord, I believe him to have been deeply sincere. I believe, too, in the sincerity of the Czar of all the Russias as he blessed the holy ikons, the images of the Lord, which his regiments were to bear before them into battle. And I do not for a moment question the earnestness of the Kaiser of Germany in saying, "God has been on our side and has most brilliantly aided us. " I do not question the honesty of these senti- ments when they are expressed by the rulers of Europe, for I find daily confirmation of the fact that all the peoples of the struggling states are as deeply moved by religious feeling as are their kings and rulers. Men do not face death in a jocular or cynical mood; and men here are facing the possible death of nations, as well as the certain extermination of mul- titudes of their beloved. In fact, press and returning traveller alike are to-day telling of a grave and solemn religious spirit in the churches of every nation in Europe; the lights and the gaiety are gone from the gay capitals, 207 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC and in the presence of horrible affliction her peoples are seeking before the altars the con- solations of the spirit. At the battle-front it is the same. We read of the czar-blessed ikons borne by priests at the head of charging moujiks. We read of a British regiment kneel- ing for a moment's prayer before making a supreme effort, that the men know means annihilation. We read of the Germans in their weltering trenches keeping the Sabbath with hymns of Christ even while the shrapnel is hailing about them. An American who en- tered Reims Cathedral during the bombard- ment gives this terrible picture, terrible and beautiful as faith is always beautiful: "Shells fell upon the prisoners, killing three or four and wounding others . . . the latter painfully dragging their bodies over the straw like gray-coloured snakes. Every now and again the half light in the Cathedral was lit by the white glare of a breaking shell. Four Sisters of Mercy also lay dead on the floor of the Cathedral, their white faces set with the sublimity of their faith. All around were the figures of kneeling women, their lips moving in fervent prayer. Apparently they were beseeching intercession from St. Joan of Arc, whose beautiful figure, crowned with white flowers, and looking ethereally calm in the tumult, was untouched by shot and shell. " In scenes such as these there is no question of sincerity. The men and women of Europe, like men and women since the world began, in 208 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC the hour of their helplessness and tribulation turn inevitably to that God whose children they have been taught to believe they are; and it may well be that one consequence of this terrible war will be an intensification and a purification of the religious life of the Euro- pean peoples. But from another point of view, for us who are far enough away to view the course of events with less passion, there are questions of the highest moment for the world's religious life, which the European conflict must raise. First among these, I should put the question as to the real meaning and message of Chris- tianity: is it a religion that countenances, nay, demands war under certain circum- stances? Is such a thing thinkable as a holy and Christian war.? Do not respond with a too-hasty negative; it is easy for us, remote from the conflict, to denounce war and say that it belies the Gospels. But a religion must be judged by its history, by its fruits; and the history of Europe is scarred by many a war waged in the name of Christ. Charlemagne baptized the Saxons in the blood of battle before he baptized them Christians; the Crusades were one splendid apotheosis of Christ and militarism, — the sword and the cross of Europe against the scimitar and cres- cent of Asia; the wars of the Reformation, bloody and savage beyond description, were all in the name of Christ; and it was with the name of Christ upon their lips, and venera- 209 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC tion of the church in their hearts, that the stout conquistadores came across the seas from Spain to hew Christian empires from the pagan body of America. We have no right to judge Christianity solely by our private convictions or to say that a religion in whose name so much blood has been shed Is entirely a religion of peace. Europe is Christian; Europe is at war; and the zeal that animates its warfare is, in part at least, the zeal of religious faith. And yet we believe, we Americans, that the Christian re- ligion is a religion of peace and good-will and brotherly kindness. How are we to reconcile this seeming contradiction; and again how is it to be reconciled to the keen and inquiring minds of non-Christian Asla.^ Christianity is on trial at the tribunal of the world's reason, and it is no light task to make good her de- fence. For my own part, I will undertake only an historical suggestion, for the full solution must be left to the eventful future of the Chris- tian world. At the foundation of Christianity, as you know, lie an Old and a New Dispensa- tion. The God of the Old Dispensation is, I suppose, in every man's mind a God of justice and righteousness and wrath; a God jealous of his due, who chastens the spirit of the haughty, who tries his servants with affliction, who pun- ishes the erring, who speaks his anger from the cloud. Such a God is indeed a God of battles and of battling hosts 1 In contrast, the God of 2IO LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC the New Dispensation is a loving father, in- finitely sorrowful of sin, infinitely forgiving, infinitely compassionate of human suffering. His minister is the dove of peace and peace ot the spirit is his most precious gift to mankind. There, in contrast, are the Old and the New Dispensations, as most of us understand them. We say that the New Dispensation has re- placed the Old, not only in the order of time but as an article of faith and as the essence of religion. I ask, has it indeed replaced the Old Dispensation, wholly replaced it in Christen- dom itself? Does the history of Christian nations show that the Old Dispensation is transcended f Is there not in Christian nations to-day a deep recognition of the old Hebraic God of Battles .f* And is not this, in part at least, the religion that countenances the pres- ent terrible war.f* Certainly, there is something of the noble patriotism of the prophets of old, — a patriot- ism founded in a deep conviction that their people had been chosen to an inestimable mis- sion, — there is something of this patriotism in the attitude of the German people to-day. "When an entire nation is inflamed and ele- vated by the same thought, that of being the bearer and instrument of a higher order of things," this, says Rudolf Eucken, is the noblest of impulses, and he proclaims that "to us (the Germans) more than to any other nation is intrus'-ed the true structure of human existence." "The task of civilization is in- 211 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC cumbent upon us by the decree of providence," are the words of another spokesman of the empire, General von Schellendorf; and it is difficult for us to see the German Kaiser, anointed of the Lord, as he believes himself to be, in any other light than as a kind of Joshua leading his people into a greater Canaan. If this be true of the Germans, can we doubt that it is, in its measure, true of the other warring nations; that each of them believes in itself, as a power for good and as a vessel of human welfare, with something of the same Hebraic steadfastness and something of the same reverence for the God of Israel who is also the God of battles ? Such a conviction will go far to explain how all of the warring nations are entering the conflict strong in their faith that God is with them. Warring Europe is still Christian Europe, but its Christianity is even yet largely the stern and implacable law of the Old Dispensa- tion. I do not wish to imply that the spirit of the New Dispensation has in no wise gained way; every student of history must recognize its influence in the fine chivalry which tem- pered the barbarity of mediaeval times, in the slow but sure expansion of the democratic belief in the rights of the individual soul, and again in that sentiment of humanity which in late years has been wonderfully spreading among the children of men; and every stu- dent of history will, I believe, agree that in these is to be founded the most vital distinc- 212 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC tion of Christian culture. But in spite of all this the fearful war that is now being waged in Christian Europe cannot but bring home to our imaginations the little distance, the very little distance, that Europe has advanced in the direction of the religion of peace. And yet,— let us seize hope even from the midst of discouragement,— and yet may it not be that this combat of titans represents the last expression of the old spirit, the last deed of the Old Dispensation .f* May it not be that, as a disease sometimes lurks in the sys- tem through long discomfort which can only be fully relieved and purified by the final fever, the fever of war in Europe to-day represents the last troubled outbreak of this inner con- tradiction at the core of our civilization.'' At least, there is consolation in this thought. It is but a few years since there died in Russia a grey old man who, more than any man of his century, stood before the European world as the symbol and apostle of the New Dispensation. He preached human brother- hood, as it has rarely been preached before, and he pled with the nations that they purge themselves of idle conceits and envious rival- ries. In his last days he seemed to recognize a kind of fatuity in his own mission, for even while he preached the gospel of peace and non- resistance, he prophesied war; with a kind of inevitableness which has caught the imagina- tion of all men, he prophesied the very con- flagration of all Europe which is now raging. 213 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC And yet his prophecy did not stop with war; for out of and beyond the struggle he saw arise a great confederacy of nations, — the nations of the earth, — hand in hand, engaged in the great work of civilization, which is the eternal work of human redemption. Such was the vision of Leon Tolstoy, the greatest Christian of the New Dispensation in our generation. I have set before you the religious problem of the war, as I conceive it, historically. There is yet another problem which the war cannot but make vivid in men's minds, if anything, of even more moment for religion. This is a metaphysical problem, to which I might well devote many lectures, but which now I can only indicate. The problem I speak of is the problem of the strength of evil and of the real seriousness of man's spiritual life. In times of peaceful pros- perity, religion tends all too easily to degen- erate into an empty formalism or indeed into a hardly less empty emotionalism; it loses its application to life, and hence its seriousness and earnestness. Under such circumstances we begin to doubt whether we have in us, after all, the stuff from which martyrs are made, whether our eyes are not hopelessly dimmed to spiritual truth. But in times of great tribu- lation — times of war and plague and famine, cataclysms of iire and flood, — we find men, under stress, rising to the measure of the faith that is in them, and discovering thereby in their own natures unsuspected nobilities. 214 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC Attila, the Hun, called himself the * scourge of God' with, I suspect, something of the same conviction that causes a nineteenth century political philosopher, Treitschke, to proclaim that "God will see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race." There is an argument here, gaining a kind of support from history itself, to the effect that it is only under such terrible conditions as war entails that the spiritual nature of man is stimulated to its highest realization, — con- sequently sanctioning war for the sake of the divinity that is in man. "It is like getting a glimpse into depths of the human soul hid- den from sight at other times," says Eucken; "such trials make infinitely more out of us, they arm us even against the worst perils." War thus becomes a kind of sacrament, a gift of the blood and of the body for the sake of spiritual life. As I said, I can do little more than raise this problem, which is in my opinion one deserv- ing the serious thought of every man. But I would add a few considerations touching the applications of it to the mission of the church as this is ordinarily conceived. We speak of the religion of Christ as a religion of peace; and I think that we justly so speak of it. Nevertheless, we speak of the earthly church as the church militant; and again I think that we speak justly. How shall we reconcile this seeming contradiction? I would answer with another question. Is it not true that the reli- 215 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC glon of the New Dispensation is a religion of peace among men, as between human brethren; and does it breathe aught save the most un- compromising militancy" against that dark and barbarous other-world of sinful and brutish nature which is repeatedly and for- ever threatening and encroaching upon man's spiritual domain? There is a war against the barbarism of nature which it is ours to wage, and which, in its waging, evokes the noblest qualities of which men are capable, — enter- prise, heroism, self-sacrifice. Of all the cata- clysms that afflict mankind, plague, famine, flood, fire, earthquake, war, only the last is man-made; and if we should redeem ourselves of human warfare, as I believe that we shall, these other trials will still remain for us to combat as long as human beings shall inhabit this earth. The battle-cry of a war for which none of us are, I imagine, too proud was, 'Re- member the Maine ' ; for the war of the future, the war of all mankind against a none too friendly earthly environment, I should sub- stitute another cry. Remembering those men who went down to their death at night in the icy waters of the north Atlantic, who went down to their death masters of their own souls, I should make the battle-cry of the future to be, 'Remember the Titanic!' Man against nature is a warfare which can never cease until human life ceases, and it is a warfare which throughout the generations of mankind will continue to put men to the test 216 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC and to bring forth the noblest of which they are capable. Nor is this war wholly an external one. In our own bodies and souls there is an old and a new dispensation, never at rest to- gether, never compatible one with the other. The struggle of the spirit and the flesh this has been called, and it has taken on many forms in the course of human history. Its proper form in our own day is, I believe, a stout resistance of the sloth and luxury and arrogance which material wealth engenders; and it may well be that the terrific destruction of wealth as well as of life on the richest of Earth's continents, which is daily before our eyes, will yet reveal to our vision something more preciously human than either material possessions or bodily life, the power of men's souls to suffer for their faiths. While the human race exists the church that commands men's hearts will continue to be a militant church, Christianity a militant Christianity, though the wars which it will wage will certainly cease to be wars of men against men, but will rather be- come crusades of the spirit against that stain of evil whose source is deep in the universe. November, 1914. 217 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC V THE WAR AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE More than a year has passed since Europe was stricken with war, and the horror of the event has hourly grown in intensity. The shock of amazement, that such a thing could be, which greeted the outbreak of the war, has given place to a settled acceptance of the grim fact; but this settled acceptance makes the thing itself no less black. Rather, in showing us how foolish and vain were our idealizations of a civilization we deemed above ambitious murder, it has brought to us a graver and darker sense of the problems that beset the life we must live. Here in Nebraska, the past summer, sur- rounded by quiet pastures and gloriously green fields, the war has seemed like some uncanny mirage lifting above the crest of our horizons its unreal images of maddened death. On the streets we have met the good- humoured countenances of our fellowmen; in the fields, the smiles of a generous nature; and we have all been pacifists at heart. But daily our eyes have been lifted to the lurid glow of war, — constrained to behold, in spite of us; and we have ended with a double sense of illusion, not knowing whether the reality lay most in the peace which greets our physical vision or in the red images revealed to our intelligence. 218 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC Again the University opens, outwardly as in other years; but the youth who are crowd- ing its halls represent the generation upon which most heavily must fall the consequences of a war which is transforming the destinies of the world. Future generations of students will study the records of the conflict, as those of to-day study the past; and generation by generation its meaning will become clearer and easier to master. But none of them will have more need of understanding than have the youth of to-day, for whom the war is creat- ing the new conditions of a new life, — and for none will understanding be so dearly bought. There are those who think that America can be affected by the war, if at all, only favourably. This is a crass and fatal view. Wiseacre veterans of the Civil War have been telling us that the copious rains of the past summer are the reverberation of Old World cannonadings; battles bring rains, they say. And this view — however fantastic to the meteorologist — is a fair allegory of our short- sighted American optimism. In a way it is true that our fields are being rendered fruitful by the blood which drenches Europe: market for our produce and manufactures (at least for so long as Europe is rich enough to wage war) is assured, and Old World gold streams in- to our coffers. But the American who sees in the war only this brief material gain must regard his countrymen as a nation of vampires 219 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC fattening on the blood of their kindred. We are not yet that. But what means the war, — what for us ? Time and events are disclosing. In the be- ginning, when the war was first forced upon unwilling peoples by the decision of kings, it seemed to us but the egotistic madness of ambitious monarchs eager to sear their names into the imaginations of posterity. As men more fully expressed their thought, in that great and strange apologetic literature which the war has called forth, we saw that, while indeed the monarchs had made the occasion and given the signal for war, the conflict itself is the expression of far more than the idio- syncrasies of royal personages. Week by week we have seen what first appeared to be a struggle precipitated by dynastic arrogance reveal itself as the struggle of discordant con- ceptions of human government. On the one hand, a mechanical imperialism, wonderful in capability and intelligence, asserting its right to rule as a kind of earthly providence; on the other, self-willed democracies, full of stupidity and contrariety, but full, too, of love of that liberty which to certain races of men has ever seemed dearer, even when it entails imper- fection, than can be the most benevolently softened servitude. Between these ideals it is for us, as Americans, no difficult matter to choose. We know them both in our own ex- perience, for no nation is consistently one thing or the other. We have much to shame 220 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC us and much to be proud of, in our conduct both as imperiaHsts and as democrats. But when we face the issue in its ideal form, and ask ourselves intimately which, in the long run, we would have our country be, imperial- istic or democratic, the spirit of our institu- tions and of our history gives us but one possible answer. But with the marshalling of our sympathies, spontaneous and inevitable according to our dispositions and antecedents, our concern with the war, as Americans, does not cease. As events unfold and the effects of the war are brought nearer to us, it becomes increasingly evident that the struggle in Europe has pre- cipitated in our midst issues that we must face. It is not enough to say that our institu- tions are democratic in spirit; we must yet answer, shall they continue to be so.^* The war has brought to our national consciousness perils and threats that we had never before realized, — the perils of internal disruption, owing to the conflicting ideals of our citizen- ship; threats of external aggression; for when we see war hurtled from the clear upon un- suspecting peoples, as was this war, we realize that no nation is secure from enemies because it is conscious of no enmity. These issues — the issue of the internal and the external perils — are issues which the young men and women of the entering genera- tion must solve. Of the two, the problem of meeting external peril, foreign aggression, is 221 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC the simpler of solution. It is a question of the minor sacrifice of money, time, and effort in the interest of military preparedness. As it affects students in the University, for example, it touches the matter of willingness to drill and of zeal in acquiring that modicum of mili- tary knowledge which the citizens of states which are to preserve their independence must possess. In a yet broader way, it touches the whole question of public support of a policy of national defence. There are at present two policies urged by our public men: the one, that we reject all armament and rely for our defence upon our virtuous consciousness of fostering ill-will toward none; the other, that we arm, not for wars of aggression, but for the preservation of our ideals on an earth which harbours nations whose political aims can thrive only in a policy of aggression. Between these policies we must choose. The internal peril is yet more searching and serious. It turns upon the question of love of country and loyalty to its ideals. The state- ment has come to my ears that many, very many, of our young men are saying that they would not go to war at the call of the United States no matter what the issue or what the danger, — that they value their personal safety more than the perpetuity of this or any other nation. I can hardly credit this, but if it be to any extent true we as a people are surely riding to a fall that will destroy us; and if it be true of the young men whom the 222 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC state is educating in free institutions, there can be no more damning mockery than is such state-education. Our country may, on occa- sion (for this, too, must be rare), have wel- comed to its privileges aliens who have ac- cepted its citizenship without giving it their allegiance; but surely the youth of such a land as ours are not being reared to betray it or in utter want of those ideals which have been the stay and inspiration of all greatly historic peoples. Yonder in Europe men have died and are dying by the thousand for beliefs that are dearer to them than life. And if we of the United States of America have no beliefs, no national ideals, which for their preservation could inspire a similar sacrifice, we are of all nations the poorest and most pitiable. September, 1915. VI THE ISSUE: UNITY, LAW, HUMANITY The United States is at last consciously at war with Germany. I say ' at last consciously,' for the conflict into which we now enter with opened eyes has been smoulderingly with us ever since the incident of Manila Bay. Not that that incident left any very grievous wound (it was passed off with a jest); but that it served as our first vague premonition 223 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC of the lurking hostility which Germany enter- tained for us, and of which the events that have crowded the past two and a half years have at last made us reluctantly conscious. Democracies are good-natured; they forgive easily and forget easily; democracies are also slow-witted, and above all blind to subtlety in politics. The United States has displayed all of these democratic traits in its relations with Germany. Feeling no ill-will, it suspected none. Indeed, the homage of unaffected and unstinted admiration which Americans ren- dered to German achievements in learning and industry made us almost impervious to any sense of injury, even in the presence of abuse. There is something altogether stupid and almost ludicrous in the slowness with which we have reacted to the series of insult- ing blows aimed at us, from the Lusitania to the diplomatically accredited spies and the Zimmermann note. But finally we have been made to understand that the injury is in- tended, and our resentment, slow to kindle, is burning deep. War is proclaimed, and a part of the smart of it is that we now see that Germany had counted on our slowness and discounted our effectiveness in waging it. Now that we are in the war, with awakened minds, it is our first duty to think clearly and to see clearly what we are fighting for. This is all the more a duty because of the duplicity with which the issue has been forced upon us and the dazed intelligence with which we have 224 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC met it. German diplomacy has been truly credited with a vast amount of psychological blundering, but in one important particular Germany's statesmen have counted with their hosts; they have seen that the public is more readily moved by passion than by reason and that rational inconsistency in the public mmd puts the people helplessly under the direction of designing leaders. This is to be seen in the manner in which they have marshalled the sentiment of their own people; for in spite of the diametrical opposition of the two aims the German nation has fought with equal enthusiasm for ' a place in the sun' by a burst- ing of 'the iron ring' (phrases which niean, in plain speech, territorial conquest) and for 'national defence' from Pan-Slavic barbarism and Anglo-French greed. German statesmen understood that these various motives would move concertedly to military fervour; and they showed their contempt for their public in playing contradictory reasons to the arous- ing of one passion. In a similar manner, but for an opposite end, they have played upon the public mind of the United States. _ Ger- many has realized that the internal division of America is her best safety. She has therefore with a truly sardonic calculation, from ante- bellum days devoted a huge energy to securing a grip upon our domestic politics (marking us on her school-children's maps, Owen Wister tells us, as 'deutsche Gebiete,') while with an equal deliberation, wherever her interests 225 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC seemed to demand it, she has inflicted upon us shame and injury. It can hardly be said that her policy has overreached, since it has taken more than two years to bring even the appear- ance of unity to the gap created. But that unity, if it is to amount to any- thing, must be one of understanding, not of feeling. The present state of the public mind is undoubtedly more emotional than rational, and while it is for the moment one, there is no assurance that this oneness of feeling can endure unless it be fortified by unity of in- telligent purpose. Americans must see the issue fundamentally, or the war will have been tragically disastrous to our self-respect. What is that issue.'' In too many m.en's minds it appears to be bound up with some idea of the rights of commerce — 'freedom of the seas, ' to use Germany's own phrase. Cer- tainly this is our immediate pretext, just as the rape of Belgium was Great Britain's and the murder at Sarajevo Germany's immediate pretext. The Sarajevo affair, long since proven to be but a hypocrite's cloak, has long ceased to move men; and the rape of Belgium, while its horror has grown rather than diminished with the passing of time, is now clearly under- stood to be the impulsive and not the full cause of Great Britain's entry into the war. In a similar manner, we of the United States must soon discover that the submarine phase of frightfulness is only a symptom of the evil we are combating. Back of it is a huger issue, 226 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC the one which alone justifies our participation in the war. That issue has been named by President Wilson. We are to fight "for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government," a right "more precious than peace." And the enemy we are to fight is " Prussian autocracy. " Unerringly, the President is true in his judg- ment; he has named the issue at its core; but it would have been too much to expect, indeed it was hardly possible, that he should have made this issue perfectly intelligible. It is no easy problem to comprehend democratic ideals; and in such an opposition as 'democ- racy vs. autocracy,' it is easier to repeat the names than to define the antagonism meant. But if this be the issue of the war we are to fight, it is every man's first duty to probe to its depth. Fomally put, the issue at stake is respect for law. Respect for law is the bond and cement of democracy; in oligarchies and au- tocracies it is only an expedient for realizing the wills of oligarchs and autocrats. For the democrat, the law is sacred, since his state is destroyed without it; for the oligarch the law is but a written instrument, to be scrapped at will with the paper upon which it is written. The opposition was completely expressed cen- turies ago in the words of Demaratus to Xerxes: "Know, O King, that the Spartans have a master whom they fear more than your 227 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC slaves fear you, and that master is the law." The harsh phrases of the German chancellor at the time of the invasion of Belgium still ring in men's ears: "Necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied Luxemburg and have perhaps already entered Belgium. This is contrary to the dictates of international law." In these words Germany abjured faith in the great institution which has cost more and has meant more to mankind than any other, — the institution of that law which is the first condition of creative human activity and friendly co-operation of man with man. In succeeding acts Germany has emphasized her abjuration with violence upon violence, making of herself an outlaw nation, outlaw not only to the agreements of peace, but also to those laws of chivalry in warfare which represent so much that is noble in human prog- ress out of the dark ages. And here we come to the grim nub of con- tention. In destroying law, Germany has been assailing the best in humanity. Brute nature is a part of our human heritage; it responds to every freedom and strains every leash. What makes men of us, rather than beasts, is our power, by dint of reason, to impose law upon appetite and create char- acters which react to principle rather than desire. The best thing about man is that he is capable of dying for his self-imposed laws, and that he can prefer the honour and nobility of a true humanity to the slinking safety of an 228 LETTERS TO THE PUBLIC ignoble life. The 'right more precious than peace' is the finest and most saving of human possessions. That this possession is taken away by an attack upon the laws of nations, taken both from the nation and the individual, has received abundant illustration in the working out of the policy of 'f rightfulness.' It is Germany's deliberately politic inhuman- ity which makes her submarine campaign so vile, and it is her deliberate inhumanity which is the real enemy we are engaged against. In all this I agree with President Wilson that it is the German oligarchy and not the German people that we must make war upon. It is true that the German people have sup- ported the oligarchy, but it is even more true that they have been fearfully abused and de- ceived by this oligarchy. Indeed, it may be doubted if frightfulness has anywhere wrought a more hideous wrong than upon the German people themselves, using their emotions for its ends; and one may well believe that the oligarchs shudderingly dread the hour of self- revelation in Germany, and that they will use every power they can find to postpone its coming beyond their generation. Their motto to-day is surely, 'After us the deluge ! ' April, 1 91 7. 229 \i 11 /.v:«k-"°- ./.-r^i'A /.c:^."°o < • o, ^ ^ t^**^^^, .^ Ay"^ •■ '?>,^ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces v$* A^ * .^gWi^^ * ^' '^ \^i5 Preservationlechnologie .; A WORLD LEADER IH PAPER PRESERVATK 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township. PA 16066 (724) 779-2111 S> c " " * ^j *o. A 'i?;."^? 0^ o « o ^^-'^^ .0 .0- .0 - -t- - » ^^ (TV V