' ! J - / J ?Q : E . qr Cf Jto iHf uwrtam Ir. SUrtjarb 31 RT. R. J. Cotter, D. D. THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW INTERPRETATIONS OF THE WORLD TO-DAY BY Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM CopyHght, 1913, by SHAILER MATHEWS TO G. D. R. COMRADE IN A GREAT ADVENTURE CONTENTS PAGE Preface 7 I. THE COMMON LOT The Man in the Cab 11 The Gambling Mania 15 College Athletics as a School of Dishonesty 18 Literature and the Beast 24 Endowing a Family 27 The Day of the Farmer 32 The Call of the Aboriginal 36 Autobiography at the Ball Game 40 Keep the Schoolhouse Open 44 Democracy in Education 48 Do We Dare Educate Everybody? 54 A Lay Sermon to Fathers 59 Thanksgiving Is It Hypocrisy? 64 Our Commercialized Christmas 68 II. THE CHTJRCH AND SOCIETY Are We Tolerant or Indifferent? 75 Are We Ashamed of Immortality? 81 Way for the Leader! 85 The Christian and the Changing Order 90 The Church and the Masses 95 Blessed are the Peacemakers 100 The Larger Social Service of the Church 106 After the Storm 110 III. THE STIRRINGS OF A NATION'S CONSCIENCE Have We Repudiated Honor? 115 The New Social Conscience 120 New-Fashioned Honesty 124 5 6 CONTENTS PAGE The Appeal to Brute Force 129 Gentlemen Poisoners 134 Salvation by Senatorial Courtesy 139 The Better Side of Commercialism 144 The Luxury of War 149 Practicing National Mind Cure 163 IV. THE EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY Must Democracy Abdicate? 159 The Revolt of the Plain Citizen 164 Rational Jingoism 168 Playing with Social Discontent 172 The Charlatan in Reform 176 Rebuilding the Nation on Interstate Commerce 180 Give Us Back Our Rivers! 182 Where is the West? 186 Safeguarding a New Epoch 190 PREFACE PRACTICALLY all tHe chapters of this little book appeared in their original form as editorial interpretations. For more than eight years, while editor of The World To-Day, I was obliged to study carefully the course of events in the larger world of politics and social evolution. At the same time I was endeavoring to teach young men and women the meaning of religion. The result of this, at first sight, incon- gruously diversified life was to deepen the conviction that the American public mind is fundamentally moral and that it is de- veloping a new leadership for our new Democracy. It is a wonderful period through which the United States has been and is still passing, and these brief studies of the reconstructive forces and attitudes I hope will stimulate religious teachers of all sorts 8 PREFACE to a keener interest in the moral and reli- gious aspects of our changing order. To see and exhibit God's working in social change is to come as near as modern men can come to the prophetic office. I THE COMMON LOT THE MAN IN THE CAB you saw him last he was sitting quietly in his seat back of the big boiler, watching the crowd hurry down the platform to business and friends a strong, unromantic figure in oily overalls. Prob- ably you did not give him a second glance. And yet, only a few moments since, he had held your life and hundreds of other lives literally in his hand. We travel so much that we forget the men who make travel possible. Yet every click of the car wheels is eloquent of the trust which we place in human faithful- ness. A rotten tie, an ill-driven spike, a switch set wrong, a lamp that refuses to burn, a confusion of orders, any one of these sends scores of men into eternity. Men say that they travel over steel rails. In reality they travel on men's consciences. * fi fi Engine-driving makes automobile-driving mere play. If you are able to buy, or bor- 11 12 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW row money enough to buy, an automobile, you may have the joy of facing death wher- ever you may choose and the policeman is not watching, but you are mercifully prevented from letting many others share your fate. The engineer has no such limitations. He is at the mercy of mankind, nature, and his time-card; but a trainload of people is the stake for which he plays. Of himself he cannot think. Face to face with the inevitableness of the next moment, if disaster comes through another's carelessness, he must be the first to suffer. If he himself errs, there is no one - to share the blame. He is the incarnation of responsibility^ that can neither be shared nor shifted /* ,* /* You will find the man in the cab throughout our world. He stands face to I face with responsibility, sometimes gaining honor or^wealth, but always at the cost of being master of the lives of others who trail behind him. It is a lonesome job. Lonesomeness is part of the cost of THE COMMON LOT IS power. The higher you climb the less can you hope for companionship. The heavier and the more immediate the responsibility, the less can a man delegate his tasks or escape his own mistakes. The private soldier can always share in victories, but the commanding officer alone bears the weight of defeat. The average man seldom thinks of the load which power brings. The captain of industry, on whose fore- sight and energy, on even the incidents of whose life, the prosperity and livelihood of thousands of families depend; the political leader who must bear the brunt of defeat which others have caused; the employer who can share his success with many, but who must face bankruptcy alone these are no mere children of good fortune. Like the man in the cab, they stand face to face with responsibility, burdened with the fate of many, but expecting help from none. /* t* fi The next time you look up from your 14 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW novel to complain that your train is late, remember the man in the cab. And the next time you envy the man of power and position, think of the loneliness of his responsibility, the friendliness of his success, and the risk he faces while you and those like you are at ease. If leadership seems easy, just try being a leader! \ THE GAMBLING MANIA A MERICA has all but gone mad over -** gambling. We have even gone so far that we do not quite know what gambling is. Is the promoter who floats an over- capitalized corporation a gambler? Is the small investor a gambler who margins a few shares of stock? Is the poor man on a salary a gambler who invests a few dollars in the supposititious dividends of a mine? Is the tradesman a gambler who stretches his credit on the supposition that good times will continue another six months? Let us not split hairs. We are not re- ferring to the spirit of speculation, but to gambling. What paper does not publish its records or betting forms of the races? What drug store does not have its racing chart? What small town does not have its contributors to some racing syndicate? Millions of dollars are staked on a single race. Boys and girls, clerks and business men, sports, thieves, and church members, all alike, are joining the ranks of the 15 16 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW gambler and dance together toward moral suicide. ,* * ,* Sane people seem mad to madmen, con- scientious people seem hypocrites to gam- . biers. The student laughs at an instructor who advises him not to bet on ball games; ? the clerk who steals money to play the races charges his fall to his employer's failure to pay him proper salary. The man who plays poker and the woman who plays bridge ridicule the friends who de- clare they should not do as they please with their own money. The newspaper that condemns gambling in its editorial columns publishes alluring promises of sudden wealth in its advertising columns. ,* ,* ?* Are we all mad together? When shall we stop offering our children to this Moloch? Must we wait for commercial depression to learn that one cannot play fast and loose with right and wrong without finding the moral universe taking its revenge? It is time that our moral teachers en- THE COMMON LOT 17 forced the lesson that young men and women need to guard themselves against a subtle poison they will find in literature and even in friendships. If we are to have a clean government, we must have clean men, and to have clean men we must have honest men. We want something greater than reform. We want a cure for socialized moral ' insanity. COLLEGE ATHLETICS AS A SCHOOL OF DISHONESTY are suffering from acute athletic mania. A day when more people attend base-ball games than churches, when the professional athlete is sure of a better income than the average minister or teacher, when crowds of twenty to thirty thousand people will pay more freely to see a match than to read a book, does not take anxious thought for the morrow when it will awake. It is time something should be said on the moral aspect of the case. Any sensible person would prefer to see young men devoted to sports rather than to dis- sipation. The ground for criticism is not, that there is too much interest in athletics, but that dishonesty is taught by athletics ! in the very institutions which should teach, 1 honesty and honor the colleges and the; preparatory schools. Take the simple matter of eligibility. 18 THE COMMON LOT 19 The provisions governing amateur status and the scholarship requirements of mem- bers of college teams are very precise, but they are not carried out in absolute good faith. Any man who has ever been upon a board of athletics knows only too well the endless wrangling which prevails be- tween colleges over this point. The situa- tion is undoubtedly better than a few years since, but not a season passes that prom- inent colleges and universities are not charged with practicing deception in con- cealing facts, in changing records, or in surreptitiously offering financial induce- ments to promising athletes. The serious element in the situation is not that the matter is public scandal, and derogatory to the educational institutions, though that in itself is bad enough. Worse than this dis- grace is the fact that young men in our colleges are being taught that it is per- missible to evade specific laws until some one objects. Any man who listens to the conversation of college students concerning the eligibility of contestants in intercol- legiate meets will be convinced that so far from being trained to a sensitive honor ' ^^"^^^^" - *" ****^W^^^W*MM^^*^^^^^^ 20 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW they are being trained to look wise or to laugh at conscienceless cleverness. Special pleadings and a training in trickery are not lessons that should be taught men who are to be molders of public opinion. The matter is possibly worse in the case of preparatory schools. Every teacher knows that one of the most serious edu- cational problems of the day is that of athletics in such schools. Boys ought to play games and ought to have their ath- letic contests of various sorts, but they should not be forced into training, or be carried all over the country to compete in great interscholastic meetings. But this is less serious than the moral dangers to which good athletes in secondary schools are exposed, from the influences brought to bear upon them to attend some college. Some such influence is legitimate, but de- moralization is the inevitable outcome of the underhand methods deliberately used by men who would resent bitterly any accusation of dishonesty. No boy can maintain high ideals in life who directly or THE COMMON LOT 21 indirectly is offered secret inducements in the way of board, scholarships, large wages for little work, at some college where he is needed on some team. College athletics are most desirable sources of college loyalty, but as long as they lead to such proceedings they must also be branded as occasions of bribery, It is not mere loyalty to one's college that leads to robbing boys in schools of their honor and honesty. Back of all col- lege athletics is the specter of the gate receipts. Without them there would be no training tables, no coaches with exorbitant wages, no army of rubbers, no extrava- gance in expenditures, no quarrels over percentages, no professionalism. Large gate receipts are ruining amateur sport and contaminating college and school athletics. To be sure of them a college must win games. To win games one must send emissaries with words of honey and prom- ises of "aid" to preparatory schools. There the matter is in a nutshell: money made to run athletics; athletics run to make money; money used too in underhanded ways; 22 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW boys taught dishonesty the moment they can catch a ball or buck the line. The whole proceeding is a disgrace to American education. * ^ ,* Can we bring college athletics back to true sport and true ideals of honor? There are two ways, and only two: Put them t absolutely under the control of the faculty and abolish gate receipts. The first is * feasible in any institution; only it must be no half-way measure. A mere faculty board cannot control the situation as long as they do not also control expenditures. The hired "coach" and student manager must go. Directly or indirectly, they are at the bottom of most of the iniquity. Athletics should be endowed, not commer- cialized. If they cannot exist in their present shape without huge gate receipts, let them be simplified. The loss of a few rubbers and of a training table where men only make believe pay their board will be a blessing. Wherever athletics have been made an integral part of the college course they have been cleaner, and their influence THE COMMON LOT 23 upon preparatory students has been less harmful. The fact that colleges all over the country are adopting this method speaks well for the future. It is to be devoutly hoped that the preparatory schools will also take the same steps and remove the serious dangers to which ath- letics in their institutions are exposed. Once treat athletics from an educa- tional point of view, and it will be possible to bring into them some of the ideals of education. Leave them as a feebly regu- lated part of undergraduate enthusiasm and irresponsibility, and their history will be marked with the trickery and discreditable quarrels with which their past has been disgraced. LITERATURE AND THE BEAST is the day of books, and, to speak candidly, of rather mediocre books. Yet the output is not without its charac- teristics. Any attentive student of litera- ture must have noticed one fact of importance: our literature is growing animal. /* * ,# It is not merely that the note of genuine romance is dying away, to be replaced by the beatification of blood-letting. The modern historical romance, coming as it does so largely from the hands of young women, may very well be trusted to return some day from Aceldama. And even blood-letting is not always elemental savagery. The discouraging trait in modern litera- ture is not descended from romance, but from anthropology. The mystery of life and love has been dispelled by the vigorous young men who are setting the pace in 24 THE COMMON LOT 25 novel-writing. Their men and women do not fall in love any more. They mate. The elemental passions which these ama- teur sociologists imagine belonged to the cave man are found and described among the men and women of to-day's world. In comparison with this latest valuation of personality, Rousseau's "natural man" was a gentleman and a scholar. This conquest of literature by animalism v/ is interesting from another angle. Many of ^ its agents are socialists, and their work may fairly be interpreted as a prophecy of what we may expect in art when their Utopia is realized. Idealism may be "bour- geois," but it certainly is not brutal. If "paganism" means what this new literary output emphasizes, we choose to become "Philistines." To drop this jargon: We will not be- lieve that we are only clever animals capa- ble of producing limitless wealth. A man is a creature of dreams and visions, as well as of economic vigor and animal passions. 4 Let us hope literary persons, even though 26 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW socialists, will remember this fact. For if matters are carried much further, fiction ] j will become a branch of physiological psy- I ^chology only less reserved. ENDOWING A FAMILY \\ 7"E have had our discussion concerning * * tainted money. It is time we con- sidered the endowment of families. Recent events exhibit the new tendency in Amer- ican life to establish a parasitic class com- posed of descendants of men who have ac- cumulated fortunes. These fortunes are no longer distributed among a man's heirs, but are kept intact and placed in the hands of trust companies for administration. The beneficiaries face no responsibility of wealth, but simply receive the whole or a portion of the fund's income. In one case three young children have approximately the same endowment as that of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Chicago universities combined. It is natural to want to grow rich. Most of us are doing the best we can to gratify this ambition. It is natural also to want to found a family. But at this point the 27 28 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW claims of the commonwealth ought not to be forgotten. Waiving all matters of ab- stract ethics, a fortune running into the millions could never be accumulated in I the lifetime of a single person except by the assistance of society at large. A farmer dies a multi-millionaire because the growth of population has made his farm the center of a great city. He has not created his fortune, he has simply been a silent partner with society. The enormous increment is unearned. Similar, though not necessarily to the same degree, is the case of huge cor- porations who grow rich by exploiting social conditions. Taxes do not begin to represent the silent partner's share in the profits. There are some rich men who see this and are endeavoring to meet equitably the claims of a partner who has done so much for them. However much their business methods may be subjects of fair criti- cism, simple justice demands that their sense of social responsibility should be recog- nized. The next step in our financial evolution THE COMMON LOT 29 is the concentration of wealth in trust companies. An enormous percentage of the productive wealth of the United States is now held by a small proportion of our citi- zens. Should each one of these citizens at death and this is to-day's drift provide that for the next thirty or forty years his wealth should be handled by trust com- V panics for the benefit of his descendants, it would follow inevitably that a large pro- portion of our national capital would be concentrated under the control of a half dozen financial institutions. There may be benefits attending such a concentration, but the most conservative of us can see that its dangers are inevitable and tremendous. With all respect for the ability and honesty of these companies, no single group of men is capable of administering such power. No group of men ought to have such power to administer. We used to think that by the process of division great fortunes would be dissipated and so the financial equilibrium of the nation in a large way be maintained. Under the new condition of affairs such equilibrium is becoming improbable. Dis- 50 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW sipation to any considerable extent is daily less possible except as it is involved in a universal financial distress brought about 1 by the excessive concentration of wealth. The capital of the nation is coming to be administered by those to whom it does not belong, while its real owners, without re- sponsibility and without power, an untitled aristocracy of idleness, spend their income I in accordance with an ever-exaggerated standard of luxury. The situation plays into the hands of socialism. Short of that, two remedies seem possible, and, theoretically at least, feasible. The first is the repeal of laws permitting the formation of trusts of more than a few years' duration, thus forcing the responsi- bilities of wealth upon those who inherit it. The second is the establishment of a rapidly progressive inheritance tax which shall assure the public's large participation in ~ all huge fortunes at the death of their creators. > THE COMMON LOT 31 The American people has no desire to destroy incentives to the creation of wealth, or to deprive the family of a rich man of a generous share of his fortune; but the es- i tablishment of an endowed class of idlers i>ii n is contrary to the American spirit and dangerous to American institutions. THE DAY OF THE FARMER OPRING is the season when the primitive *-* man in us wants to dig in the ground. If we live in flats we put flower-boxes on the back railing. If we have a back yard we or our wives plant flowers in a rib- bon of ground along the back fence. For what man of us has not wanted to be a farmer? The average city man, in early summer, plans for that Utopia which is to be his when he has made enough money to buy a little place not too far from some Broadway and can settle down to the companionship of a horse, a cow, some chickens, and an occasional grandchild. To most of us farming is a remarkably simple matter. You break up the ground, you smooth it down; you put the seed in; then you smooth it some more; then you sit in a hammock until it is time to grow rich selling your grain to the commission 32 THE COMMON LOT 33 merchants. How much easier and how much more attractive that seems than the daily routine of the office or shop! At any rate, every man who never lived on a farm is convinced that he would make a good farmer ! All of which optimism is subject to ex- pensive disillusionment. Your optimistic amateur agriculturist farmer is too sim- ple a word for him finds that he is fighting a losing battle with bugs, droughts, grass- hoppers, rain, and his alleged unsophisti- cated neighbors. He needs to have his farm endowed if he expects to be able to afford company din- ners during the winter. * f* fi But the farmer who is not an amateur is a really increasing factor in to-day's life. In fact, farming is rapidly becoming one of the professions. We have our agri- cultural schools, just as we have our law schools. It is getting to be a business as well. Farmers have their trusts, like other manufacturers. 34 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW It is a far cry from the New England farmer, trying to arrange an exploded granite quarry into a stone wall that he may have room in which to plant his crop, to that master of capital, science and black earth ten feet deep who plows with a trac- tion engine and reaps with a ten-horse team. And between these two types of farmers the drift is steadily toward the latter. The comic paper does not laugh at the "granger" as frequently as it used to laugh. It wants his subscription. The capitalist does not foreclose mort- gages on the prairie farm now. He borrows money of its owner. And, what is vastly more important, the entire country looks with a respect border- ing upon apprehension on this new type of American who has decided views on rail- roads, trusts, and, in fact, on every sub- ject, from the "greenbug" to the lecturer at his Chautauqua. This rise of the farmer into national sig- THE COMMON LOT 35 nificance is welcome in view of the inun- dation of great cities by immigrants who have significance only en masse. The farm is the nursery of individualism. If you are a cliff-dweller in the city send f your boy there next summer, and let him see what it means to create wealth with the help of nature rather than with the ticker. You will help make him a better American. THE CALL OF THE ABORIGINAL THEY tell us that spring and summer are the birthdays of revolution. It certainly seems likely. Most holidays which celebrate revolutions occur about this time of year, and when nature begins to put forth signs of new life, human nature too begins to be restless. And everybody remembers what hap- pens to a young man's fancy in the spring. It is only a part of the general situation that in these days most of us feel the pull of the aboriginal within us. From June till Thanksgiving scratch any civilized man x and you will catch a savage. And what is more, he will not be ashamed. We want to get outdoors. Saturday afternoons come all too seldom for golf and tennis and baseball. Even if our dignity or our avoirdupois prevents our being athletic in our own persons, we like to sit on the bleachers and watch our substitutes give us the excitement of sport 36 THE COMMON LOT 37 without its exertions. The average Amer- ican may be reducing athletics to a seden- tary occupation, but even that, when business and wife will permit, is an outdoor occupation. He gets room to shout. Then, too, as winter passes we want to dig in the ground. Children want sand hills and their parents want flower beds. True, the attack of ground-digging is not long-lived, especially among men. As in primitive times it took squaws to plant the maize, it takes women to make back yards and flower boxes on apartment-house railings blossom like the rose. None the less, this desire to grub comes back to us as the habit of turning around to avoid snakes before he goes to sleep comes back to a lap dog. We want to go fishing. Not so much for the sake of getting the fish as for the fun of trying to get them. It is really aston- ishing how uneasy a man gets in his office 38 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW or his shop when he knows that the . ice has gone out of the ponds and lakes and streams up in the woods. Bronchitis and sore throat and rheuma- tism and pneumonia may follow him like dull care the horseman, but he grows restless until he finds himself shivering and wet-footed by the side of a camp fire or an airtight stove in some refuge for "sports." And each new year he refuses to learn caution from the experiences of the past. , For we grow strong by making believe we are primitive. Pale and anemic imitation of this up- rising of the aboriginal within us is that which convention offers under the name of "vacation" a wabbling in chairs on hotel porches; a struggle to imagine ourselves happy in stuffy bedrooms; a desperate effort to give or get taken in marriage; a yearly fortnight of self-delusion when we think we are getting rested because we are more uncomfortable than we are at home. No, there is no recreation in being more conventional than we ordinarily are. You THE COMMON LOT 39 cannot enrich a field with a lawnmower; you need a subsoil plow. And the annual recurrence of this hungering for the primi- tive relations in life is evidence that humanity has depths worth tilling. A real vacation is a sort of subsoil plow- ing. A man calls upon the elemental within him to yield new fertility to the ordinary life of the year's routine. It is not a mere matter of camping-out or farming or tramping. It is not even exercise, rest, and a better digestion. It is a getting of one's self back to the elemental things of life that are to be found only on the farm, by the sea, and in the woods. A man finds himself healthier and saner be- cause he has for a few days reverted to that intimacy with nature which modern improvements have all but made us believe was barbarism. A few weeks of not too strenuous sav- / agery will make you the better able to endure the storms and buffetings of civilization. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE BALL GAME A S summer draws on, we must go on **- thinking about a good many matters, which tend to make us serious. But our real souls are in baseball. That, barring the short and acute attack of graduations, is about all the average American can find really worth thinking about after the days grow longer. Fortunately, there is plenty of time to go to the game. ,* ,# ,* We love the game for what it is, but we love it quite as much as a form of auto- biography. For every man of us has played baseball, and every other man of us secretly cherishes the belief that if we had not gone into law or business or teaching or insurance, we too might have been the idol of the "fan" and the terror of the umpire. It all comes back to you as you watch 40 THE COMMON LOT 41 the pitchers warming up. You are back again on the vacant lot. Boys you had long forgotten, suddenly are alive again Bricktop and Fatty and Stuffy and Jim reach out from the long ago and grip your heart. Where are they now and what are they doing? Long hits which set your side shouting and the "mud larks" tum- bling into cellars of houses burned in the Great Fire, free fights between the catcher and the runner over an untouched base, disjointed thumbs that had to be pulled in that all is real again! ,* # # And then you are back in college with the air filled with the cheers of the massed rooters, the president with teeth chatter- ing in his fear lest a lost game should mean a loss of freshmen in the fall, the line of town girls not yet college widows watch- ing your every play, the madness of victory while the old bell rang itself off its bearings yes, you were a part of it all! # fi fi True, you caught fouls on the bounce 42 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW and called for a "low ball" and waited for the pitcher to throw seven balls before you took your base; you knew nothing of squeeze plays and bunts. But you caught the ball in your hands and not in a mat- tress, and after two strikes you came up under the bat without cushions and shin protectors, and you are proud of the swol- len joint that gives you the opportunity to tell your neighbor on the bleacher of the great play for which it was the penalty. fi /* f* And so we middle-aged men who could not run around the bases without calling in the doctor, who would be terrorized by pitching we used to despise, who would flee a grounder and misjudge a fly we who are growing a trifle stout in our pros- perity live our youth over again on the bleachers. The younger generation listens conde- scendingly to our reminiscences and thinks of us as sedate, sedentary suppliers of house rent and pocket money. These strapping young sons of ours, with their track teams, their football, and their THE COMMON LOT 43 coaches they cannot understand this re- version to enthusiasm over a game which they watch critically and discuss in terms we are ashamed to ask them to define. But to us it is a stirring of old adventuresome- ness and we go home, hoarse, sunburned, and tired, but having turned back the wheels of time for a blessed couple of hours. They tell us we must play golf and may play tennis if we do not play too fiercely ; that work with the pulleys, and, safest of all, massage, are the ideal exercise for men who dwell in offices. But we know better and go to the ball game. For there flows still the Fountain of our Youth. KEEP THE SCHOOLHOUSE OPEN A MERICA has two recurrent crises ** the presidential campaign and vaca- tion. At first sight it would seem as if the former were the more important. It is certainly important enough, but in the long perspective a vacation is almost ter- rifying to anyone but an irrepressible optimist. For vacations help or hurt the citizens of to-morrow. We do not take the matter very seriously. Of course those of us who are sufficiently well to do send our children to camps and farms and grandparents and other sub- stitutes for parents. But no matter how great the number of such fortunate per- sons is, it is all but infinitesimal in com- parison with the army of those who can do little or nothing for their children and are not wise enough to do even the little they might. Our society is so broken up into social 44 THE COMMON LOT 45 compartments that she is a rare woman and he a rarer man who stops to think of the millions of boys and girls who during the summer months will have broken training and will be left practically to their own devices and the influence of those who know little and care less about the responsibilities of citizenship. /* f* t* Why should our schools be closed during the summer? Is it to give the teachers a vacation? They certainly need it, but could not substitutes be found? Is it for the sake of economy ? What worse economy is there than that which provides conditions which not only lead to the tremendous expense of courts and re- formatories, but to the infinitely greater cost of lives that have been ruined through that mischief which Satan never forgets to / find for idle hands? ,* fi # Boys and girls might be injured by a twelve months' application to books? 46 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW There are other things than books in our education. The vacation school should teach something else than winter school. Why not teach a trade? or play? At any rate, boys and girls ought to be kept off the street. And it makes no difference whether the street is in the city or in the small town. A good many of us think that the small- town street is even more demoralizing than the city street. Notwithstanding all our talk about the new education, our schools still can be improved. But the reform that is needed is not so much in the curriculum as in the concep- tion of the very purpose of school. It is all very well to discuss "Frills" and the "Three R's," but let us open our eyes to . something more fundamental. The wel- fare of the community demands training in self-restraint and plain decency. When that happy day for which we THE COMMON LOT 47 look dawns and we all come to our senses, we shall see that the duty of the State is not to teach boys and girls for nine months in the year and then turn them loose for three months; we shall see to it that if fathers and mothers forsake their children then the State shall take them up into schools, not jails. If it is the duty of the school to keep growing children from bad influences in the winter, it is even more its duty to keep children from evil in the summer. The closed schoolhouse is a standing monument to an imperfect education. It is a guidepost to crime. DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION YEARLY summer, and July in particular, -* ^ has come to be a time of educational agitation. To-day as never before teachers have abandoned vacation to become stu- dents again in summer schools and assem- blies. There never was a time when there was such universal desire to learn and to teach. It was not so long ago that an education was a .class distinction. Anything beyond what could be taught in the common school or an occasional high school was regarded as the peculiar property of the so-called learned professions. Business and farming were not judged compatible with anything approaching a liberal education. The college man was an aristocrat. The same aristocratic conception of edu- cation was even more pronounced in the case of the professional scholar. Nothing | was scientific that was interesting. A man who would write a readable book was branded as a mere popularizer. Your col- 48 THE COMMON LOT 49 lege professor might not have been very well paid, but what he lacked in income was more than made good by his con- sciousness of superiority to the Philistine. The last ten or fifteen years have changed all this. The Brahmin caste of New England, which was imitated with greater or less success all over the country, has lost its sacred prerogatives. Member- ship in societies that demand registered pedigree has replaced it. The change is eloquent. Our aristocrats of learning used to be known by their diplomas. Our new aristocrats of birth are known by their buttons and badges. There are, and always will be, let us hope, men who know more than other people. This would be a very poor world to live in if we were all equally wise. We need men who are specialists in order to help those of us who are not specialists to a realizing sense of omniscience. But out- side of university circles we do not expect 50 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW them to become an aristocracy. Nowadays any man or woman can be educated. In fact, it is hard to escape an education. The columns of our papers are full of advertisements of courses given by corre- spondence. All over the country there are Chautauqua and similar reading classes, assemblies more or less educational in character, university extension lectures, women's clubs, men's clubs, and free libraries. That university is an exception that does not have its summer session. It never was true that poor men could not go through college if they wished to, but iin these times it is easier for a poor boy i to spend four years in college than it is for him to work at a trade. * ^ ,# The leaders in this democratizing of edu- cation have never received the apprecia- tion due them. The men who began the Chautauqua system, the men who insti- tuted the correspondence courses, the early university extension lectures, all have had to endure the contempt or the pity of those who were making education the basis THE COMMON LOT 51 of a quasi-aristocracy. Yet they persisted. Thousands upon thousands of plain men and women were given opportunities to come in touch with the better things in life. It is hard for us to realize abstractly just what this meant, but we can begin to realize it when we recall that those who are now crowding our schools and colleges are the children of a generation that be- longed to Chautauqua circles. It is true that to a large degree the first enthusiasm for certain forms of this popu- lar study has spent itself, but it has not been dissipated. It has been built into the very structure of American life. Thanks to it, the time is forever past when occupa- tions can of themselves shut out men and women from the world of literature. The learning of this new educational democracy is untechnical, and in the eyes of a profes- sional scholar is superficial; but what col- lege graduate knows very much about the things he studied in his classes? About the first lesson a teacher learns is that his successes cannot be measured by what his 52 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW students remember. It is the man that counts. His interests, the horizon of his life, his sympathies these embody the true residuum of study. fi # # College education is no longer a door simply into the learned professions. Let us be thankful for that. But let us be doubly thankful that up and down our country, in little towns as well as cities, on farms as well as in offices and studies, , / there are thousands who have fy| | fotfirest in the things which really make life some- thing better than a struggle for existence. As education has ceased to be aristocratic, and has become democratic, life has grown the richer, public sentiment has grown the higher. A few years more and all this work will have borne still nobler fruit. To a large degree we are still educating people away from their early surroundings. What the next few years must do and will do is to educate them in their surroundings. We may well risk the dangers which are said to be inherent in superficial learning for the blessings of the larger outlook and the THE COMMON LOT 53 more spiritual sympathies which have come from this new education. I If we would preserve our democracy, we jmust educate our democrats. DO WE DARE EDUCATE EVERY- BODY? \ \ 7ITH the coming of autumn the United * * States betakes itself to education. There is no town so poor that it will not see its schoolhouse open and its boys and girls taking up again the routine of study. In the grade school, in the high school, in the college and in the university thousands of young people from all ranks of society will begin anew their preparation for the conduct of life. Nothing yields itself more readily to rhetoric, and nothing is fraught with larger consequence to the republic. Why should we educate everybody? Why do we pour out money to educate our own and other people's children? Is it that we may in- sure a race of cultured people? That is what education at least the higher educa- tion meant a few years since. Beyond the rudiments of reading, writing, and arith- metic boys and girls studied almost noth- g that could be used after school. We 54 THE COMMON LOT 55 taught them Latin, which they would never read; algebra, with which they would never [calculate; physiology, whose rules they would not observe; literature, which they refused to read. Results were unavoidable. .? | | *! !! I>.^M^^^ The cultured classes were the well-to-do classes. The poor had no share in what passed as education. We are changing all this. We believe in the education of the hands as well as of the mind. We believe that a boy should be taught to be useful as well as ac- comjglished; that a girl should learn in school that which she does not need to forget in the home. Education is looking toward specialized efficiency. Perhaps this is wise; perhaps it is not wise. This is not the question we would raise. That question is: Is America ready to face the consequences of this universal * x education for actual life? Culture is es- I sentially gurgoseless; education is purpose- ful. But to have a purpose means that a 56 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW generation is dissatisfied with its present. To arouse an ambition in a generation and to attempt to give that generation larger self- control is also to arouse in it ...discontent, An educated people can never be con- Y tent to be contented. Individuals may be indifferent, but a society will be intent. And with this discontent comes a desire to change, to improve, to equalize one's lot with that of another; to increase one's own privileges, and to deprive another of those which seem unjustly his. No won-] der some countries have been so much in-' terror of popular education. The priv- 1 ileged class preferred an ignorant under class that was content to an educated proletariat that was ambitious. If education is an enemy of supersti- tion, it is also the leaven of equality. It is an unpleasant awakening that comes to some of us in these simple facts. Public opinion is too strong to venture to oppose a policy of popular education, but not to silence complaints against attempts actually to educate. "Let the masses THE COMMON LOT 57 learn to read and write, but not to think/* is the educational creed of a growing class in our communities. "They should not be educated above their station." Nothing so terrorizes the successful man as the unrest among the children of the unsuccessful man. Yet if discontent in his case spurred him to endeavor, it is hard to see why it should not be praised as it spurs on an entire class. If a desire for larger oppor- tunity, for the abolition of such restraint as prevents the expression of a larger life, and for a larger equalization of oppor- tunity be dangerous, then every public school in the land should be suppressed. The school-teacher is then the most dan- gerous member of the community. As long as we educate people we must be ready to see them dissatisfied with what 1 they have. That, with the fear of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the beginning of a good many other things. ,* ,* ?* You can educate the individual away from the masses, or you can educate the 58 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW masses themselves. The former is the easier and, to most men's minds, the safer program. But it is not the best. A school- house should be the place where social equality and fraternity, and not mere fighting power, are bred. It must create a democracy and not an oligarchy. Do we really want a democracy? If not, let us close the schools! A LAY SERMON TO FATHERS r I THERE are a great many important J- matters possessing the public mind as autumn comes, but, thanks to the opening of the new school year, a good many of us find ourselves face to face with something far more puzzlesome. For we must think of the Boy. Very likely you sent him away for his vacation. Then you began to plan for yours. You went about your work with a smile that was the first installment of va- cation. You were going to be with the Boy. And the Boy, away off on the farm, was planning for your coming. He, too, began to count the days. The improvements that were to surprise you, the plans for every sort of practicable and impracticable celebration were elaborately completed. For the Boy, like you, found the waiting endless. When you stepped off the train 59 60 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW the Boy was there, browned and big. He shook your hand with obvious self-con- sciousness. Men don't kiss each other! "How are you, Boy?" you said. "I'm all right," the Boy replied. That was all. But when you rode away with him by your side, you could see, out of the corner of your eye, that he was looking at you out of the corner of his. And you were both wondrous content. ,* # # Vacation brought the fellowship the year denied. It has taught fathers and sons a good many lessons, but none more startling than the fact that boys grow up. And what is stranger, your boy is grow- ing up. Some day he will be a man; some day he will be where you are, and life will have pushed off on him the responsibilities you bear to-day. Before you tramped with him and fished with him during vacation this seemed in- credible, or at least a long way off. Now, somehow, it seems at the door. The cycle of nature is being completed. The Boy is getting ready to crowd you THE COMMON LOT 61 out of the day's work, as you have crowded out your father. And yet God forgive us! too many of us fathers are trusting schools and clubs and haphazard circumstance to fit our boys for this inevitable usurpation. We are too busy to give them the companionship we owe them; too tired and irritable to read the promise of strength in their restless- ness; too indifferent to their unspoken hopes to share in and shape their ambi- tions. Life and work close in upon us and we forget that they, and not we ourselves, are to be our successors. We forget that we, too, are sons! The ordinary father could know his Boy better if he chose. Not, indeed, just as he comes to know him in vacation; not, pos- sibly, as his mother knows him; but none the less he can know his Boy. If he takes time. And, as this is a lay sermon, after the manner of preachers, it should be added, he ought to take time. 62 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW If a father is good for anything, he himself is the best gift to make his Boy. We have not yet reached that blear-eyed j Utopia in which parents breed children and society brings them up. Despite the polyg- iamy and polyandry of the divorce courts we are still a nation of parents and chil- dren. And just because we are thus settled in families, fathers and mothers ought to be friends of their children. The more com- plicated our social life becomes, the more imperative does this duty and as all sermons say this privilege become. It is not merely that such friendships make parents better parents and children better men and women; they will make more gentle that approaching usurpation which for a moment startled us when we saw our boys could run almost as fast as we, and could plan almost as wisely. For we shall surrender to friends. ,* <# ,# Schools and school-teachers are no sub- I stitutes for fathers and mothers. The winter has its opportunities just as THE COMMON LOT 63 truly as has the summer. And the home can have its friendships for Father and Boy just as truly as have the trail and the camp and the farm. Happy is the Boy who knows this. And happier still is the father. THANKSGIVING IS IT HYPOCRISY? A MERICA has five holidays which are ** not political: Christmas, New Year's, Decoration Day, Labor Day, and Thanks- giving. Years ago, in New England, there used to be a sixth, Fast Day, but within the memory of most of us this relic of a more ascetic past had become simply a day when boys rode horseback. Of them all Thanksgiving is the only Puritan holi- day that has become universal. It does not carry the burdens that oppress Christ- mas, and it is the most genuinely human of its fellows. It celebrates the good cheer of our common lot. * fi /* But where does Thanksgiving come in? Our governors and our President issue proclamations of various degrees of sin- cerity, calling upon us to praise God from whom all blessings flow. We are told to be thankful because the price of wheat in America is high or because the corn crop has been huge. These proclamations are 64 THE COMMON LOT 65 sometimes ambiguous. They are silent concerning the famine or the pestilence in other lands that bring the American farmer good fortune; and they serve chiefly to re- mind us of the exact date on which the last Thursday in November falls. It is true a few of us go to church in the morning and listen to discussions of the dangers from which the country has been or is to be saved, but it takes a good many churches to get even a respectable "union" congrega- tion. To most of us Thanksgiving means family reunions, big dinners, and football. There are those who would have it something else a religious day, a com- panion of the Puritan Sabbath. To men of this opinion there is something very irri- tating in the splendid roar that rises from the tens of thousands around the football field. But such persons would have been sadly out of place on the first Thanksgiving when, after going to church and after eating the best dinners they could assemble, the Pilgrims went out to watch their young men win in a shooting contest with the friendly Indians. Our modern Thanks- giving springs from this more material side 66 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW of the ancient festival. As a holiday it has ceased to be formally religious. It frankly celebrates the home and the en- joyment of life. It is the nearest approach } we make to the festival of the Greeks. ,* & # Are we, then, hypocrites? Is Thanks- giving Day a farce? It depends on how we think gratitude ought to be expressed. Athletic sports are certainly out of keeping with Decoration Day, with its sad and sacred memories. But just as certainly they are not out of accord with Thanks- \ giving Day. Although it smacks a little of immodesty to assume to know what the Almighty likes and dislikes, it certainly seems as if he must find something very acceptable in the elemental happiness of his creatures. A man does not need to be miserable in order to be grateful. He is not necessarily ungrateful because he is happy. Even the Puritans killed the fatted turkey and invented cranberry sauce. A nation is not pious because it likes THE COMMON LOT 67 holidays, but neither is it impious because the majority of its citizens prefer football to midweek sermons. We have no national church to tell us when we ought to be spirit- ual, but we have a seriousness of purpose that our most strenuous fun cannot de- stroy. Cynicism of any sort is out of place nowadays certainly. The American nation can return thanks for having found its conscience. The recollection of this fact should season every Thanksgiving dinner and solace every defeated football eleven. Individ- uals may be irreligious and immoral, but the nation itself is true to that early piety which inscribed on our coins, "In God We Trust." OUR COMMERCIALIZED CHRISTMAS T^ROM Thanksgiving until Christmas *- most of us live in an atmosphere of deepening gloom. We begin that pre- season shopping by which we hope to save money, time, nerve, and the health of the shop girls, but even the bargain sales afford but a dreary time. We are in terror of forgetting to give a present to somebody who will give us one. The only star of hope in our horizon is the certainty that some of these people whom we shall forget will send us presents so far in advance of Christmas that we can square our account without their suspect- ing our neglect. Once Christmas was quite another affair. Christmas Eve we hung our stockings on the mantelpiece in full confidence that Santa Claus could find his way through a six-inch stove pipe. We tried hard to keep awake long enough to see him come, 68 69 but we never caught him. Christmas morning found the stockings bulbous with gifts and with a barley sugar candy cat in the toe, which, as a concession to the day, we were allowed to eat before breakfast. But the Saint had escaped unseen. And then there was the Christmas tree, with a grandfather to distribute the gifts and a strong force of uncles and aunts to maintain peace among the cousins. And there was skating in the afternoon with the choicest sort of melee to give the fin- ishing touch to a day to be remembered until it was forgotten in the more spe- cialized joys of a birthday. ?* t* f* How far away those days seem! It is not merely that we were boys and girls then and are men and women now, al- though that probably makes some differ- ence. It is not even that to our unending surprise we find ourselves in the place of our fathers and mothers. The spirit of Christmas itself has changed. When we talk about Santa Claus to our 70 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW children they look at us reprovingly as those whose eyes have been opened. What reality is there in that classic of blessed memories, " 'Twas the Night before Christ- mas," for youngsters who think fireplaces are always heated with gas logs and who live in steam-heated flats? We still have our Christmas trees, sub- ject to the regulations of the fire depart- ment, but we are really slaves of our Christmas shopping list. Christmas, like ourselves, has been com- mercialized. * f* /* It is in fact the Decoration Day of a commercial age. Then, as on no other day, we face with compassion those who have fallen in our battles for wealth. For a moment we think of the thousands of children who have no share in that easy life we give our children, and must find the season's joy in the charity dinner. Along with the barter to which we have debased our giving within our circle of acquaint- ances, we play at extending the spirit of the day to those who are the pawns of our THE COMMON LOT 71 industrial game. The Salvation Army lass, standing cold and numb on the street corner, collecting funds for Christmas bas- kets for the poor, reminds us of the wreck- age left in the wake of our prosperity. We give a trifle to help the poor temper the bitterness of the year with a couple of hours' good eating. However sincere we may be in our efforts to spread Christmas cheer, our charity is none the less a testimony to our sense of the fact that peace and good will have not come upon the earth. Poverty and wretch- edness are not to be offset by yearly gifts of baskets of food and out-grown clothes. We ought to make the spasmodic kindli- ness of Christmas one of the constant forces of our industrial world. Equality and fraternity are born not of charity, but of justice. Instead of commercializing Christmas, we ought to Christmasize commercialism. ,* ,* /* We do not pretend to be prophets, but 72 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW we can all dare to hope. And this is what we hope: That some day the strong will help and not exploit the weak; that some day fra- ternity will be more than a rhetorical flourish; that some day love will beget justice rather than charity. And Christmas is the one day in the year that such venturesome hope seems more than a will-o'-the-wisp. II THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 73 ARE WE TOLERANT OR INDIFFER- ENT? TF it were necessary for the well-being of * posterity to give titles to years as we give them to men, we should call our own day "The Tolerant." One can hardly find a religious paper European, Amer- ican, Australasian in which there is not the discussion of church union. The sum- mer season abounds with great conventions, some of them thoroughly interdenomina- tional. We have the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and the proposed Conference on Faith and Order. There is even certain relaxation of attacks upon higher criticism, and the critic and his critic sit beside each other in summer Bible schools. Yes, we are growing very tolerant and correspondingly thankful. ,* ,* * Yet we sometimes wonder whether some- thing of what we call tolerance should not more properly be regarded as indifference. 75 76 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW Do we really care whether our neighbor's belief is true or not? We are very apt to look out on other people's hopes and convictions as a traveler looks out upon the strange people and faces with which he is surrounded on his jour- neys. Foreigners do not live as he lives, do not dress as he dresses, do not worship as he worships; but he never undertakes to convert them. He is an observer, not a missionary. ' In much the same way a man looks out upon the beliefs of his neighbors with equal complacency. They do not believe as he believes, they do not think as he thinks, they do not choose the things he chooses. He may not even understand the peculiar vocabulary in which his friends seem to find great spiritual inspiration, but he never thinks of getting into a discussion with them. He simply does not care what his friends believe. Let one of them at- tempt to convert him, and he hardly knows whether to consider the matter an insult or material for an after-dinner speech. ft * f* It is a great mistake to call this attitude THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY ?? of mind tolerance. A man must have some definite convictions to have that virtue. Those gentlemanly writers who regard religion as a survival of the weak- ness of some prehistoric ancestor, and prefer devotion to a social organism which they have invented to a God whom they have exposed, can hardly be expected to appreciate positive religious convictions. They know what they do not believe, but they are not quite so clear as to what they or anybody else should believe about God and immortality. It would require a great stretch of imagination to think of them as really tolerant. They may Leave to their sister when she prays, Her early heaven, her happier views, but it is a matter of condescension on their part. <* ,* ,* So too those teachers who cheerfully re- move the bases of definite Christian teach- ing in the name of a scientific method are no more necessarily tolerant than the sur- geon who smiles at the success of an 78 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW operation that removes a patient's leg. They are willing men should believe some- thing. They grow impatient if men believe too vigorously. fi ?* /* As a matter of fact, indifferent people are very apt to be very intolerant when some- thing they really do believe is threatened. Persons who hold that a man is better in proportion to the number of his beliefs are no more rasping in their criticism of one who suggests a reduction in this number than is the man who rejoices in the belief that he does not believe. Those stern men who believed that theo- logical error was to be removed from the world by burning up its representatives at least had one virtue: they had positive conviction. The problem which beset them besets us in its reverse form. They had conviction, but not tolerance; we are in danger of being tolerant because we have no conviction. For practical purposes it is hard to say THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 79 which attitude of mind is more to be avoided. The moral dilettante who cares more about the opera than he does about reli- gious belief is no less a danger to his time than a man who cares more about ortho- doxy than about justice and mercy and faith. The world needs men with convic- tions quite as much as it needs men who do not interfere with other people's rights. * Tolerance is the child of conviction and of love. It never had any other parentage. To believe strongly, and yet doubt one's own omniscience, is in itself no small ' achievement; but to believe strongly and permit a man who does not agree with you also to believe strongly is an evidence of Christian love. The time for indifference to other peo- ple's beliefs has not arrived. You cannot build up a society by first exiling its God. What we want is men who sharply dis- tinguish between the essential and the formal, the fundamental and the acciden- tal, in religious truth, and who stand im- 80 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW movable upon those fundamentals, and for this reason grant latitude in the expression of other men's faith, and in those things which are the more or less logical deduc- tions from that faith. Men who are to be brothers do not need i.to be twins, but they do need to be sure of their parentage before they claim fra- ternal rights. ARE WE ASHAMED OF IMMORTAL- ITY? THE question is not intended to be ir- reverent, but serious. Has the time come when a man should hesitate to speak of a distinct belief in the fact that there is ) a life after death? Is the agnosticism con- cerning the details of the world to come to be so dominant as to prevent our using that gospel which promises a heaven? Shall we close our New Testaments and find consolation in psychical research? Anyone who has followed the course of practical religious thought during the last few years cannot have failed to recognize the gradual lessening of emphasis upon the N resurrection both of Jesus and of men. Even hymns that speak about heaven are re- served for funerals. There has grown up a habit of treating all matters pertaining to life after death by way of allusion. We are told that the resurrection is present in the higher life, the moral uplift in human hearts. We are told that the life that now 81 82 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW is is very much more certain than the life which is to come, and that we can very X well let the future be settled by the present. * In other words, although we should hesi- tate to say that we disbelieve in immor- tality, we have belittled it and apologized for believing in it until it is no longer a great force in human life. It is "under investigation." * ft f* That is why we have trouble in our preaching. That is why we have preferred to turn our ministers into entertainers rather than to keep them prophets and priests. That is why men do not listen to ethical preachers unless they are "inter- esting." A morality that hesitates to v speak of heaven and hell is a very delicate, hectic mother of saints. You cannot get a man to be good on general principles. He wants to know something definite as to the outcome of his career. For practical pur- poses, if there is no hell we must invent one; if there is no heaven we must invent that too. Anything is better than sweet pictures THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 83 and appeals to butterflies coming out of caterpillars. You tell us, you writers of beautiful sen- tences printed on thick, cream-colored paper and bound in beautiful covers, you tell us that we should sacrifice for the benefit of other people. But why? Why \ should they not sacrifice for us? You urge us to lay down our lives for the benefit of the race and for human solidarity, and tell us soul-thrilling stories borrowed from Victor Hugo. But why? Why should we sacrifice ourselves for pos- terity? If neither we nor they have any- thing more than a life here, why should we be so keen upon preserving a race of bipedal animals who wear clothes? Exist- ence between birth and death does not seem to most of us sufficiently attractive to warrant maintaining it at all costs. And it is very difficult to discover the basis of morality in a stock farm. /* /* f* Convince us that the story of the gospel I 84 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW is true, and that death does not close the book for us and ours, and you convince us that life has its great values in the newer stage for development into which men are going. Then we have something definite to think about, some hope worth acting upon, some motive that will lead to sacrifice. That sort of gospel will not be impotent. The Christian Church professes to hold this great fact of the future life revealed by Jesus as its chief treasure; the Christian professes to believe it; a Christian preacher has promised to preach it. If there be no immortality, poetize, if you please, about spring and cocoons and eth- ical uplifts; only don't think you are preaching the gospel. If there be a gospel, and if there be immortality, why be ashamed to talk about it? N WAY FOR THE LEADER! 1VTEXT to being a leader a man likes to ^ be led; next to commanding he likes to obey. A leader will lead because men respond to him; men will be led because there is a leader to lead. Unfortunate in- deed is that age in which there is no one who dares say to another, "Thou must!" Even more unfortunate is that age in which men uncertain as to their next step are crying for the man who can command. We boast of individualism in religion and even more proudly of freedom of thought in all branches of investigation. Yet we begin to question whether such liberty is wholesome for the man who is born to be led. Individualism is very apt to ferment X into anarchy. i* ,* ,* The coming test of religious democracy will be that of its ability to produce men who will compel pugnacious individualists to receive them as leaders. Such men 85 86 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW must be men of individuality. They must be broad-minded; but a man whose liberal- ism consists in not believing things other people believe is as useless for purposes of leadership as a goldfish in a bowl. Com- posite photographs are interesting, but nobody falls in love with them. Where is the religious authority to which men of a democracy will bow because they must bow? Certainly not in the mere ar- rogance of self-appointed dictators. Nor, as far as most educated men are concerned, in an ecclesiastical monarchy, although monarchy is preferable to mobocracy, and let us thank God a church that dares believe in itself will always have men who take it at its word. A democracy which has touched state and industry demands a democratic church. For men who theoretically believe in in^ dividual liberty there is no leader except the man of aggressive faith; the man who counts his assets and does not worry about his liabilities; who dares speak the things he believes and keep silent about his THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 87 doubts. Give men such a leader and they will follow him to death. r <# ^ ,* Bewildered men who, chosen as leaders, seek to be led, seek for a message, seek for defense against their own doubts, are deny- ing that such confidence is longer possible. Distrusting their ready-made beliefs, ap- propriated memoriter in school days at so many pages a recitation, they stand aghast, ready to dodge any assailant, turning from religion to sociology, looking for an open- ing to teach Latin or English literature. They cannot lead because they have lost confidence in authority, in what they once believed to be truth, in themselves. The new leader is the child of a new confidence. Let him then lead. Why should he stop to debate with men who prefer to fight for error? Let him under- take the work of bringing his new assurance into the life of men and women who need the assurance, but do not need to know what the arguments upon which it rests. 88 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW Let him investigate vicariously. Let him preach and teach positively. The pulpit is not a lecture room. The man of his age has a gospel for his age. Let him speak it boldly and without concessions or conditions. There is rising up a group of young men who have this compelling conviction in the truth of the gospel. Many of them are just now going out to be pastors. They have been trained to search for truth and to recognize it when found. They have been trained to preach that truth and not to tell people their adventures in the search. Men are listening to them and begin to respond to the great facts that have been the impulsive forces of the ages. These young men have no new truth, but they have a new conviction. They do not minimize difficulties, but having over- come difficulties they know how to guide men in easier paths. They have no patent panacea for social ills, but they have sensed the eternal power of the gospel of THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 89 Jesus Christ and believe that it can remake men who can remake society. Their authority is not that of the man possessed of force or of a memorized sys- tem of theological philosophy, but that of the man who believes in himself^ who believes in the gospel, who believes in Jesus, and who believes most of all in the indubitable testimony borne by nature and experience to a loving God. THE CHRISTIAN AND THE CHANG- ING ORDER T) ELIGION cannot isolate itself in this * ^ period of change and reconstruction. It should not if it could. If any man is needed when the future is in the making it is the man with the spirit of Jesus. The radical is not a leader; he is an irritant. ^m^^t^tf^^^^f Indispensable as he is, almost without ex- ception he is a champion of rights and not of sacrifice. To insure stability to his re- forms there must also be the man who dares to sacrifice as well as to demand rights; who will share his privileges with those who have none; who will make the life and comfort of the artisan superior to cheapness of production; who will not give his own soul as the price of taking over a worsted competitor; who will not believe that dishonesty becomes honest in propor- tion to the magnitude of the enterprise in which he is engaged; who will prefer failure ito success when success costs too much in human suffering. 90 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 91 If a Christian is not this sort of man, what, then, is a Christian? Though a man speak with the tongues of men and angels and give all his money to feed the poor, and yet have not the spirit of Him who suffered and died because he loved men too much to be successful, he is none of his. fi f* # The loudest cry to-day is that for justice. Justice will come through the concession of privilege. There can be no question about that. The only question is as to the reason for granting concessions. If they are won by force, it will be at the cost of much suffering and of lasting hatreds; if by voluntary concession, it will be because the spirit of Jesus is still dominant in so- ciety. There is no third alternative. The decision rests in the hands of men who are nominally and even actively connected with Christian churches. It is the duty of the churches to see to it that they have the mind of Christ. Questions of ortho- doxy and heresy may well be left open. Men may want to know what to believe, but much more do they want to know 92 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW how to live and help others to live. Why should not the church socialize the mind of Christ? ft ,* ft iblic opinion is only the common de~ nominator of many people's opinion. When once individuals think alike public opinion is made. Suppose, then, men should come to believe with Jesus, that it is not neces- sary to be beaten into conceding just claims, but that love should anticipate the demand of rights. Suppose men should be persistently taught to pattern after the good Samaritan rather than after the rob- bers on the road to Jericho. Would not public opinion soon force a settlement of disputes and insure peace where now there is only fear of war? Good will would dis- place policemen, and industry the charity organizations. Nor is this a mere dream. There never was a time when men were more bent upon readjusting institutions and ideals for the benefit of those who have not shared THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 93 justly in social advance. There never was a time when men recognized more clearly that those who have enjoyed more than their proportionate share of privilege must learn self-sacrifice. The spirit of conces- sion, which is but one expression of Chris- tian love, is working, even though it be but slowly. The submission to arbitration in industrial disputes, the increase of legisla- tion in the interest of the general public, the growing recognition of the human fac- tor in economic life, the multiplication of voluntary agencies for eradicating rather than ameliorating poverty, the growth of democracy the world over all these are indications that Christians have not lived in vain. # /* # We do not need new religious institu- tions as much as we need a new Christian public opinion. Men may fear the dom- inance of a church or of a theology; they can never fear the dominance of the Golden Rule. And herein lies the opportunity for the Christian. The future is not to be worse but better than the present. The 94 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW age is changing, but it is changing because men both within and without the church are determined to realize the principles which Jesus enunciated. To share in making the coming civiliza- tion thoroughly Christian by making men and institutions more Christlike in their readiness to give rather than to receive benefits this,lmd not the stubborn holding ; to rights until rights are forced from them, is the true mission of the Christian. THE CHURCH AND THE MASSES THE churches of America have been swept by the outward currents of well-to-do people away from the old cen- ters toward the suburbs. Their old par- ishes have been taken over by commerce, and the homes of their former members have become tenements or have been re- placed by warehouses. Church organiza- tions skirt the deserted region, but their influence is little felt. The tenement house and the boarding house are practically un- touched by Protestant religious organiza- tions. With here and there an exception, *- I the abandoned territory is being peopled I by men and women who are neither Jews, Catholics, nor Protestants. ,* ,# ,# None the less, there is no need of panic. Christianity is not a failure. The church is not moribund, however its critics may suffer from rhetorical hysteria. Looked at soberly, the situation amounts to this: In 95 96 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW the past churches have belonged to those who could support them. The same is true, to a less extent, of Protestant churches to-day. People with incomes can afford to build and maintain churches; people with- out incomes cannot. Outside of certain groups there is no widespread opposition to Christianity. It is a matter of expense and indifference. There is no institution taking the place of the church among the masses. The masses cannot afford institutions. It is superfluous to discuss whether this condition of affairs is creditable to a Chris- tian society. We all agree that it is not. Yet at the same time there is no need of general denunciation of the past mistakes of the church. We are determined to undo them. The development of social life is by no means constant or easily foreseen, and the church as a social institution has to adjust itself to conditions as they develop. Such adjustment will no more be instan- taneous with the church than with legisla- tion. We should, of course, like to have social reorganizations of all sorts made promptly. We should like to have the church within a year reorganize itself and undertake vigorously the new duties which great cities thrust upon it; but it is quite out of the question. Unlike sociological programs, social adjustments cannot be produced extemporaneously. Fifty years ago the churches were as much in the dark as the sociologists con- cerning the problems of cities. They did the thing that seemed at the moment best. When they abandoned their old sites they had not the slightest intention of abandon- ing people to evil, or of lessening their own responsibility. They simply went where their members were living. And, after all, the soul of a man who is neither poor nor ignorant nor depraved is worth saving. ft f* * Suppose we drop matters of origin and look at the future. Is the church aware of its mistake, and is it endeavoring to repair it? That is a far more vital question than as to how affairs got into such a crisis. To this question there can be but one answer: The church is endeavoring to cor- 98 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW rect the blunder of its past. It is aware that it is living in a new world, and that many of the methods of the past are in- efficient in the present. Despite the gloomy forebodings of men who criticize from a distance, the theological seminaries are sending out ministers who believe no less in the gospel, but who believe more than the men who left the center of cities un- churched believed, that the church has a mission to teach men how to live just as truly as to teach them how to die. There is a new conscience in the churches. To say that the institution that has found- ed practically every hospital, and endowed practically every college, that supports prac- tically every charity and ameliorative agen- cy, that has bred practically every man and woman now working among the poor, that has originated practically every re- form, and whose members have compelled the passage of practically every law look- ing to the benefit of the poor to say that such an institution is indifferent to the ^needs.of the masses is to give way to an impatient and unworthy pessimism. THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 99 The most hopeful social sign of the day is this ethical renascence among Christians. Give the new forces now at work in the churches another decade, and our cities will be far better cared for religiously. The Christian of to-day is reconquering the ter- ritory his father surrendered, and he is endowing his institutions so that the poor man may always have a religious home. BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS TV/TANY cities of the United States are *- in the state of industrial war. One hundred thousand men and women are often on strike, with probably several times as many in close sympathy with them. Over against them are their em- ployers protected by policemen, detectives, and soldiers. The ordinary citizen is often uncertain whether he lives in civilization or in barbarism. He dares not promise to build a house, buy a meal, or change his linen. With the avalanche of injunctions about them, business men and laborers alike begin to wonder whether they are citizens or subjects. f* f* f* Yet one thing stands out clear in all this the growth of the reliance upon law rather than upon violence. Threats of violence are still made by the representa- tives of the labor unions, and threats of an equally lawless sort are made by their 100 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 101 opponents; but none the less, riots are less frequent than one might fear, and both employers and workmen are turning to arbitration. If the attitude of newly formed labor unions and those employers who for the first time are brought face to face with an actual industrial struggle is warlike, the older unions and the combina- tions of employers which have for years been in the habit of dealing collectively with their men, are coming to a more cor- dial understanding and a fairer recognition of each other's positions. While the general atmosphere just now is one of struggle, there are undoubtedly growing up various forces making toward peace. The disappointing thing in the situation is that the Christian Church is_ incon- spicuous as a peacemaker. It would be expected that a body of men whose watch- word is fraternity would be among the most zealous champions of mutual con- cession. In some cases, it is true, the clergyman is called in as arbitrator, and his decision is the expression of the great 102 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW principles for which he avowedly stands; yet the voice of the pulpit is not what it should be in such a critical situation. It is crying in the wilderness, but it does not yet proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. A religious teacher should have a mes- sage if he is to speak upon economic sub- jects. But what is his message to be? It is presumptuous for him to give advice as to how a business should be conducted and worse than folly for him to urge upon either party passive submission to the de- mands of the other. Yet as an honest man \P and as a follower of his Master, he cannot disregard the obligation laid upon him, and f upon all those whom he represents, to as- sist in the ending of hatreds and struggles. ****** Has the gospel anything to say to the capitalist and to the labor union? It certainly has no economic program, and is utterly silent as to the production of wealth. Has it any part to play in the world that now is, or must it content itself with THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 103 assuring people of justice after death, and misery this side of heaven? The question answers itself. Religion has a role to play in this world of industry quite as much as in the world of good manners. Only it is not economic. It does not need to wait upon political econ- omy or sociology. It has a distinct mis- sion, one which, if it fails to perform, no other agency will accomplish; and this mission is to make men loving. Why not drop heresy hunting and take up this duty? Why not teach church members that they do not escape moral responsibilities because they unite in unions i or corporations? We need to be taught that there is no excuse for the good man who allows a bad man to act as his representative in mat- ters of business, or for a philanthropic organization which supports itself by funds wrung by conscienceless agents from its tenants. Above all, do we need to be taught that preparation for war is a heathen way of insuring peace, and that the Christian method is to avoid war by removing causes 104 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW of dispute. A Christian society may pun- ish; it should never fight. This law is as true of industry as of politics. A world kept at peace by fear of strikes and lock- outs is as hideous a caricature of Christen- dom as a world kept at peace through fear of armies. f* ft /* As far as the church itself is concerned, the situation is a very simple one: the production of men who have the spirit of Christ and are ready to sacrifice privilege for the benefit of other people. And that means strong preaching. A religion which, no matter what its pious phrases, actually leads a man to hold fast to everything he possesses, whether it be money or advan- tage, has no right to call itself Christian. It is mere barbarism. Obey it and you will be following the medicine-man. Conciliatory arbitration, with the accent upon the first word, is the practical contri- bution Christian men can make to the indus- trial situation. And Christians must make this contribution without fear of the con- tempt of those who prefer fighting to discus- THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 105 sion ; without fear of being called amateurs in practical affairs; without fear of anything except the rebuke of one's own conscience. If the Golden Rule is inoperative outside pious books, let us be honest with our- selves and say so. If reconciliation between men is less pos- sible than reconciliation with God, let us say that also. Only let us also not deceive ourselves in another particular. Let us be honest and label ourselves heathen. THE LARGER SOCIAL SERVICE OF THE CHURCH IV/fODERN society is under conviction of **-* sin. True, this conviction is not quite the same as that under which olden- time evangelists sought to bring their hearers. We have not had forced upon us the horrors of hell and our desert of eternal punishment. But we are none the less suffering the pangs of conscience. Who is responsible for overworked moth- ers, for starved babies, for children who work that capital may declare dividends, for shop girls burned alive for lack of fire escapes, for politicians who are grafters, for corporations that defy law, for the horrors of the white-slave traffic, for fathers and mothers who prefer "joy rides" to the care of children? Once we were indifferent to such ques- tions. We said misery is the outgrowth of social evolution and the accompaniment of prosperity. Such replies no longer leave us easy- 106 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 107 minded. Even those who still amuse their consciences with old excuses masquerading in scientific vocabularies, are growing mor- ally discontented. Our modern world may not fear hell, but it does fear the outcomes of injustice, mendacity, and lust. Our sense of responsibility is growing in- dividual. We are not quite so ready as we once were to slip over upon society the responsibility for social sin. We get de- creasing satisfaction from trying to think of ourselves as peripatetic laboratories emerging from the social process and domi- nated by the sex instinct. Somehow we are coming to feel that what is nobody's fault is our own fault. The very bitterness of our disillusioning is become our salvation. To face moral evil is to call upon God for help. Convic- tion of sin has always been the first stage of a revival of religion. We are already in the midst of such a revival. And it is something more than a new sense of duty. It is a turning to the God of duty. 108 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW As we try to work for him we see the hope- lessness of our efforts unless he works for us. As Jesus Christ touches men's con- sciences, the Father of Jesus Christ must give them forgiveness. This depth of moral unrest, this Nathan- like appeal we each one of us make to our- selves as we see the injustice and the cruelty of what we call civilization, this new turning to God, all force the church to take itself seriously as an institution of a religion that shall inspire social love and sacrifice. That is the larger social service the church alone can render. However much our churches can minister to the communities' need of wholesome pic- ture shows, libraries, boys' clubs, basket- ball teams, and men's banquets, they will commit suicide if they do not help society out from its conviction of sin into a sense of brotherhood through fellowship with God. Social service is not altruistic restless- ness. It is the wisely directed ministry of souls who believe in something better than the heroism of a forlorn hope. It is religion THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 100 at work. We do not want our churches "hustling" miscellaneous reforms. We do not want them ethical orphan asylums where people are amused to keep them out of mischief. We want them spiritual homes in which souls are born into spiritual life and taught the social meaning of regeneration. i* f* f* Social evolution is a splendid term, but it leaves the heart empty. If the Holy Ghost is really convicting the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, a church which tries to introduce religion surrep- titiously between stereopticon slides is a sorry spectacle. But a church filled with a contagious faith in the God of things as they are becoming, that seeks first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, that stirs men to moral discontent in order that they may be brought into sacrificial service through fellowship with their crucified Lord, that bases the demand for human fraternity upon the experience of divine sonship such a church is the veritable servant of the living God. AFTER THE STORM was never moribund, but there are plenty of men who recall the days when they feared to diagnose its symptoms days when they confused the origin of re- ligion with religion; an imperfect concep- tion of God with God himself; statements about molecular and chemical change in nerve tissues with philosophies of the uni- verse; the doubts born of uncorrelated new facts with a final decision as to life and death. There were even years when one did nqt dare to accept truth for fear lest it should be fatal to religion. Those were the days when panic sought to hide itself in denunciation of theories men could not cor- relate with a circumscribed belief in God. For men who face reality and who will not bow the knee to corollaries hastily drawn from over-bold speculation these days are past. Such men may have given up some of their former opinions, but they no THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY 111 have not abandoned faith. They have no skeletons in their theological closets to make them timid. Life is a problem, but it is no longer a riddle. We know God bet- ter because we know his universe better. If we are less anthropomorphic, we are also less deistic. God grows nearer as we see chance banished from the world, and he grows more personal as he grows less distant. Increasing knowledge demands a larger, not a smaller common denominator of faith, and for the man who understands Jesus that denominator is not far to find. As religious men we are less interested in origins than in destinies. If a man by anxiety cannot add a cubit to his stature, still less can he add to or take from his ancestors. In a world of change they, at least, are certain. Not Whence? but Whither? is the vital question, and that is being answered by appeal, not only to longings, but to knowledge as well. /* t* f* The storm is past. Through the fog of 112 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW criticism and reconstructions looms land. It is ours as truly as it was our fathers'. Our charts are drawn from fuller surveys, our course is better buoyed, the headlands stand out clearer from the shore. We never doubted we should arrive, and now we see our port. God and immortality and the strong Son of God these are to-day not less, but more secure. Ill THE STIRRINGS OF A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 113 HAVE WE REPUDIATED HONOR? rilHE question is not mere rhetoric. For -L years dishonesty has played its role in politics, but during the past few years the citizens of the United States have been subjected to an almost daily recurring shame. They have seen officials high and low indicted, and sometimes sentenced as bribe-takers and blackmailers. From Maine to California there has arisen the stench of corruption in city and in state. A Senator of the United States has been sentenced for using his official position in behalf of a questionable corporation. Is it any wonder that the plain citizen wonders whether honesty is still regarded as a virtue? Has the time come when men , have frankly determined that they cannot ' jf \serve God and have chosen Mammon? # * # We cannot believe this to be true. Ex- posure is not an evil. It is a sign of a new moral interest. Our shame is great, but we 115 116 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW are not shameless; we are bewildered, but we are not cynical ; we are disgraced, but we propose to disgrace those who have dis- graced us. The very fact that throughout the United States evils are uncovered ar- gues that American politics are not beyond hope, and that the public conscience is aroused. Reform is the inevitable outcome of abuse. It is a pity that the forces making for better things cannot count upon all their natural allies. It is a simple matter to wipe bribe-taking off the slate; men need only stop bribing. Corruption is not to be laid to the low-lived politician who worms his way into some petty office. We can remove him from office, or we can surround him with so many honest colleagues as to render him harmless. The reform that is needed is not merely a turning of rascals out of office. Any reform that begins in politics must end in ordinary business. Corruption means corruptors. . ,* ,* <* The gravest danger to which our civic life is exposed is the "respectable'* man A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 117 who seeks to accomplish his ends by offer- ing legislators an opportunity for "boodle." The more our civilization develops, the more extended is the region of contact be- tween legislation and private interest. The recent decisions of the Supreme Court, as regards railroads, would have been as un- necessary as undreamed of thirty years ago. Unless all signs fail, this tendency for a closer dependence of business upon the state will increase. In this increase lies the most critical question of the day. Its answer will be honest corporations or socialism. There is no third alternative. It is the fear lest government shall in some way be subjected to business interests that accounts for the plain citizen's fear of trusts. He does not object to the combina- tion of capital in itself. The very farmer who denounces corporations will buy stock in a trust organized by his neighbors. Nor is it that the plain citizen objects to the lobby, at least not what he would call a legitimate lobby. His apprehension is due to the mere 118 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW presence of representatives of enormous \wealth at the seat of government. Being himself subject to like passions with his legislators, he cannot avoid suspecting that such presence means influence, and that influence means corruption. As a religious man he may believe in the miracles of the Bible, but as a plain man among men he cannot believe that the presence of repre- sentatives of corporations in the lobbies of legislative assemblies means purity, in politics. ,# f* fl It is no time for good citizens to de- spond. The issue is one not of politics alone, but of. business honesty. As long as human nature continues, it will be the y moral question which lies below every ' ^tto*- The good citizen will not believe that honor is a luxury in either private or public affairs. Therefore he hates dis- honor. It is he who has brought corrup- tion to light. It will be he who finally establishes such conditions as will make rascals, whether respectable or unrespect- able, cease from troubling. A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 119 If respectability will not be honest from choice, it will share the punishment waiting for the rascal with whom it chooses to associate. T EGALITY is one thing, morality is ^ another. An action is legal until it is proved illegal. That is often a long process. Lawmaking has not been of late an entirely disinterested process. In fact, some very keen men find a more than com- fortable living in making laws and in keeping laws from being made. But sooner or later law responds to public conscience and moves on in its unceacing pursuit of morality. Conscience in many respectable people consists in denouncing the sins of other -'people. This may sound cynical, but it is meant to be a bald statement of fact. What respectable citizen likes to call himself a rascal? He never bribes. He is held up by labor organizations, city coun- cils, and State Legislatures. He does not graft. He does not expect 120 A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 121 to apply the Sermou on the Mount to business. He contributes to no corporation fund. He only helps to save his country with his money. Other men may water stock. He simply capitalizes his company on the basis of its earning capacity. There are bribers and corruptionists and stock gamblers. He laments the fact and writes essays on the morals of the country in which such evil men live. And he is worse than the men he con- demns. He is a hypocrite. We are just now seeing the social con- science awakened to the dangers from such respectability. It is a movement which cheers the optimist and even halts the cynic. We have dared take account of stock of our national disgraces, and de- spite the hypocrisy, the corruption, the prostitution of government, the barefaced knavery and downright thieving we have discovered in men we did not suspect quite as truly as in men we did THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW suspect, we are at least not paralyzed by the revelation. We have been disgraced, but we are punishing the respectable ras- cals. Slowly but relentlessly they are brought to book not all of them, but enough of them to prove that the average citizen, whether or not he may dress for dinner, is at bottom honest and bound to make it uncomfortable for the man who betrays his trust. He is demanding in- vestigation where a few years ago he could only submit and suffer. The millennium has not dawned, but a new sense of right is in evidence. Men who have grown rich by exploiting out- grown legislation need defenders. Not so long ago they found only imitators. That v means a growing social conscience. The average citizen cannot follow aca- demic discussions, but he knows something is wrong, and he thinks he knows how that something should be made right. He does not want charity; he wants restitution. He does not want fine phrases; he wants elementary honesty. A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 123 And he will have it. ,# ,# ,# Just how this new social conscience will yet express itself, it is too early to prophesy. Wait till it is a few years older. But one thing is certain: it will insist that laws be enforced rather than evaded, that law- makers be honest rather than blackmailers, that men produce wealth as conscientiously as they use it. It will not accomplish all that it should, but it will accomplish something. Conscience is a poor servant, but it is a terrible master. NEW-FASHIONED HONESTY AFTER-DINNER speakers are making much of old-fashioned honesty. They very properly bemoan present corruption, graft, chicanery, and the entire list of evils, which, with time-honored jokes, make up ithe stock-in-trade of after-dinner speakers. They would make men virtuous by making them like their grandfathers. t* f* # But what inspiration lies in this eulogy of grandparents? It is always easy to see a saint in a dead relative, just as it is easy to see a statesman in a dead politician. Some of us are very keen to build monu- ments for the prophets these very same grandparents made extremely uncomfort- able. Why talk about our ancestors' honesty? Why not have an honesty of our own? Grandfathers' virtues, like grandfathers' clocks, may be a badge of respectability, but in our own day they are not always 124 A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 125 in good running order. Our forefathers were no better than we are indeed, to judge from the criticism of their fellow citizens of another political party, they were a good deal worse! Old-fashioned honesty gave sixteen ounces to the pound, condemned wooden nutmegs, paid its debts, told no lies, and kept five or six of the commandments. But the world in which old-fashioned hon- esty lived was singularly uncomplicated. Smith knew Jones and Jones knew Smith. Neither thought seriously of that great mass of people whose names they did not know. If Smith did not cheat Jones, and Jones did not cheat Smith, there was every chance that each would die in the odor of respectability, and have his pic- ture, painted by Copley or by some crayon artist, hung in his local Hall of Fame. Individualism set the limits to old- fashioned honesty. It had broken down political absolutism, thrown the bones of kings into lime pits, and achieved gen- 126 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW erally those results which go to make up the working hypothesis of yesterday's life. ft ft f* We need this individualistic honesty to- day, but we also need a very much bigger sort of honesty, an honesty which sees that our obligations are set, not alone by our relations with each other, but also by our relations with municipalities and states, with a nation and a world. Such honesty is not any too common. Men have gone down to their mausoleums labeled honest millionaires who were directors in corpora- tions whose methods would bring blushes to the cheek of a confidence man. Accord- ing to the standard of old-fashioned hon- esty there was nothing to be said against these honest millionaires. But from the point of view of the new honesty they were very like thieves. They robbed society legally. * f* ft A man does not need to be an academic optimist to see the beginnings of this new- fashioned honesty. We are doing the best A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 127 we can to shape up laws which shall express a new social conscience. Morality is always about a generation ahead of legality. Good men once be- lieved slavery both constitutional and right. Twenty-five years ago, and even less, men took rebates from railroads as they took discounts from wholesalers. It never occurred to them that they were doing wrong. But the new social con- science would not think of justifying slav- ery, or hold a man guiltless for taking rebates from the railroads. It is no time for pessimism, except for those who can sell pessimism at so much a thousand words. It is a day rather for congratulation that a commercial age has set itself to be honest in a big way. For the social conscience is in deadly earnest. ;To grow rich fast is to risk being investi- gated. Every day it is getting more desirable to be honest. We are no longer satisfied with a morality whose ideals are those of a small corner grocery. We are bound to 128 k THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW have men and particularly legislators give a square deal to the public. That is the new-fashioned honesty, and that is the sort of honesty no man or group of men can prevent our having. THE APPEAL TO BRUTE FORCE HPHERE was a time when we thought violence had been quarantined. We expected there would be fighting in Africa and revolutions in South American repub- lics, but we did not expect violence to become epidemic. We thought that the reign of peace and good will among Chris- tian nations was assured by the providen- tial discovery of smokeless powder, sub- marine torpedo boats, and other agents of a beneficently systematized slaughter. We almost regretted the civilizing of the Red Man, since it shut the door of rapid promo- tion to West Point graduates. But apparently our dreams were the re- sults of ill-digested optimism. Despite the prophecies of the poet, the reign of violence is not yet over, and peace seems impatient of anything but a bloody wooing. For militarists have taken to prophecy. Japan and Russia had to fight before the fate of China could be fixed. Russia and Great Britain must fight if the future of 129 130 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW India and Tibet is to be determined. France and Germany cannot always main- tain their truce if the German colors are to float over Strasburg. The Turk must be red-handed as long as Armenians are his I unwilling subjects. The United States must I inevitably be drawn into the maelstrom of I international war if it is to insist upon the integrity of China and its own share in the world's commerce. The Far East may yet involve the civilized world in a general war. So has run the prophecy of militarism. ,* <* # Nor has it been the soldier alone who would thus build up a better future by a recourse to force. The "educational committee" of the labor union ushers in the reign of fraternity by terrifying nonunion girls and killing nonunion men. Employers' Associations, scorning the elemental brutality of cavemen, starve re- calcitrant employees into peace as their feudal prototypes starved a town into con- senting to be sacked. A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 131 Ecclesiastical bodies cure heresy by ruin- ing the reputation of heretics. Mobs lynch Negroes. And Christian nations in the interest of commerce partition empires, appropriate new continents, and maintain order in a Belgian Free State by mutilating natives who refuse to tap rubber trees. Scratch civilization and you will find something far/ worse than a Cossack. And yet it is not because men have grown more savage that they thus invite deadly struggle. They were never more prodigal in their charities. The nation that invents new guns and new armor or- ganizes a Red Cross League to care for the victims of its inventions. It is not that the better men among us have new lust for violence. It is, rather, that the ruling and the subject peoples and classes have grown desperate. Peace and love and self- sacrifice seem for the moment terms of an impracticable rhetoric. In momentary de- spair of other methods of reaching peace men have dressed up their passions in the THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW guise of some good cause, and, as always, believe that uniforms justify violence. It is not difficult to understand this desperation. What man of us has not chafed under injustice or ingratitude and longed to call down fire from heaven upon inhospitable Samaritans? Why not treat brutes as they would treat us? It is no easy thing for a man, much less a nation, to be strong and gentle, self-reliant and patient. Yet to this peace men and nations must some day come and, despite recent history, 11 are coming. Besides the recurrence to brute force there is also in world politics and industrial struggles a recognition of the final value of the Golden Rule. The Hague Tribunal and arbitration treaties are not ghosts of dead optimisms. It is not merely that men believe war of every sort to be fearfully costly. Eco- nomic arguments may very well be over- whelmed by economic arguments, and the gains of a commercial war may be judged greater than the penalties of increased A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 133 national debts and bankrupt merchants. National and industrial peace must be built on something more fundamental than profit and loss accounts. It must be, nay, it is being built upon a recognition of elemental justice. Madness may have seized the world for the moment, but brute force cannot always be the court of final appeal. To believe otherwise is to misread the past and mis- judge the signs of the times. GENTLEMEN POISONERS TN the good old days the dinner table was a favorite place for ridding oneself of dangerous rivals. You gave a great dinner, surreptitiously inserted poison into some- thing your guest would eat or drink and were relieved of further anxiety con- cerning him and his doings. Everything was done decently and in order. Common folk might, indeed, attend to such matters in a vulgar fashion. Gentlemen poisoned in a gentlemanly way. And as they made law and administered law and punished breakings of law, there was, of course, no scandal. With their wider ethical outlook our manufacturers find it difficult to approve altogether of this method of procedure. For one thing, it was too exclusive. Gen- tlemen poisoned nobody but gentlemen. I Now they poison anybody. Such limitation was, however, probably 134 A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 135 to be expected of a less developed past. Italians and Frenchmen of the fourteenth century could hardly be expected to reach really broad democratic interests. Amer- ica had not been discovered, corporations had not been invented, trade was of neces- sity limited. Then, too, it must be admitted that some of the agents which the gentlemen poisoners of those days employed were not as re- spectable as could have been desired. The business had not become "respectable." And the list of poisons was also rather restricted. The resources of modern science were unknown, and one's selection was necessarily limited to a few drugs, and even these were often detected. With the march of modern improve- ments these limitations have been largely removed. The gentleman poisoner of to- day has every possible opportunity. He can color candies with coal tar dyes; he can preserve meat with boracic acid; he can keep milk sweet with formaline. If he is in the dairy business he can put 136 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW "preservatives" into his butter, although the fact that a child would have to eat a pound of his product to be killed some- what lessens its efficiency. If he sells molasses, he can lighten its color with sul- phur compounds, though here again it takes a good deal of molasses absolutely to kill anybody. If he makes marshmallows or marshmallow crackers, he can use paraffin. True, paraffin is not a deadly poison, but any large amount of it is pretty sure to produce some fatal intestinal trouble. If his interests are more philanthropic, he can sell a cure-all composed of sulphuric acid diluted with water at one dollar a bottle. By advertising cough medicine he can help people become victims of mor- phine and opium. And then there is always acetanilid for headaches. Verily, the gentleman poisoner of to-day is far more fortunate than his brothers of the Borgia family. For years we endeavored to obtain federal legislation to prevent "respectable" citizens from killing us off. Year after year bills A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 137 were introduced into Congress providing that articles of food and drink and medi- cines should be so labeled as to protect the innocent purchaser. All through these years there went up to heaven the cry of little children who have been sacrificed on the altar of patent medicines manufactured and sold by "gentlemen." Men standing high in the community have sent to every dinner table in the land goods which they knew contained deadly poison, calculating that no person would eat enough at any one time to be killed outright. These "gentlemen" the manufacturers of poi- soned whisky, poisoned tomatoes, poisoned cherries, poisoned sausages, poisoned mo- lasses, poisoned vinegar, poisoned peas, poisoned flavoring extracts prevented the passing of any legislation to prevent their wholesale murder. Now we are in sight of relief. These men have labeled themselves, if they have not labeled their bottles and tin cans. We see that courtesy and wealth, even zeal for reform, cannot hide the hideousness of 138 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW the man or corporation who sells poison under the guise of food. Yet even now they are not ashamed, these gentlemen poisoners. They fight every attack upon their nefarious trade. They pour out money to lobbyists, tips and stocks to legis- lators, in the hope of insuring the con- tinuance of their business. But their day is drawing to a close. Already their agents are clearing the shelves of the grocery shops. If they persist in poisoning us, we are at least to know our danger. fi ?* f* And one of these days public sentiment will grow more serious. Instead of fining grocers who sell what manufacturers force them to sell we shall pass laws that will reach the poisoners themselves. And then instead of laying little fines for "adulteration" we shall treat these gentle- men poisoners as we treat vulgar poisoners. We shall try them for murder. SALVATION BY SENATORIAL COURTESY TF "conservative" oracles divine truly, the country is in a desperate plight. Re- form has become an orgy. No wonder that "conservatives" especially those whose special privileges are under scrutiny should view the future with alarm. What with a nation rising to demand the examination of the land titles of senators, the reduction of salaries of insurance dy- nasties, the removal of public funds from banks that pay half the current rate of interest, the cancellation of contracts granted as rewards for political jobbery, a law to show that railroads are the servants, not the proprietors, of the country, and an order to advance rather than to "stand pat," "conservative" respectability, like the Czar, has need of Cossacks. But, after all, apprehension need not grow too intense. There is the "conserva- 139 140 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW live" Senate. True, even it has its mar- tyrs. Senators have been indicted and sentenced to imprisonment, and another has seen his reputation as the ideal gentle- man in politics shrivel up and, like his office, blow away. But these men, after all, must have been victims rather than sinners! Had the public been under the sway of true sena- torial courtesy instead of an hysterical determination to reform things, they might even now be assisting their former col- leagues to temper the madness of the people ! For in senatorial courtesy lies salvation. The Senate will not act while a senator has unexploited legislative privilege. As long as we have the Senate, the "con- servative" element of society can sleep o' nights. If public opinion and executive zeal over- reach themselves and threaten equality of treatment in railway rates, the Senate will protect the endangered corporations from demagogic appeal. A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 141 If the House of Representatives, too sus- ceptible to that public opinion to which its members owe their office, would hasten leg- islation, the Senate will wisely guard the people against that impetuosity which would pass a bill in a single session. If the business men and the press of a great city favor the retention of an effi- cient postmaster, they are delivered from unseen evil by the foresight of a senator who provides salvation in the person of a practical politician. If the nation at large demands relief from a tariff that checks the development of important industries in half the republic, the senators from States the size of a county in the affected districts will pro- tect the republic and incidentally their own interests from the shortsightedness of men who want what they ought not to want. t* fi /* Yes, the "conservative" interests of the country have much to thank the Senate for. Even those of us who belong to the unimportant millions who are threatened 142 THE MAKING OP TO-MORROW by misguided reformers may feel assured that, however hasty may be our action, and however revolutionary may be our well-intentioned demand for fair play, we, too, are under the aegis of senatorial courtesy and disinterested senatorial "con- servatism." /* /* !* And therefore we have rebelled. We have served notice on our senators that we own them, and that they do not own us. We are seeing to it that they are elected by the people and not by too tractable Legis- latures. If a pocket State cannot free itself from the feudal lord set over it by financial suzerains, those of us who live in States that are too big for any master except them- selves are providing enough senators who are representatives, not of sovereign States or of sovereign corporations, but of a sov- ereign people. We propose to be saved from "conserva- tism" that euphemism for "privilege." We propose to be saved from senatorial courtesy which is a euphemism for log- rolling. A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 14S We propose to be saved from the Senate which is a euphemism for vested in- terest. And we work . out our salvation with the faith of men who "move mountains by shovelling them away." THE BETTER SIDE OF COMMER- CIALISM shall we teach our children? The question may seem superfluous, for what father nowadays teaches his chil- dren? Boys and girls sleep at home, eat at home, and sometimes get disciplined at home, but we expect the schools to teach them. And we are quite ready to let them do their best. The child who learns his lessons at his mother's knee is getting to be as much a tradition as the boy who is taught his father's trade. It would be foolish to find fault with the situation. The home-taught child is not likely to grow up the democrat every American should be, and a mother would find that teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic would interfere sadly with boil- ing potatoes and going to women's clubs. lit is fortunate for America that it has common schools, and it is to be devoutly 144 A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 145 hoped that every citizen will make himself a special champion of the school-teacher. But, after all, there is something that the schools cannot teach, something which fathers and mothers must teach. And that particular lesson concerns money. * <# # Preachers tell us that commercialism is the curse of the age. Perhaps it is, but it is one of those things which are not likely to disappear during the lifetime of our children or our grandchildren. Good or bad, it must be assimilated with whatever else goes to make up life. Undeniably it is a danger. A man whose one and only supreme motive is money-making is a very contemptible person. But did you ever know such a person? Would not all your friends repudiate the charge that money is the end of their living? Men don't want mere money; they want to succeed in their business. Of course that means growing rich, but what they want is the success. Some of them also honestly want to help their fellow men 146 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW with their wealth. Yet too often this ultimate aim of life is forgotten, and men love the game for itself. Sometimes they are forced to do things they would not want other people at least magazine writ- ers to know about. But paint the picture as black as you please and certainly it can be drawn black enough there yet is left a fact which our children ought to understand: They and their generation are going to be richer than we and our generation. They must be taught how to use wealth in the only way which can justify possessing it. If we were expecting Socialism to be es- tablished and private capital to disappear, it would be a very different lesson we should teach our children. Then we should tell them: "Bait the millionaires. Hold up every successful business man to carica- ture and calumny. Discredit every insti- jtution likely to perpetuate or to make pos- 'sible the increase of individual property." But we are not going to be Socialists. Our children must live in a commercial A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 147 age, as we are living in a commercial age. To teach them to hate the wealthy class and at the same time to teach them how to grow rich is madly inconsistent. To laugh at a rich man because he does not spend his money in luxury and then laugh at him the more for using it in phi- lanthropy is to put a premium on cynical self-indulgence. A boy who is to devote the best years of his life to making money should not be taught that commercialism is bad, but he should be taught that it is a curse when it leads to dishonesty, and despicable when it makes men vulgar and selfish and arrogant. fi # fi You do not need to be a demagogue in order to teach your child to despise a suc- cessful rogue. As society will be consti- tuted when he is a man, wealth will be an enormous power for good. Hospitals and churches and libraries and universities and medical institutes and pension funds and ministries to the needy and unfor- tunate these are not evils. Neither are 148 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW art collections and museums and the thou- sand and one other means of making life something more than mere existence. Yet until Socialism brings in its paper millen- nium these good things will be the fruit of commercialism. We may trust public opinion to make it difficult for our children to grow rich through legal dishonesty. Can we as cer- tainly trust American parents to see that the rich men of the future use their wealth fraternally not as purveyors of charity, but as partners with society? r THE LUXURY OF WAR all have our luxuries. Some of us have our steam yachts, some our automobiles, some our books, and some of us our bad habits; but luxuries we must have, cost what they will. So, too, with the world. It has its luxury war. ft t* # Of course all good Christians believe that men ought not to fight, but so do we believe that men ought not to spend mpney for things they cannot afford. But there are always extenuating circumstances, and it is always easier to run in debt for lux- uries than for necessities. In the days of the Roman empire a standing army of one hundred and twenty thousand men kept order in the country surrounding the Mediterranean. That, of course, was before we achieved our present high civilization. In these same countries to-day there are probably two million men 149 150 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW under arms, and as many more in Germany and Russia. But Rome was relatively poor. All of these men have been taken from industry at the age when they ought to be learning their trades. They have to be supported by the state and have to live off of other people. But an army is a luxury which civilization enjoys. All the world, and especially every woman, loves a uniform. Why, then, should Peace Conferences and Hague Conferences try to make us more economical? Have not our re- formers learned that as long as a man or a nation's credit is good he can afford all the luxuries he can borrow money to pay for? fi f* f* And then there is the science of war. If one man kills another to avenge a per- sonal wrong, it is, of course, plain murder; but when he and a hundred thousand other people unite to kill another one hundred thousand people for a national insult, it is military science. A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 151 Why should Peace Conferences stand in the way of the development of science? A modern battleship will cost enough to endow a dozen small colleges. It will be sent to the junk heap in twenty years if it does not go to the bottom before. But education is only a necessity. The battleship is a luxury. It costs enough to support a nation's military establishment to give old-age pen- sions, to build hospitals, libraries, art museums, parks, and raise the salaries of mail carriers. But a nation gladly sacri- fices these secondary goods that it may afford the luxury of being ready to kill a few hundred thousand of its neighbors and develop field hospitals for itself. i* <# f* One of these days we shall come to our economic senses if not to our moral senses. At that time we shall hear no more silly talk about the greatness of war and of the patriot who must kill somebody in order to be patriotic. The world will do without cannons to smash people to pieces, rifles to bore holes in their bones, bayonets 152 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW to stick into their bodies, and mines to blow up their transports, and will use the money that these luxuries cost for sensible purposes. When that time comes we may not have as many processions of soldiers, but we shall not be squandering our money on a luxury that reduces wealth, breeds social inequalities, and terrorizes neighbors with a fear of misery. But it takes nations, just as it takes plain folks, a long time to grow sensible. r" 1 PRACTICING NATIONAL MIND CURE f I THEY tell us that we are to have pros- J- perity for the next few years obtru- sive, aggressive, implacable prosperity. Whereat some of us rejoice and those of us who are on salary tremble. But the prophecy, we take it, is true. We have been passing through the most irrational period of hard times in the history of finance. We have tried to dam optimism, and now that the sluice gates are open the probability is the dam will go- And never mind the mixture of figures when optimism goes on an orgy there is money to be made. We are certainly a most remarkable people. With enormous crops, with ex- traordinary output of mines, with farmers lending money to Wall Street, and with day laborers getting more money than 153 154 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW college professors, we have been insisting upon our poverty. We became commercial hypochondriacs. We mistook an acute attack of financial in- digestion for industrial nephritis. Then we began to discuss the relative merits of undertakers on Wall Street. f* ?* fi Now, however, that we have practiced faith cure, we are as convinced of our health as we were convinced of our disease. All of which argues that the linotype is mightier than the check-book. ,* ,* ,* With the remembrance of the fat years of the past to give us pause, it would be strange if there were not those who rather dread the fat years of the future. Moral- izers are more apt to thank God for days of misery than for days of joy. They think that people's souls thrive better on economy than they do on large bank balances, just as alluvial farms are better for corn than for P9ets. Indeed, a thoroughgoing moralizer welcomes misfor- A NATION'S CONSCIENCE 155 tune as a writer of epitaphs welcomes death. And even if a man is not quite so con- vinced that virtue thrives best on melancholy, he cannot but wonder what these years of prosperity are to bring. Of course they will bring fortunes and automobiles and trips to Europe and sum- mer cottages and new clothes and college diplomas. But they will bring also a higher standard of living, habits of easy spending, a disparagement of thrift and distorted perspectives of the values in life. ^ The one set of effects is as certain as the other. The impartial historian of the future and impartial historians, you will recall, are always in the future will be very apt to find himself in doubt as to whether the standard of national con- science does not rise and fall inversely with the rate of bank discount. But even the impartial historian, we are inclined to think, will have to admit that the prosperous years beginning with 1909 are in many ways an exception to the general rule. We do not expect, of course, that they will be marked by millennial re- 156 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW gard for poetic ideals of righteousness, but, unless all signs fail, they will not be marked by that exploiting of natural resources and public morals which has marked so many other periods of rapidly increasing wealth. Public conscience in America is vastly more in evidence to-day than it was in the dark years of 1893-97. Law has ceased to be a rhetorical flourish to be attached to perorations uttered by men who meta- phorically wink at their own praise of honor. The nation itself has begun to take honesty seriously. We have our Christian Science, our Emmanuel Movements, and our New Thought to help us cure our bodily ills and to make us feel that the way to stay healthy is to realize that we are healthy. Why not practice the same sort of cure in our body politic? In fact, we already are. We are practicing cure by suggestion. We have thrown off fear of bankruptcy. We can throw off fear of national corrup- tion by believing in national honesty. IV THE EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 157 MUST DEMOCRACY ABDICATE? HHHERE is to-day an incipient but wide- spread reaction toward some form of dictatorship. A city has difficulty with its administration; it proceeds to increase the power of its executive. The great Amer- ican public is too busy to attend the caucus or to discuss in detail political measures; it submits to be governed by a machine under the control of a single man. A legislative body by the force of circum- stances feels compelled to delegate its power to committees; its speaker legislates with a gavel. The judiciary is not content to pass upon laws, but legislates and ad- ministers by injunction. In this tendency democracy confronts no merely rhetorical danger. A government must be representative if it is to be demo- cratic; but an executive officer may be no more representative than an hereditary monarch. The Legislature is the corner 159 160 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW stone of democracy. What will be left when it passes into desuetude? If Legis- latures surrender to a speaker and his committees; if cities put all power into the hands of a mayor; if people, Legisla- tures, and executive are to be at the mercy of judges who issue injunctions, just where does any genuine democracy appear? Democracy will be more than a name as long as men believe in representative bodies. This faith cannot survive a con- viction that such bodies are hopelessly corrupt. Democracy is doomed in America as it was doomed in Rome unless "boo- dling" is made impossible. We would rather delegate power to an incorruptible execu- tive than be governed by corruptible representatives. And, therefore, to avoid our own re- sponsibility, we strengthen the hands of our mayors and governors and subject a jcity to a State Legislature. You cannot build a marble palace out of unbaked bricks. There can be no democ- racy without democrats. Equality must be based on something other than common misery or common misfortune. Coopera- tion merely to obtain rights is a travesty of fraternity. No democracy can hope to survive in which the people distrust their institutions or are themselves ignorant and without moral ideals. An idealless democracy is a breeding place for political corruption. It has been the singular mission of Chris- tianity that, possessed though it is of no political program, whenever it has been brought straight to the hearts of a people it has made toward political equality. A genuine Christian is a democrat, a real Christian community is a fraternity. With all its faults such a democracy believes in discussion, and it elects Legislatures to legislate. It believes that the executive should do the will of a legislative body, not his own will. It believes that the judiciary should pronounce upon laws already made, not assist in making them. And it be- lieves all this will result in good because it believes in the sanity of righteousness. It 162 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW has no confidence in bad men. It has full confidence in the judgment of a com- munity of good men. ,# # # Americans are not so engrossed in money-getting as to be indifferent to poli- tics. Possibly they may have been once; but even if that be true, they are so no longer. Nor are they really distrustful of democracy. What they fear is not legisla- tion, but unending and resultless talk. They believe that honest men in honest discussion, whether in house or committee, can reach reasonable and practicable de- cisions. They want those decisions reached promptly and administered impartially. The American public is long-suffering, but it is losing patience with legislative incom- petence. Unless all signs fail, the time is not distant when that man will commit political suicide who attempts to use his position in a Legislature to block public business for the purpose of blackmailing corporations. There are more eyes watch- ing legislators to-day than ever in our history. The wheels of a righteous pub- EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 163 lie opinion grind slowly, but they grind none the less. We do not believe that corruption is ineradicable. If honest men irrespective of party lines come to the support of legisla- tive honor, both in city and in State, real democracy is assured. It is not a question of political machines, but of the men who shall constitute the machine. Still less is it a matter of ending national political par- ties. It is not even a question of educa- tion. It is a matter of curing the evils of democracy by more democracy. As far as America is concerned, this means new faith in our representative bodies, and this in turn means more honest men in politics and more honest men out of politics. { A* THE REVOLT OF THE PLAIN CITIZEN THE plain citizen is getting suspicious of the game of politics as it has been played. Until within a few years he has not taken government very seriously. He has preferred "campaigns." With that bland optimism which makes a church more interested in new converts than in mature saints, and which makes it easier to sell stock in a company before it has assets than after it has begun operations, the plain citizen has annually, biennially, and quadrennially spent money and meas- ureless energy in electioneering. Once his candidates were elected or defeated he has lost interest. The good deed had been done. The new officials were Amer- ican citizens and could be trusted to govern honestly, sagely, and inerrantly. In the meantime he had to make money. Of late years the plain American's optim- 164 EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 165 ism has been jarred. He has discovered that politics is something more than ora- tory, torch-light processions, and shouting, and he has his suspicions of officials who regard their offices as private assets. He has come to see that government has more duties than to arrest burglars and maintain a navy to frighten foreigners into paying their honest debts. He has come to see that respectability, culture, and even ecclesiastical enthusiasm, do not guarantee a man immunity from being a grafter or the source of graft. And more than this, he has come to feel that he wants his government to govern and not be governed. In a word, he has rebelled. He is not altogether clear as to what he wants, but just now he has very clear opinions as to some things he does not want. And among these is the sight of a N few dozen men arrogating to themselves under some corporate title powers which rival those of the nation. ,* ,* t* You cannot silence this plain citizen 166 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW to-day by calling him a Socialist. You might have done so ten years ago. He is not a Socialist, and he is not hostile to trusts as a means of reducing costs of pro- duction. But he does not want to be gov- erned by them. What he intends to pre- -, vent is the rule-or-ruin policy of the group of men who are slowly absorbing the con- trolling interests in corporations of national importance. It is to be hoped that the gentlemen in question sense the situation. The plain citizen does not know just how railroads and other corporations of national influence are to be regulated. He does not care. He has elected the President to find out. If Congress opposes the President another election will come. Here is a new conception of government, determined on finding a protection against the concentration of economic power in non-political bodies. The people at large, and especially the people of the middle West, believe that corporations, as well as individuals, must conform to law. At the EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 167 present moment, the plain citizen is ready to sacrifice any man or any group of men who opposes his new conviction. This new spirit marks a new epoch. Any administration will be strong in the same proportion as it disregards the hostil- ity of those politicians who are the lingering survivals of a different spirit and a different epoch. The plain citizen, aroused, may be trusted to rid the government of inflamed anachronisms, institutional or human. RATIONAL JINGOISM you ever go to an old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration in New England? If not, you are to be pitied. Those of us who have been more fortunate will never forget it. Early in the morning you were waked by church bells and the gun, that, do your best to prevent, somebody always fired be- fore you could fire yours. Then there was the procession of Hor- ribles, a group of fellow townsmen des- perately disguised and desperately set on being comical. Then the procession formed, and the band and militia company and towns- people escorted the Distinguished Orator to the grove. There a little girl dressed in red, white, and blue read the Declaration of Independence, the minister prayed, and the Distinguished Orator defied Great Brit- ain and the whole world. Then you sang I "America " all of it. And after that you went home rejoicing 168 EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 169 that you lived in Columbia, the home of the free and the brave. Do men still celebrate the Fourth? Of course we and our children have our firecrackers by day and our economical but unquestionably respectable fireworks by night pin-wheels and rockets and coals of fire. But the celebration of the day in any real sense seems to have disappeared. The old-time "Fourth" has followed Fast Day to that bourne from which New England holidays barring Thanksgiving have never returned. And nothing has really taken its place. Least of all, this new day of mingled vul- garity and lockjaw. Noise is no more patriotism than burnt fingers are national self-sacrifice. The ris- ing generation has all but no knowledge of the real meaning of the day. Ask your boy. He will tell you that it is the day on which the "Cubs" play a double-header. # /* fi It seems a pity to lose such an oppor- 170 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW tunity to educate ourselves in patriotism. We ought to redeolicate the day to the serious attempt to bring home the mean- ing of America to our boys and girls, and especially to the thousands of foreigners who are to be our fellow citizens, and, later, the government. There are a good many thousand people who ought to be taught a rational jingoism. ,# # & For what does this republic really stand? Is our political discussion to degenerate into forming programs for prosperity? Did our fathers die that we might cut our coupons? Why not have one day in the year when we study what our country really means and find ourselves growing proud that we are Americans? Middle-aged people are in danger of growing soggy and slouchy. The middle- aged nation is likely to follow their ex- ample. Really, to know what the Amer- ican spirit is, a man needs to go to our great Southwest, where men are building towns and cities and States and find that EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 171 joy in creating which America once felt as a whole. Our minds are so full of the distress and the inequality and poverty of our country that we sometimes forget its vigor and hopefulness and fundamental honesty. Let us have a day when we get together and tell each other we believe in ourselves and in our institutions and in our future a day in which we forget our grafting politicians, the tariff, the trusts, and the yellow peril. And on this day, at least, let us put all our critics in the front seat and see to it they don't escape until the speeches are finished. PLAYING WITH SOCIAL DISCONTENT upon a time there was a French queen who heard that her subjects were starving because they were unable to get bread. "Why don't the poor, dear people eat cake?" asked she. You have heard the story before and thought it very silly, but it pictures the attitude of a good many people we know. Of course nobody is starving nowadays at least not enough people to talk about yet we see every- where discontent among the masses. Some of us who have enough to eat and drink and be reasonably merry feel ag- grieved at this. Why should the people be discontented with their wages? Our salaries are good. Why should they be discontented with the church? We go occasionally and enjoy the singing. Why should they be discontented with 172 EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 173 philanthropy? None of us gives any more than he can help. Why should they be discontented with politics? Have we not prosperity? The masses are ungrateful when they insist that they are not satisfied with what we are getting out of life. Does not this remind you of the French queen? The arrogant lawlessness of respectable people gives bitterness to the situation. They want legislation against strikers, but hold themselves superior to law when it comes to high finance and building clubs in prohibition districts. You momentarily share the feeling of the masses toward such folk when an automobile races along your street with death before and stench behind. Your estimate of the occupants of that automo- bile is first cousin to the sentiment that chased the nobility out of France. Discontent is not necessarily an evi- 174 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW dence of social disease. It may be the outcome of vitality and hope. No real lover of his kind wants everybody to be comfortable. If everybody were satisfied, 1 the world would vegetate. But there is discontent and discontent. The tired man thinks he needs a "bracer," and some discontented people are apt to think they need revolution. At least they want an orgy of demagogism. One great problem which faces us to-day, accordingly, is the education of discontent. You cannot muzzle it; you cannot end it. You can give it better ideals. The political aspirations of the masses deserve something better than cartoons, denunciation, and complacent indifference. They are making history and will make more. f* 1* t* Those whom a rebellious public opinion will drive out of office, privileges and re- taining fees first drive mad. The present decade will show whether the lords of our modern feudalism f airly | grasp the situation. EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 175 It will be well for them if they do grasp it. Discontent, when once it is a part of public opinion, is likely to resort to ex- treme measures. THE CHARLATAN IN REFORM T TOW easy it is to join in ventilating * * the faults of our neighbors! There are a good many men who apparently think virtue consists in rebuking other people's jdns. They are keen to testify before anl investigating committee, even though they wax indignant when the committee's work extends to corporations in which they hold stock. As matters often look it seems as if reform were in danger of being overworked. Everybody seems to be eager to improve W somebody's else morals. Reformers range from those who are devoting their entire life to accomplishing a specific end to would-be reformers looking for a job. In point of honesty they range from martyrs Ito charlatans. Just now the charlatan reformer is too considerably in evidence. We are in un era of confession. Boodlers confess to es- cape punishment. Good men confess to 176 EXTENSION OP DEMOCRACY 177 ease their conscience. Rascals confess be- cause they haven't any conscience. Gen- tlemen with active imagination confess in the interest of their income. It is the charlatan's Golden Age. A man's peni- tence has come to be his largest financial asset. Reputations are butchered to make newspaper and magazine circulation. It is a sorry business, this of the charla- tan in reform; fit to be classed with that of the charlatan in medicine. To uncover the sins of one's associates and oneself as a commercial venture and to advertise spe- cifics or cure-alls is a genuine menace to public morals. It is one thing for the department of health to open up a city's sewers. It would be quite another thing if sewer opening became a commercially lu- crative fad. A man is not a prophet be- cause he lays bare social evils. He may be a common yellow journalist. It is one thing to bare evils in the name of God; it is quite another thing to be a scandal- monger at so much a thousand words. There are many evils in our national life 178 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW needing exposure. Some of them are being exposed with the honesty and impartiality of the Hebrew prophet. There is no health- ier sign in American life than the determi- nation to know the worst in politics and in business. Whoever is honestly helping the American people to know such wrongs, we honor and will assist. But the true re- former rights wrongs. He does not exploit them commercially. We are certainly overdoing the matter of exposing abuses. There is much evil in to-day's life, but there is more good. Most of the evils are the penalty which we pay for the good. To forget this is to expose ourselves to demagogism or hysterics. You cannot have a garden without weeds. You cannot keep house without a garbage box. But he would be a common slanderer who said that his neighbor's garden was all weeds and a common cad who talked only of his neighbor's garbage box. ,# /* ,* What we fear most in this orgy of confes- EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 179 sion is that we shall be so disgusted with the babel of the charlatans that we shall cease to listen to the voice of the prophet. In the present situation that man and that publication can do most for the future which, in addition to appeals to the public conscience, will also cooperate with the great constructive forces born of national life. Denunciation is not constructive. * Honesty may not be as picturesque as rascality, but it is more common and better worth studying. Class prejudice is not conscientiousness, and scandalmonger- ing is not reform. The future lies not with the grafter, but with the slowly rising tide of public conscience. You cannot sweep that back. REBUILDING THE NATION ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE fathers built the United States upon the doctrine of natural rights. We are rebuilding the nation on interstate commerce. Once upon a time we had need of a con- stitution with a great many sections, sen- tences, and clauses. We were troubled about many things; now one is sufficient. Our legislators have shown us that nearly any power the federal government needs can be gained from the single clause which gives Congress the power to regulate inter- state commerce. If we want to regulate rates and rebates and passes on railways, interstate com- merce gives us the right. If we want to inspect the packing houses and put labels on canned goods, interstate commerce tells us that we may. If we want to control the express com- panies and the sleeping cars and the pipe lines, put air brakes on freight trains, and 180 EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 181 say how many hours cattle can be in transport, interstate commerce gives us the power. If we want to keep manufacturers from poisoning us with formaldehyde and bo- racic acid, interstate commerce provides the antidote. Yet there is nothing revolutionary in all this. It is rather an illustration of the fact that politics is at bottom a matter of dol- lars and cents. Sometimes this fact gets obscured by oratory, treaty making, and the slaying of thousands of people accord- ing to military rules. But sooner or later the real nature of government appears. Fortunate indeed is that nation which finds in its economic power the key to reform. GIVE US BACK OUR RIVERS! /CIVILIZATION, like Moses, got its first ^^ start on water. Until recent times there never was a nation that did not paddle or sail its way into history. Look in your general histories to find the proof. The United States was born of water. It was easier to get to New Orleans from Montreal by way of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi than over land. In those early days rivers were thorough- fares. They continued to be thoroughfares until the middle of the last century. Now they are used mostly for sewerage and drinking water. I There are a few cities in the United States that have been bright enough to maintain river commerce. Among them is New York. Thanks to the Hudson and the Erie Canal, New York is a river port as well as a railway terminal. It has a monopoly 182 EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 183 worth keeping. Is it any wonder that New York financiers and statesmen are not keen to push projects for a waterway through the Great Lakes to the Gulf? Nature meant the commerce of the cen- ter of the continent to drain southward. But how can nature hope to compete with a power that bridges over or tunnels under her rivers? Yet sooner or later nature knows that human nature will come to its senses. It takes no great genius to discover that the Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi, Mis- souri, and the Arkansas might very easily be joined by canals with the Great Lakes. Nature gave the rivers; Chicago has dug the canal. Make them all navigable! They are raw material ready for a transportation system which will make the Nile look like a strip of litmus paper. fi # S* The rivers themselves seem anxious to work. Not having farm products to trans- port they are transporting farms. 184 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW There is a good deal of agricultural land of Missouri and Illinois, not to mention half a dozen other States, to be seen in the Gulf of Mexico. Dig up a few sand bars, build a few levees, and blow up a few dams, and the rivers will be sobered. Then the region between the Alleghenies and the Rockies, the Gulf of Mexico and the north pole can get its goods to market without worrying about the shortage of freight cars. If it is for the interest of the country that we should have harbors on the Pacific and the Atlantic, it is just as necessary that there should be wharves and light- houses and fourteen-foot channels on the big rivers. The Middle West does not begrudge the money spent to make harbors at Wiscasset and Seattle, but it wants to see ocean steamers at its docks. Memphis and Saint Louis and Keokuk and Chicago and Du- luth, and every other river and lake town, want to be seaports. When that time comes and unless all EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 185 signs fail it will not be long in coming the railroads will not be poorer, but Amer- ica will be a good deal richer. Wheat will not rot in piles waiting for overtaxed factories to build freight cars and engines; and the dangers from brittle steel rails can be forgotten in the excitement of steamboat / races a thousand miles long. And, since every prophecy of good must nowadays be reducible to dollars, water in the rivers will pay better dividends than water in stock. WHERE IS THE WEST? IT would be easier to tell where is the East. That is always toward the At- lantic. Boston is East to Cleveland; Chicago is East to Colorado, and every- thing this side of the Cascade Mountains is East to the Pacific Coast. It almost amounts to this: the West is where a man is; the East is where he or his father came from. So it comes to pass that the West has no fixed geographical limits like the South and New England. It is something more than a geographical term. Like Boston, it is a state of mind. There are mountains and rivers and oceans within the limits of which this state of mind is preeminently to be found, but it is to be recognized in other regions as well. You can tell a Westerner as you can tell a Southerner, sometimes by his speech, always by his attitude toward life. The West means Americans who are 186 EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 187 controlled by certain ideas and motives. But American does not mean Anglo-Saxon beyond the Alleghenies. It is never, strictly speaking, a matter of descent; but this is doubly true of that great region where blood and ideas and habits of every people under the sun are fusing into a new race. Inevitably the West is cosmopolitan. With such an origin it could not be other- wise. Provincialism in any arrogant sense of the term you will not find outside of the \thirteen original States of the Union. On the prairies too many men have succeeded where according to all precedent they ought to have failed for anyone to claim a proprietary right in omniscience. Lacking that, however convinced it may be of its own superiority, the West is tolerant, and the Westerner is at home everywhere. The West is a synonym of vitality. No region knows larger zest in life. Whether it be in farming or in literature it finds the world full of novelty. That is one reason why it produces so many novelists. All stories may have been told long ago, but the West has not yet found it out. There are regions in the United States which, like 188 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW the moon, are dead, but reflect light they do not originate. There are others whose energy is parasitic; they grow on the suc- cesses of other men. But the West is crea- tion personified. It has killed the buffalo to make way for cows and sheep. It has replaced Indian wigwams with cities. It has made the prairies feed the world. Is it any wonder that it is dead in earnest? An empire of wheat and corn does not suggest late dinners and late rising. And is it any wonder that its hope is as intense as its vitality? The past tense would disappear in the West if it were not for its annual New England dinners! And the West is also a synonym of democracy not the democracy of the doctrinaire who worships the Declaration of Independence and keeps "servants," but that democracy of practice which sees a partner in every man and woman who is accomplishing something. Pioneers may not always be fraternal, but they still call each other by their Christian names. They ;m- still too close to nature and still too EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 180 possessed of the enthusiasm which belongs to men who have conquered in a hand-to- hand battle with nature to bother with social distinctions. It is expected that every man will work. The unemployed, whether rich or poor, migrate. The cowboy is disappearing and the miners are forming trusts. The old West with its romance is all but past. There will never be another Bret Harte any more than there will be another Daniel Boone. The West, with its boundless interest in life, with its passion for creation, and with its democracy, is still new. The visitor from the East finds it crude, often frankly materialistic in its judgments. But the crudity is disappearing in actual achieve- ment, and the materialism, if more frank, is less treacherous than that of high finance.4 The West is human and so imperfect, but it is sincere. It is rough, but it is being educated. As a locality it may be shift- ing, but as a state of mind it is America in the making. For it is full to the brim with democracy. SAFEGUARDING A NEW EPOCH TT is not every man who can read the * signs of the times. Some of us are blind and some of us have hallucinations. But one thing is plain even to the blindest. The past few years in the United States have closed one epoch and have begun a new. Even more than we have been aware, democracy itself has been on trial. The country has faced a fundamental issue: Are laws to be obeyed, or are they to be ! evaded? It is one of the penalties of reform that men always forget the pit out of which they have been dug. The condition of affairs a few years ago was one that played into the hands of the Socialists, if not of the revolutionists. We were turning out laws by the hundreds, and the lawyers were making a living telling us how not to obey them. We believed that great aggre- 190 EXTENSION OP DEMOCRACY 191 gations of wealth were all but beyond the reach of law, and knew that the miasma of graft was ruining our business health. The plain American citizen was losing faith in the ability of the republic to grow rich and remain democratic. All this we are liable to forget in the excess of our new enthusiasm for civic righteousness. True, we are by no means saints as yet, but we have begun to learn the meaning of the word "law." Our courts are not all they should be, but they are more closely watched than they were ten years ago. Our Congressmen are too friendly with lobbyists, but they are more susceptible than formerly to public opinion. Business men maybe are no more honest than they were once, but they are less in- clined to play upon the brink of dishonesty. This new epoch is not the work of any one man, although Ex-President Roosevelt ^ deserves gratitude for his share in bringing it to pass. It is a new phase in the develop- 192 THE MAKING OF TO-MORROW ment of democracy to be seen in national, municipal, and even State governments. It is no wonder that men who have played fast and loose with the law should think themselves aggrieved. A man with privileges that he has come to believe are vested rights, dislikes to be told that he must bow to a higher law than that which his attorney formulates. Nobody likes to be less important than : he has been. But it would be worse than idle to attempt to bring back the past. It would be sheer foolishness. Unless we utterly mistake the temper of the country at large, we have reached a very simple alternative: Is the American people strong enough to regulate the ad- ministration of great corporations, or are we to have fastened upon us an oligarchy from which there is no release except through revolution? And there is no question that the coun- try chooses the first alternative. ,* ,* # The era of muckraking has closed. It EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY 193 was strenuous, indeed over-strenuous, but it did its work. The era of respect for law, or, at least, of fear of law, has dawned. That which in other days has been accomplished only by bloodshed is being accomplished by the processes of democracy. The good work will continue. We are not going back. We are going forward. Just how far we shall go, and how rap- idly, and by what means, will depend largely upon whether men who are at present in control of great industrial and financial institutions are able to read the signs of the times and govern themselves accordingly. If they wish to democratize privilege without contest, they will reap the peaceable fruits of justice. But, willingly or unwill- ingly, democratize them they must! 8antaBa < I I THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000865247 1