UBRARV ] SAN 0»£GC To S:i)e Colljcr lectttrcs PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY MEDICAL RESEARCH AND HUMAN PROGRESS, By W. W. Keen. 1917. THE RESPONSIBLE STATE. A Reexamination of Fundamental Political Doctrines in the Light of World War and the Menace of Anarchism. By Franklin Henry Giddings. 1918. DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE; PEACE. By William Roscoe Thayer. 1919. THE COLVER LECTURES IN BROWN UNIVERSITY 1919 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE By William Roscoe Thayer ®roi»tt UniJ?er0it^. ^§t Cofuet ^utuvta, 1919 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE BY WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ^be Stitecjjibe pxt^^ CambciDge 1919 COPYRIGHT, I919, BY WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED In Memory of THEODORE ROOSEVELT Who gave his Country the Supreme Gift Possible to a Patriot in a Democracy COURAGE THE Colver lectureship is provided by a fund of $10,000 presented to the University by Mr. and Mrs. Jesse L. Rosenberger of Chicago in memory of Mrs. Rosenberger's father, Charles K. Colver of the class of 1842. The following sentences from the letter accompanying the gift explain the purposes of the foun- dation: — *'It is desired that, so far as possible, for these lectures only subjects of particular importance and lecturers emi- nent in scholarship or of other marked qualifications shall be chosen. It is desired that the lectures shall be dis- tinctive and valuable contributions to human knowledge, known for their quality rather than their number. In- come, or portions of income, not used for lectures may be used for the publication of any of the lectures deemed desirable to be so published." Charles Kendrick Colver (1821-1896) was a graduate of Brown University of the class of 1842. The necrologist of the University wrote of him: "He was distinguished for his broad and accurate scholarship, his unswerving personal integrity, championship of truth, and obedience to God in his daily life. He was severely simple and un- worldly in character." The lectures already published in this series are: — 1916 The American Conception of Liberty and Government, by Frank Johnson Goodnow, LL.D., President of Johns Hopkins University. In boards, 63 pages; price, 50 cents. 1917 Medical Research and Human Welfare, by W. W. Keen, M.D., LL.D. (Brown), Emeritus Professor of Sur- gery, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. In cloth, 160 pages; price, $1.25. 1918 The Responsible State: A Reexamination of Fundamental Political Doctrines in the Light of World War and the Menace of Anarchism, by Franklin Henry Giddings, LL.D., Professor of Sociology and the History of Civilization in Columbia University; sometime Pro- fessor of Political Science in Bryn Mawr College. In cloth, 108 pages; price, $1.00. CONTENTS I. Democracy 1 II. Discipline 42 III. Peace 79 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE DEMOCRACY Democracy is on trial, as it has been ever since the first Democrats, entranced by a vision of perfection, attempted to embody their vision in a working system of govern- ment. To the cynic, and the every-day practical man, no other system is so ridic- ulous. It wears its defects on its front. Its failures strew the centuries. It seems to fly in the face of experience. And yet, to the eye of hope, it shines with an irresistible radiance, before which all other systems look dim and sordid, hideous and mean. The divine fact at the heart of Democ- racy is Freedom. The desire for Freedom, born into every human being at his birth, accompanies him until his death. When we least suspect, it underlies our motives. 1 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE When we are most free, that state seems so natural that we take hardly more notice of it than of health when we are well : but in proportion as we lack freedom, we yearn for it. Deprivation measures its value. Every one, from human clod to king, knows this desire in some of its many forms. The exile, eating out his heart among strangers, longs to be free to return to his own people. The sinner prays to be uncoiled from his sin. The sick bless the medicine or the surgeon's knife that frees them from their pain. The destitute and downtrodden, outcasts under every dis- pensation, — our brothers and sisters, though we deny them kinship, — whose existence seems unrelieved misery, have, nevertheless, a groping instinct for free- dom. Grief, sorrow, remorse, agony weigh the more heavily because their victims despair of seeing the burden lifted: yet they too await one liberator — Death. Not only, however, does its negation testify to the universal human craving for freedom, its possession gives stronger DEMOCRACY proof. The master artist seems free to deal as he pleases with color or form, with words or sound. We call it wizardry, in- spiration, genius. But the artist himself, in the very climax of his most joyous achievement, feels not quite free — the last touch of perfection eludes him — he perceives a better beyond his best. So, too, the man of affairs, managing men and in- dustries as confidently as a general de- ploys his forces, goes on broadening his range, but always realizing that, although he has liberty to accomplish so much, he would need more and more strength to do all he dreams. The joy of work comes when the worker has free play for his tal- ent, skill, or faculties. Neither obstacle nor baffling counts against him, so long as he feels the stimulus of healthy activity. Only where there is no horizon does the joy fade out of work: for the horizon sug- gests liberty. Even the passion for money-making, until it degenerates into a perverted ava- rice amassing riches for their own sake, is 3 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE rooted in a wholesome desire for Power which the owner can transmute into inde- pendence, that is, Freedom. But Liberty has a higher purpose than ministering to our desires and our pleas- ures; higher even than releasing us from pain; higher than bringing solace to our griefs and forgiveness to our sins. Liberty is the condition which makes us moral agents. The freedom of the will is the no- blest of Man's assumptions. Without it, he would remain an animal, devoid of con- science, blind to the sense of right and wrong in dealing with his fellows, unaware of any moral relation between himself and the Infinite. Philosophers may never be able to solve the mystery by which Man, every atom of whose material body is subject to laws which he cannot control, enjoys, neverthe- less, in the practical conduct of his life, freedom of choice between good and evil: but so it is. In proportion as we are moral we are free. Indeed, we may look at hu- man life, from the lowest savage to the 4 DEMOCRACY highest civilized type, as the manifesta- tion on an ascending scale of the penetra- tion of matter by spirit. In all religions, absolute Freedom — omnipotence — is at- tributed to the Deity: so Freedom is the condition in which alone Man can attain his highest development here. I press these old truths upon you, be- cause we live at a time when the enemies of Freedom would have us believe that Democracy is a worn-out experiment, a folly which the forward nations have in- dulged under the spell of an iridescent but fatuous illusion. Democracy cannot be so dismissed. It is an integral part of that universal impulse towards Freedom to which history bears witness. You can- not demand Freedom of worship and of speech, Freedom to love and to work and to trade, and then deny political Freedom. The same sap runs through .every branch and twig of the Tree of Life; wherever you exclude it, the branch will wither and die. 5 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Unless we are prepared to hold, there- fore, that mankind has touched its zenith and must henceforth descend into the bar- barism from which it emerged, we shall put our faith in Democracy, as the method by which, in the political field, the race may mount to higher levels. If we give up Democracy, we renounce that Spirit of Freedom planted in us with roots which go down to the very deeps of our human nature, and is almost as necessary as is the instinct of self-preservation. Hitherto, no tyrant, were he King or Kaiser or Anarch, has succeeded in destroying this spirit. The exile has preached it in his banishment; the prisoner has uttered it for the invisible winds to spread from his dungeon ; its martyrs have been burned at the stake, and lo! from their ashes that spirit has passed unhindered into other lands and has entered other times with a liberator's invincible progress. What we distrust is not Democracy, but its very imperfect counterpart. One does not need to be a Bismarck in order to 6 DEMOCRACY satirize its failures, absurdities, inconsist- encies, and ills: any fool can do that. The wise man, who is also the just man, in- quires in each case the conditions under which the Democratic experiment is made, and he remembers that the medium through which every system works, for better, for worse, is our finite human na- ture. In being worked out a theoretically perfect system cannot escape the defects of humanity. Opposed to Democracy stands Despot- ism, which has many varieties, from the privilege, disguised or open, of a certain class, to the absolute authority of a tyrant. It rests, primarily, on brute force and assumes — an assumption which Richard Rumbold denied on the scaffold — that nine tenths of the race are born with bits in their mouths and saddles on their backs, and that the other tenth come into the world booted and spurred to ride them. In one way or another the Despot draws the majority of brute force to his side, and thenceforth his control is comparatively 7 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE easy until a stronger than he arises and wrests his power from him. By self-inter- est, he attaches one class to his fortunes; by oppression, another; by terror, a third. He finds it easy to dupe the credulous by claiming to reign by divine right — a claim which, whatever its sedative value in earlier ages, cannot be treated seriously in our modern time, when we know the dia- bolical methods by which dynasties have been established. I do not propose, of course, to sketch the varieties of Despotism. They range from the atrocious regime of ancient ty- rants like Dionysius and Nero to the en- lightened rule of Marcus Aurelius and Leopold II. Their common characteristic is that the direction of the affairs of state springs from and is governed by a single will, even when that will belongs to a madman. This singleness of direction has always given to Despotism a great ad- vantage in dealing with foreign enemies. The tyrant commands; his subjects obey: there is neither debate nor divided coun- 8 DEMOCRACY sel. His policy may be wrong, but those who carry it out for him need not hesitate, for they have his sanction. Despotism, you perceive, is, relatively speaking, a low form of government. The essentials were well understood and ably carried out by Rameses II in Egypt thirty- three hundred years ago. We allow our- selves to be deceived by the obvious superiority of modern invention in ena- bling Despotism to use its tools with clock- like precision in war and peace: for no German achievement in the recent Atro- cious War equals that of Napoleon in marching an army of half a million men into Russia in 1812. Napoleon's army went on foot, and horses and oxen dragged its stores and cannon along with it. The German hosts and their equipment rushed by railway or in motor cars, cam- ions, and lorries. Nor has any German edifice, even with the aid of the latest machinery, matched in magnitude or in difficulty of construction the monuments which the Pharaohs raised by human labor. 9 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Despotism, we infer, being a lower sys- tem, has already been developed to its maximum according to the material re- sources on which depend, in a definite measure, the social conditions of different epochs. But Democracy has rarely had a fair field. The Greek Republics stood on too small a base, and besides they ac- cepted Slavery as a necessary element. The Roman State, even under its Repub- lican dispensation, differed too widely from our ideal of Democracy to be re- garded as a model for us: its supreme re- sults were not Democratic but Imperial. Once, and once only, has Oligarchy come nearer to attaining that perfection which each form of civilized government aims at. The Venetians contrived a system which fitted their peculiar needs as a glove fits the hand — a system delicate and elastic, but as firm as a web of steel — thanks to which Venice not only floated triumphant for twelve centuries on the Lagoons, but held the gorgeous East in fee, and dur- ing half a millennium controlled the com- 10 DEMOCRACY -merce of Western Europe with the Levant. Were duration, or perfect adjustment of means to ends, were prosperity, or the welfare and happiness of the governed, the test of government, then surely Oli- garchy, as it flourished in Venice, would stand incomparably first. But as there has been only one Venice, so her methods, could they possibly be revived, would suit no modern State. Nor would the methods of a Theocracy like that of Cal- vin at Geneva or that of the Puritans in Massachusetts. Such examples belong to highly individualized groups, under very unusual conditions, and they presuppose a community which is homogeneous in race and ideals, and sparse in population. The great modern Democracies — Brit- ain and the United States — are filled, on the contrary, with multitudes differing widely in origin and traditions. The High- lander has as little in common with the Cornishman as the Welshman has with the East Anglian: and the constituents of our American population have become as 11 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE polyglot as were those of Rome at the height of the Empire. The importance of this diversity cannot be exaggerated: in the United States it has seriously hindered the orderly working of Democracy, and it stands today the chief menace to the at- tainment of that sense of common inter- ests and ideals without which no form of government can reach its highest expres- sion. Before we condemn Democracy — as it is now too much the fashion to do — we should see whether the shortcomings charged against it here during the past generation really sprang from Democracy, or from conditions which, if they had obtained in other countries governed by other rules, would have caused similar re- sults. Medicines, in the hands of a trained physician, cure. If children get hold of them and poison themselves or others, you must not accuse the medicine. The objections to Democracy were raised almost since the earliest attempt to set up a Democratic experiment. From 12 DEMOCRACY Plato down, how many great, sober, far- seeing, and enlarged minds have pointed out its obvious defects! "When a Democ- racy," says Plato, "which is thirsting for freedom has evil cup-bearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply, of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give plentiful draught, she calls them to ac- count and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs. . . . Loyal citi- zens are insulted by her as lovers of slav- ery and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects : these are men after her own heart, whom she praises and hon- ors both in public and private. Now in such a State, can liberty have any limit? Certainly not. By degrees the anarchy finds its way into private houses and ends by getting among the animals and infect- ing them. . . . The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son to be on a level with his father, he having no shame or fear 13 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE of either of his parents; and this is his free- dom, and the metic is equal with the citi- zen and the citizen with the metic and the stranger on a level with either. . . . There are other slight evils : . . . the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; and, in general, young and old are alike, and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young, and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they do not like to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young. . . . "For the excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. . . . Tyranny natu- rally arises out of democracy, and a most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty." ^ This is not all that the starry-eyed Plato has to say about Democracy, but it fairly * Plato : Republic, Book viii, 562-64. (Jowett's trans., 2d ed., Oxford.) . 14 DEMOCRACY epitomizes his verdict on it. He believed in Aristocracy. So did the other great Greek, Aristotle, who also had the power of looking into the very essences of things and into the seeds of time. He regarded Democracy as a de- generation from a better form of govern- ment. He, too, saw how easily Democracy turns corrupt and becomes tyranny. The most favorable conditions for a Democ- racy, he said, would exist in a pastoral state; for shepherds and husbandmen are so busy with their herds and crops that they have little time to devote to politics. Without cities or large towns they have no places of resort to take their attention away from their chief concerns, which are agricultural. They assemble at rare inter- vals in their villages and decide what rules or laws to pass for the common good. Ad- ministration costs little or nothing, be- cause each husbandman gives his service gratis and the collective needs, for which money or its equivalent must be raised, are few. 15 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Such a social state, you will see, differs entirely from Democracy adapted to cities — especially to our modern large cities — or even to farming regions of wide extent and having in the aggregate a considerable population. You can walk, between break- fast and luncheon, from one end to the other of some of the smaller rural States of Hellas. Inevitably, therefore, the form of government which would suit them would not serve for our Prairie States or for the amplitude of Texas. When Aristotle refers to the most nearly perfect kind of Democ- racy, he means, like Plato, the kind that husbandmen or shepherds would devise and operate, and he implies that other democracies start on a lower plane and become most easily perverted. "An aris- tocracy seems most likely to confer the honors of the State on the virtuous, for virtue is the object of an aristocracy, riches of an oligarchy, and liberty of a democracy." ^ In many places he insists on equality as the vital element in Democ- ^ Aristotle: Politics, Book rv, chap. vm. 16 DEMOCRACY racy, and from this it follows that, "the rich should have no more share in the gov- ernment than the poor, nor be alone in power; but that all should be equal, ac- cording to number; for thus, they think, equality and liberty of the State best preserved." ^ Aristotle, the most practical of men, analyzes the four varieties of Democracy from the most "ancient" and perfect, that of the husbandmen, in a descending scale, and he draws up the rules by which each can be most wisely maintained. One feels, however, that he analyzes forms of a dis- ease rather than ideals of health. Being an Aristocrat, Aristocracy alone wins the ap- proval of his reason and kindles the enthu- siasm of his heart. And, indeed, social con- ditions in Hellas differed so fundamentally from our civilized conditions today that deductions on government, as it existed in the century of Plato and Aristotle, can- not be expected to apply to our age. The Hellenic prime out of which sprang the ^ Book VI, chap. n. 17 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE matchless marvels of Greek genius in art, poetry, and thought was based on slavery and serfdom. Therefore between their sys- tem and ours there yawns a gulf which cannot be bridged; nor can we appeal too directly to them for example. By using the Socratic method, Plato pours over the failures and follies of De- mocracy his inimitable spray of sarcasm. He never becomes heated, or over-zealous, or acrid, or too anxious as to the issue, but here, as always, he seems to have the cer- titude in his soul that the imperfect things shall pass away, no matter how long de- layed their extinction may be, and that neither ranting nor entreaty can add one iota to the majesty of truth. Aristotle writes even more impersonally, as a chem- ist might in describing chemical elements and reactions. But it is equally clear that he, too, holds Democracy, whether as dreamed of, or as practised, in scant es- teem. But we need search Antiquity no far- ther. Sufficient for us to know that the 18 DEMOCRACY greatest of the Ancients having examined Democracy in theory, and witnessed its working in various phases which history up to their time laid before them, regarded it with more than distrust and actually re- pudiated it as an ideal form of govern- ment. Nor need we linger over the Dark and Middle Ages. Only when we come to the establishment of the American Repub- lic do we find concrete criticism which still seems to be addressed straight at us. The desire for Liberty, which swept like a fructifying monsoon over the peoples of Europe, who were still held in a degener- ate but tenacious Feudalism, captivated millions of hearts. A new gospel aroused and possessed them. Liberty explained itself, justified itself. Those who were fired by it felt that it would be disloyalty to defend it by argument. What lover stoops to reason in behalf of love? To spread a knowledge of Liberty throughout the world; to touch with its inspiration the hearts and wills of men; to substitute it for the worn-out, cruel, or palsying sys- 19 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE terns, these were the glorious enterprises of the devotees of Liberty. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young, was very heaven!" And, indeed, a new gospel had come into the world, the most hopeful and re- juvenating since that of Christ, eighteen centuries before. It proclaimed that all men are created free and equal, and it as- serted as unanswerable truths, other facts equally startling to a world in bondage to a moribund past. Hints and adumbrations of this gospel can be found, of course, scat- tered here and there in earlier writings; but they were not brought together, they never reached the dynamic fusion which is necessary for a creed, or a theory, or a platform, to take the hearts of men by storm and to control their acts. The shining apostle of this new gospel was Rousseau, who had the art which Shakespeare attributes to wine, of steal- ing away men's brains. Rousseau thrilled men's hearts, he played upon their emo- tions as a south wind plays on the summer 20 DEMOCRACY wheat. He made half-truths more lumi- nous and seductive, more entrancing and magnetic, than truth has ever been among the masses. Just as in his youth he had the presumption to teach music without knowing the rudiments of musical nota- tion, so in his prime he made Europe drunk with visions of a Golden Age, which dated from an imaginary past when man, he asserted, lived in a state of Nature and was good and free, — yes, and happy. Had Rousseau known anything about the childhood of the human race, he would have known that there never were such a Golden Age nor such virtuous and satisfied men and women. The epoch he painted never existed; the "earliest men in a state of Nature" were gorillas and orang-ou- tangs and apes in which the human re- semblances began to peep out, as the por- tents of the frog break through the surface of the astonished tadpole. But the falsity of his assumptions counted for nothing. Although he de- scribed a past and glorified a human 21 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE nature which never existed, his hold over men was undiminished, for they wished to hear just those things and to beHeve in a fabulous world which matched their vague and restless imaginings and their overmas- tering desires. If things were what they were, they ought to be what Rousseau described them. Even today, reading his "Social Con- tract," and recognizing its inherent false- ness to facts present and facts past, I find myself glowing in admiration of his ap- peals to the emotions, although my head often refuses its assent. Suppose a man, endowed with the most musical of voices and with a manner which instinctively brushed aside doubt or debate, should pass through the wards of a hospital and should say to the sick and wounded in their cots: "Be of good cheer! You are all going to get well!" Would not his hearers incline to believe him.^^ Would they not be buoyed up with hope which corresponded to their needs? Rousseau did even more than that. He fired not merely the sick but DEMOCRACY all classes of society with his cheering mes- sage; particularly the lower and lowest classes. He told them that the evils which they groaned under and believed to be foreordained and incurable, were neither; that they had gradually become part of a social system in which the few enjoyed the riches, privileges, and power of the State, and the many, unwillingly, amassed these elements necessary to the supremacy and the pleasure of the few. Change Society. Restore the Golden Age in which all men were equal. Restore Liberty — and Utopia, or Paradise even, would return for all to dwell in. From this inspiring gospel Fraternity and Equality stood forth beside Liberty, as the ideals which should shine upon the Golden Age in prospect and should guide the down-trodden in their march towards it. Hence, swept forth the French Revolu- tion, the bloody conflict of class with class, the mad strife for Equality, the frantic protests for Fraternity, while something far different from Fraternity rankled in 23 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE the Revolutionists' hearts. The knife of the guillotine alone was Democratic, treat- ing the necks of all its victims alike. And has not Rousseau's message, which he in- tended should bring in a benign and peace- ful future, brought instead the black and frightful class feuds, the disorders, and hatreds, and gnawing en\"y which mark our own time and render it unhappy.^ At bottom, was not Rousseauism, through the antagonisms which it aroused, the real cause of the late Atrocious War.^ The Society which he attacked was pre- cisely made up of the few, the members of the privileged classes, and this War has been their final struggle to preserve their privileges and to abolish Liberty, Equal- ity, and Fraternity, which, being the ideals of Democracy, are consequently the implacable enemies of Despotism. As surely as noon and midnight cannot ex- ist in the same place at the same time, so surely are Democracy and Despotism mutually abhorrent. When Democracy was only a theory, a 24 DEMOCRACY more or less improbable project in the mind of a dreamer here and there, the few who took it seriously found it an easy- mark for then- raillery; but bv the middle of the nineteenth century, when it had already become a challenging fact through the persistence of the United States and the propaganda of theorists in Em-ope, its opponents, the spokesmen of the Priv- ileged Classes, hurled arguments, invec- tives, and sarcasm upon it. Cavour, who was not one of these, looked at it very soberly, and said as early as 1835: "We must not deceive ourselves; Society is marching with gi'eat strides towards De- mocracy; it is, perhaps, impossible to fore- see the forms which it will take on; but, as to its substance, it is not doubtful, at least to my eyes." Every aristocratic public man amused himself by pointing out the inherent short- comings, not to say absurdities, of Democ- racy. They denied that men are created equal, and they could prove in any gather- ing of half a dozen or more, that inequal- 25 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE ity, in intelligence, in feeling, in virtue, was the rule. They asked, where is the forest in which all trees grow to the same height? And at the suggestion of universal suffrage, which is the simplest confirma- tion of equality, they ridiculed the as- sumption that the vote of an intelligent and prosperous landowner should count no more than that of his illiterate farm- hand, in electing the candidates to admin- ister the government. When you are sick you don't call in a coal-heaver to give you medical advice, you seek an expert; why, then, in politics should you prefer coal- heavers to experts .f^ Bismarck, the lifelong champion and strengthener of Despotism, never ceased to mock at Liberty, and to make it appear silly and futile. He berated parliamentary government as a thing to be scorned and despised, unworthy of the support of grown-up men. He likened a parliamentary State to a household gov- erned by its nursery. And yet, in spite of its follies and failures, in spite of ridicule, abuse, and vehement attack, in spite 26 DEMOCRACY even of the attempt in despotic countries to punish those who professed it in secret, Democracy went forward with the irre- sistibiHty of a glacier, and often with the flaming impetuosity of a volcanic eruption. Aristotle, you remember, thought that Democracy worked best among a com- munity of husbandmen. He regarded the poverty of the men who adopted it as being necessary to its functioning. Obvi- ously, if you have a tract of ten square miles inhabited by ten shepherds or gra- ziers, each of whom pastures his flocks on his own square mile, there will be very little need of a common government. At most, those ten may have to keep up a road connecting their pastures; there will be no salaries, and therefore no struggle for ofiice. Contrast this ideal Democratic body, as Aristotle thought of it twenty- three hundred years ago, with one of our colossal modern Democratic communities, like New York City^ ox London, or Paris, in which many needs of first importance 27 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE . — water, policing, drainage, streets, pub- lic health — have to be provided and di- rected by persons whom the city chooses for those ends. Immense smns of money must be raised in order to pay for all this common work. The police force alone, in New York or in London, outniunbers the entire population of more than one of the small ancient Greek States. The municipal employees in the many departments swell to an army. The pastoral community had no Bureaucracy because it had no Bureau; but in the modern city the mere bringing together of thousands and tens of thou- sands of persons engaged in the same de- partment creates a Bureaucracy. They think like Bureaucrats, they have com- mon Biu-eaucratic standards and ideals, because they are Bureaucrats. The annual budget reaches scores of millions of dol- lars, and where so much money is, there are invariably swarms of rapacious beaks and talons to seize it. If the men at the top seek office to gratify their ambition, the throngs below them regard office- rs DEMOCR-\CY holding as their means of Uvehhood. And there are other throngs who do no work, but simply live on the crumbs and pick- ings from the great expenditures. Now all this has been charged up against Democracy as its inevitable prod- uct. How different the practice is from what good men dreamed it would be! '*Wlien among the happiest people in the world," says Rousseau, "bands of peas- ants are seen regulating affairs of State under an oak, and always acting wisely, can we help scorning the ingenious meth- ods of other nations, which make them- selves illustrious and wretched with so much art and mystery?" Excellent rhap- sody, from the master rhapsodist of mod- ern times I But that oak never drove its roots into actual soil and never lifted its wide-spreading leafage towards an actual skj^; it had no existence save in Rousseau's romantic imagination. I would not screen Democracy from any charges, aark and unlovely though they be, which can be justly brought against it. 29 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE The sternest condemnation of its faults and shortcomings will best serve to correct them. But I protest in the name of Justice, against drawing a parallel between the perfection of the men, who never existed, under the oak, which never existed, and the sins of Democracy, which we all know. Take our Democracy at its worst, if you will, but do not be misled into supposing that the practices which you justly con- demn in it, are not common to other forms of government. When Bismarck dickered with the Catholics or with the Jews in or- der to carry a measure in the Reichstag, he was doing no more and no less than the late Senator Thomas Piatt did when he dickered with Tammany Hall. One was a Prussian Prince, the other a New York Republican Boss ; their morality and their methods were, in such transactions, iden- tical. Beware of idealizing other governments and other times to the discredit of your own. We pick out a period which was not harassed by our particular torments, and 30 DEMOCRACY we wish that we could restore it; forget- ting that, had we hved then, we should have had to face other and perhaps worse perplexities. Father Time has ridden many horses, but Black Care has mounted behind him on every one of them. We must, above all things, learn to dis- tinguish the substance from its outer dress. Human nature being the stuff all societies are made of, we must seek in other epochs the equivalents of the actors and their practices of today. The Dema- gogue, for example, is held to be the con- spicuous, if not the inevitable spawn of Democracy. Loathsome always and often despicable, is he worse than the Favor- ite — his incarnation under Absolute Mon- archy? Have not countries been misgov- erned, wars waged, and social corruption promoted by Royal Favorites? Study the history of England under Charles II; turn to almost any page of Bourbon annals in France, in Italy, in Spain, under the Old Regime; look behind the scenes in the Ger- man States ; dip into Russian chronicles — 31 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE if you need to be enlightened. The Favor- ite gets his power by flattering the Mon- arch, or even by courting the Monarch's mistress; the Demagogue owes his to flat- tering the multitude. Toady for toady, which shall we choose? Which, does his- tory show, has had the greater scope for doing harm? For myself, I prefer, if the President of the United States must have an unauthorized and extra-constitutional political advisor and collector of political public opinion, Colonel House to Madame de Maintenon, who partly served Louis XIV in those offices, or to Madame Du Barry who had even higher ascendancy over Louis XV. By these hints I would stimulate you to look facts straight in the face and to de- cide for yourselves whether the evils at- tributed to Democracy are really insepa- rable from it or belong equally to other forms of government. I do not excuse the evils on the ground that they are common alike to Absolutism and to Republicanism : two wrongs do not make a right. The 32 DEMOCRACY question we wish to solve is, whether De- mocracy cannot be purged of these evils and so stand forth in everybody's eyes as the ideal system. Cavour, who had wit- nessed the working of a great Despotism like Austria, of petty and parasitic Des- potisms, like those of the Pope and the Bourbons, of the pretended Limited Mon- archy of the Orleanists in France, and of Constitutional Representative Govern- ment in England, remarked: "The worst of Chambers is better than the best of Ante-Chambers." This saying should be laid to heart by the trusters in Democracy to cheer them in their days of despond. How much of the evil is due to Democ- racy and how much is inherent in human nature? That is our question. Being ide- ally the highest form of government, De- mocracy demands of its votaries the high- est qualifications. What are these .^^ Intelli- gence, and moral sense. Since Democracy requires that the persons who administer the Government shall represent the pref- erences of a majority of all the voters, we 33 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE take it for granted that every voter shall be suflSciently informed to know what he is voting for, and sufficiently intelligent to vote with judgment. This is a most com- plimentary assumption, which experience hardly confirms. We recently had a Secre- tary of State, Mr. William J. Bryan, who was not aware that Denmark owned any islands in the West Indies, and it added to our pride at possessing such a prodigy, to read the report that he sent an invitation to the Swiss Navy to attend one of our naval celebrations ! How can we expect our Democracy to function properly, if the plain citizens, like you and me and the hod-carrier, are no better informed than is an American Prime Minister.'^ Let us not damn Democracy as a hopelessly inade- quate system, so long as we tolerate such ignorant persons in the highest offices. If we set them to drive a locomotive, we should not be surprised at any disaster their ignorance of engineering caused. Why are we surprised that government, which is a far more delicate mechanism, 34 DEMOCRACY sometimes has collisions when we entrust it to the inexpert? We should blame our- selves, not Democracy. On the other hand, mere intelligence will not suffice. The appalling dereliction of Germany has proved that. In 1914 no other nation in the world had so large a proportion of educated men, women, and children as had Germany. The Germans were, in fact, almost embarrassingly intel- ligent. The man who blacked my boots in Leipzig was a Ph.D. and was said to be the chief living authority on the use of the optative mood by Hesiod. I did not dare to test him because I could n't remember a line of Hesiod in Greek. However, no one doubted the unmatched literacy of the Germans; and yet what was it all worth.'^ What is anything worth unless it can stand the moral test.? I take it that De- mocracy is to our hopes the best of all forms of government, because it is the most moral. Consider your individual life, or almost any hour of any day; as you re- view it, can you honestly declare that by 35 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE its thoughts and deeds you showed your- self at your highest level? On what day was it that you lived so nobly as to cause any one to infer that you are worthy of Eternal Life? Nevertheless, during the days which, in the retrospect, seemed meanest and meagrest, you carried latent within your heart your aspirations, your hopes, your faith — probably unanalyzed by you — that you were really a part of the Eternal. Does not this suggest the truth in regard to Democracy also? In spite of its shocking lapses from its ideal, is it not indeed the Ark of the highest Covenant, which men have entered into, with the Divine, for their collective gov- ernment and growth? Does the existence, often impudently flourishing, of Tam- many Hall, and its counterparts in our great cities, really shake your faith in the American Constitution? Does not the very fact that the organization of all the wicked and vicious forces of a city, under the name of Tammany Hall, shocks you, show that you recognize that Tammany is not 36 DEMOCRACY a necessary product of Democracy? Under Borgian and Medicean Popes, commer- cialized vice and flagrant corruption tri- umphed openly to an extent that would arouse the envy and the astonishment of any Tammanyized Boss today. The Renaissance of the Borgias and the Medici left magnificent creations in the arts and in literature to delight mankind forever, but we must not therefore idealize it as a Golden Age to live in. We must not allow splendid exceptions to dazzle us, or blind us to the average condition of all who live under any system of government. Prodigies of virtue, monsters of cruelty and vice, crop out at every stage of civ- ilization. No creed has been framed so grim that sweet and saintly souls have not professed it, nor so kindly that it has not harbored some sinners. Not the exceptions, but the average is the test. So in the long run, unreasoning fidelity to a sovereign, or leader, or doctrine debases, because it substitutes blind passion for reason and conscience. Such passion, just because it is 37 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE blind, may plunge towards perdition as easily as mount towards salvation. If am- bitious monarchs had not counted upon such fidelity and abject obedience, most of the wars would never have been fought, and the world would not be blasted today by the most atrocious of all wars. Had William the Second not been able to count upon the servile obedience of millions of Germans to fight for him, he would never have made war; for during four years and a half of actual conflict, when hundreds of tons of shells and bullets were discharged daily, he and his six sons scrupulously kept out of range of all danger. The dema- gogue's plea, "Our country, right or wrong," would never be heard if states- men directed the policy of nations, and citizens were too intelligent and too right- eous to be seduced by demagogues into supporting an unjust quarrel. Unreason- ing patriotism, by reducing citizens to the level of machines, which work or stop at the operative's will, is to be abolished. Any patriotism which does not rise above 38 DEMOCRACY the instinct which makes cats and dogs enemies at sight, is a dangerous posses- sion, Hable to explode at any moment and in any direction. I have said enough to show that the freedom which true Democracy requires for the training of true Democrats leads to a higher state than that which despotic, feudal, or monarchical systems attain. The abject fetish worship of Prussian peasants and professors of their King, was no more admirable than is the supersti- tious regard of the Russian moujik for an ikon. All such sentiments originated in fetish worship, and those who still harbor them reveal under stress the savageness of the plane which their own moral develop- ment has reached. Unless you believe that the majority of mankind can never advance beyond a more or ?ess disguised fetish-worship, you will not be deluded into accepting any form of fetishism as final. In the evolu- tion of the human race the passage from lowest to highest has often been inter- 39 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE rupted, but never checked. In that pas- sage, fetishism has its place; but the fact that the race did not remain forever on that level, proves that fetishism is inca- pable of fulfilling the potential human ca- pacities. And so of tribalism, feudalism, and all other partial systems, in which humanity bivouacs on its march towards perfection. It is because ideal Democracy calls for the highest development in each individual of which he is capable, and pre- supposes Freedom, without which there can be no such development, that we hail it as the highest revelation thus far vouch- safed to man. I have wished to present Democracy to you exactly as it appears, I will not say at its worst, but at its average. I have not glossed over the objections the philoso- phers raise against it, nor the pungent satirical comment of its enemies. I have insisted, however, that before you can judge it fairly you must remember that many of its shortcomings are not peculiar to it, but are found in other forms of gov- 40 DEMOCRACY ernment; they must not be attributed to some fatal flaw in its nature. Whatever its defects, it has kept aUve and promoted Liberty. II DISCIPLINE In my previous paper I tried to define the ideal basis on which Democracy rests, and then I went on to sum up the chief objec- tions which have been made to it in theory and the charges levelled against its short- comings in practice. My own view is, that Democracy, being the final expression in political and social life of our assumption of the Freedom of the Will, it is and must be the highest form of government. "True enough," replies the hostile critic, "but there are many beautiful dreams in the imagination of visionaries which no sensi- ble person expects to see realized on earth. Seraph wings, for instance, would be very useful, but we cannot argue from their usefulness or from our desire, that we shall ever have them. Is the realization of De- mocracy any more probable?" To carry the doctrine of the Freedom of 42 DISCIPLINE the Will to its proper conclusion brings us inevitably to Liberty — Liberty of the Individual. Democracy, therefore, should mean the system under which each indi- vidual is free to follow his own will. In real life, however, practical difficulties at once arise. Here are two, three, fifty, or five hundred persons whose wills conflict with each other. How is harmony possible among them? And if the stronger wills bear down and control the weaker, where does Freedom come in.f^ If we answer hon- estly the question put in this way, we have to admit that it does not come in at all. But this is not the true angle from which to approach the subject. Only a Robinson Crusoe, alone on a desert island, could act as he pleased without danger of conflicting with any other human will. Needless to say that the freedom he might enjoy in this respect would be curtailed a hundred fold in all others. Because Man is not made to live alone; he is, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, a social animal, and he can reach his full stature only in 43 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE society. The vital question, accordingly, is by what system can he attain the highest development of all his faculties in a com- munity with his fellows; not what he would or could do on a desert island or in a vacuum. Only by assuming the Freedom of the Will can we regard Man as a moral, responsible being; as one, that is, who has direct immediate relation with the Su- preme Being from whom, under whatever name He is called, emanate our human conceptions of righteousness and virtue. If you suppose that some one can come between the human soul and God and that the Individual can be controlled by such an intermediary, you destroy the idea of the free exercise of the Will. Likewise, in human relations, large and small, we as- sume Freedom. We do not love under compulsion — our love for our mother or friend is free. The most terrible despot could not compel us to accept into our hearts his abhorrent ideals in place of those which we love and revere and have lived by. Freedom being, therefore, the very in- DISCIPLINE spiration which chastens and glorifies all our other highest passions and conduct, how can we presume to exclude it from our social and political relations? How can we imagine that under a tyranny, whether it be composed of one or many persons, which orders the Individual what to think and what to do, he can develop the facul- ties he requires for leading his life as a political or social animal? If an athletic trainer whose object should be to bring every part of the body of the youth under him to perfection, should devise a regi- men by which the youth lost the use of an arm or a leg, what should we say of such training? This is exactly what the Despot does. He cripples or suppresses various faculties, moral and intellectual alike, of his subjects, with the result that he leaves only halves or lesser fractions of men for his domination. The HohenzoUern Des- pots, for instance, reduced the Germans to the most abjectly obedient and servile mass that the world has ever seen; a na- tion whose soldiers clicked their heels in 45 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE unison and whose civilians uttered their thoughts in uniformity to Imperial com- mand. But at what a cost was this vast machine of Despotism arrived at! The German was taught to deny Truth, to deny Humanity, to wallow in Deceit, to gloat over Frightfulness. The Man in him, the responsible moral entity, dwindled away until only a heartless, soulless ma- chine remained. The political moralists all agreed that even if a Democracy could be set up any- where on the beautiful and alluring lines which visionaries propose, it could not last, for it is as frail as a very delicate flower, as perishable as the ripest fruit. They agree, also, that Democracy when it degenerates turns quickly into a lawless, turbulent, cruel Mobocracy, which, after a brief orgy of misrule, becomes the prey of the strong man, the tyrant. The history of the tiny Republics of ancient Hellas, of the City-States of ancient Sicily, of the municipal Democracies of medieval Italy, unquestionably give color to this opinion. 46 DISCIPLINE "There is the moral of all human tales; 'T is but the same rehearsal of the past. First Freedom and then Glory — when that fails. Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last." ^ But if we possess any historical sense we must take time and conditions into our reckoning. Water becomes ice at one tem- perature and steam at another, and the laws which govern ice and steam do not necessarily apply to water. We must not measure the mastodon by the limits of the mole. The little Republic of antiquity, bounded by a few square miles and in- habited by a few score thousands of souls, is not necessarily the norm for a vast mod- ern Republic which stretches over half a continent and shelters its hundred million or more inhabitants. The causes which led to the decay and collapse of Theban De- mocracy need not, therefore, apply to our own. Not only does each form of govern- ment develop a sort of protective colora- tion or recuperative power, but it sees these reactions differ at different ages; ^ Byron : Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto rv, cvm. 47 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE and the historian must take most scrupu- lous pains to discover just what effect the conditions of this time or that have upon a given system. Failure to do this has brought Democ- racy into disrepute. Most persons today regard Democracy as a sort of panacea or quack medicine which will cure every dis- ease from measles to marasmus. In truth, however, no such panacea exists, either for the body physical or the body politic. Few indeed are the tribes or nations which have climbed up to the level where they can be trusted with Democracy. The exultation with which the unthinking, a few years ago, hailed the so-called Democracies of the Young Turks and of China show^ed the shallowness of popular understanding of the essence of government. As I take my morning walk I meet a friend who beams with smiles and says: "Isn't it splendid that the people of Southern Borneo have set up a President .f*" Or: "These are bad times for pessimists! Progress, progress, is the countersign. Have you seen the dis- 48 DISCIPLINE patch that reports that the people of the Cannibal Islands have eaten their des- potic King and declared themselves a Republican Federation?" To which I re- ply, as sympathetically as possible: "Yes, it is a fine morning, I hope it won't rain before noon." The question is, therefore, not whether Democracy is excellent in theory, but whether a people is ready to use it profit- ably. Even Rousseau, to whom so many social and political orgiasts appeal for sanctions, recognized this: "As, before putting up a large building," he says, "the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the weight, the wise legis- lator does not begin by laying down laws, good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them." ^ Should not this be the guiding rule of even the most exuberant champion of Democracy.'* I, at least, accept it in the brief consider- ations which follow. * Social Contract, Book n, chap, viii, p. 38. 49 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Ideally, Democracy should come to a people gradually, as fast as individuals and groups are prepared to receive it and to make the best use of it. But the Course of Things has a churlish contempt for the plans of thinkers and often thrusts a novel cause forward, before Society has ab- sorbed and mastered the preceding cause. Thus the world had not learned how to use Democracy before Socialism crashed to the front. Socialism is the negation of Democracy. It would place the world in a strait-jacket as rigid, as cramping, as crippling even, as is the oppression of the most successful tyrant. Not by chance does it happen that the race which in- vented Feudalism, and in modern times has perfected the State as Despot under Prussian control, should also have devised and elaborated Socialism as a system, which is to possess the earth. It may be that for an age or two Socialism may keep up its drive against Civilization with in- cessant turmoil and fluctuations between the quiet of men gagged and bound hand 50 DISCIPLINE and foot and the disorders and writhings of their struggles to free themselves. It may be that the very dregs, the Bolshe- viki, who claim to be Socialists in order to camouflage their lust for blood and loot, may bring back Chaos for a time, but the one truth to which in the darkest days we may cling is that Chaos cannot endure. Order, not Chaos, is Heaven's first law; and after Socialism and Bolshevism had done their worst, Democracy, the ulti- mate human ideal, though postponed for centuries and ages, would come back to demand the attention and allegiance of man. We cannot too often repeat that the master word of Democracy is Individual- ity. Democracy does not compute man- kind by masses and multitudes. It believes that the largest multitude is made up of Individuals and that the final purpose in our life here is to raise every Individual to the highest level which his nature and faculties fit him for. Walt Whitman once? said to me, " I guess the secret of the influ- 51 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE ence of Jesus Christ is, that He believed that every human being had something in him worth saving." We were not talking theology or political theory, but simply about life and its upshot and outlook, and Walt's casual remark seemed to me then, and seems to me now after thirty years, to be worth many volumes of theological exegesis. Pure Socialism, on the contrary, ignores the Individual and deals prefer- ably with the greatest mass of all — the State. Quite logically, therefore, the con- ception of the State which the Germans have held up for Europe and America to admire and to imitate is a Despotism pleasing alike to HohenzoUern Autocracy and to German Socialism. I am a Democrat, however, and the Democratic ideal which I serve, holds in- flexibly to the sacredness of the Individ- ual. From this it follows that the problem of Democracy is how to safeguard the Individual and at the same time maintain the rights of the collective Individuals who form a State. The answer is that we 52 DISCIPLINE can do this by Discipline, by Education. Before you dismiss this answer as banal or too easy for so complicated a matter, con- sider what it means. Consider and be con- trite as the phantom of the pompous boast and Pharisaical sham, called American Public Education, rises before you. At best, it is the ghost of a good intention. We have gone on for generations repeating the old humbug about the little red school- houses, in which was guarded the Palla- dium of our liberty and from which issued our future Presidents and statesmen. We have thanked God for our public schools, the corner-stone of our Democracy; and having given these perfunctory thanks we have gone away about our business and left our schools to look after themselves and, too often, to decay. Nothing is more certain, however, than that the stability and the open-minded sagacity of a Demo- cratic State must depend on Education. We have been so busy attending to other things that we have neglected these fundamentals. 53 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE To be unwilling to learn from an enemy indicates dangerous self-esteem. To be un- able to learn is a premonition of incurable decline. During the century preceding the Atrocious War the Germans devel- oped the most complete system of edu- cation operating in any country in the world. As the power of Prussia increased, German education was made more and more the servant of that power and the promoter of its ambitions. After the founding of the German Empire which formally sealed Prussia's domination in Germany, the educational system vied with the military system in converting Germany into a Draconic Despotism, and of making that Despotism not only pala- table to the Germans, but the object of their ideals. Wherein did the marvellous efficiency of the German educational sys- tem lie? It lay in the fact that it had a direct purpose in view, and that in every essence and detail it served that purpose. Nothing was left to chance, nothing to individual caprice, nothing to hesitation or debate. 54 DISCIPLINE With an ingenuity and a persistence worthy of the noblest cause, this educa- tion did not stop until it converted every German, prince or peasant, Junker or cap- italist, into an unquestioning servant of the Emperor, the Absolute Head of the State. He held his office by "divine right." A strange Deity — a composite of Frederick the Great and the good old *'Gott" Thor of the Teuton barbarians — • was invented to be the Kaiser's partner and to give a sort of mystical, suj>ernal warrant for his acts. The German people, by nature envious and bloated with con- ceit, were flattered by being assured by their professors, politicians, and pastors, that they were the Chosen People, and that modesty or any admission that any other people could equal them in any re- spect, were signs of a craven spirit. The so-called religion they adopted served only for them. If they retained any scruples of conscience, they were taught that the moral law of other peoples had no force in Germany; that absolute obedience to the 55 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Kaiser and absolute loyalty to the Father- land comprised all the law and the gospel they required. No crime, no hypocrisy, no baseness, would be imputed against them if it were directed against the foreigner for the glory of the Fatherland. So there grew up in Germany what we may regard as a horrible reversal of reli- gion. To lie, to deceive, even to murder, in order to promote German interests, were not sins but patriotic virtues. The Kai- ser and the little Ring with whom and through whom he worked, found the Ger- man people only too willing to be em- ployed to advance their evil ambition. To have reduced 65,000,000 Germans to a state of immoral pulp which could be used for any purpose the Kaiser desired, as if it were a single, servile creature, but trained to do with amazing thoroughness just what he desired they should do, and no more or no less, asking no questions, nurs- ing no scruples, licking the hand of its master with spaniel-like fawning — that is the astonishing monument which the 56 DISCIPLINE German system of education, set going by William von Humboldt and Baron Stein — two sane and enlightened bene- factors — had raised to itself in a hundred years. It took the little boy in the kinder- garten and led him forward by carefully measured steps to the university, and at the end of his university career it let him loose on the world a thoroughly Prussian- ized person, holding the views on politics, the State, the sanctity of the Hohenzollern and Pan-German ambition, which his masters taught him, and no others. Whether he went into the army or into professional life, he owed his livelihood and his promotion to the State. But the shrewd devisers of this system, which was intended to fortify the Autocrat and his small Ring in the privileged class, took care not to open the treasure-house of knowledge to all Germans. They did not prepare the sons of peasants and of the lower classes for the gymnasia and univer- sities, but they stopped their education in boyhood — it was enough for them to 57 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE learn instant obedience. If they were al- lowed to rove over the fields of politics and philosophy, they might be disturbed by unorthodox thoughts. Now what does this tragic story of Ger- man education teach .^^ It teaches the tran- scendent power of education itself, when duly organized and carried out thor- oughly and uninterruptedly. It warns us that here is a force which, working slowly, sweeping into every crevice, spreading and acting cumulatively like a slowly ris- ing inundation, at last transforms Society and, it may be, sweeps all its dams away. Judging by the German example, it needs only fifty years to reach its goal. There are many elderly men among us who stud- ied at German Universities in their youth when a different spirit prevailed, and they little suspected that the transformation, at which they now stand aghast, was al- ready beginning. Fifty years .^^ They seem but a span in the life of a people. The tiger's cub, tiny and kind and playful, may be a child's pet, but in a little while it 58 DISCIPLINE grows up to be a tiger, man-eating, cruel, sly, merciless. So the Germans of our youth have been turned by an evil meta- morphosis into the Prussians of today, odious and abominable forever to civilized men. We must not forget, however, that nearly two and a half centuries before Humboldt and Stein, and their colleagues, launched the Prussian experiment in edu- cation, the Jesuits organized a similar sys- tem with equal solicitude as to details, and equal singleness as to purpose. After un- dergoing his twenty or more years of dis- cipline the novice became literally brimful with Jesuitry. His thoughts, his motives, had only the interests of his Order at heart, and his will belonged to his Supe- rior. For him, too, common morals, and re- ligion had no existence, if they conflicted with Jesuit plans. The hideous doctrine that the end justifies the means guided the practice of the Jesuits, although they denied professing it. For us now, the sig- nificant fact is, that by their method of 59 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE teaching, by their schools and academies, they too proved the immense, the over- whelming power of education. Fletcher of Saltoun said, "That if a man were per- mitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a na- tion." The Jesuits used to say, with even more certitude, "Let us teach any boy until he is fourteen and he is ours for life." We must acknowledge, therefore, the immeasurable potency of education, and organize such a system that the American children of today shall all be the American patriots of tomorrow. In our training there should be no stealing away of mor- als, no deadening of scruples, no poisoning of motives, in order to exalt Kultur, nor should there be any putting on of blinders in order to prevent our pupils from seeing anything which the Jesuits wish to hide from theirs. Our teaching should be open, and the breaking of the Individual Will, as a preparation for absolute obedience, should not be dreamed of. We appeal for a "reasonable service," and if there be any 60 DISCIPLINE sacrifice, it shall be a willing sacrifice such as the patriot makes when he gives up everything — family, home, friends, wealth, work, honors, precious expecta- tions — to fight for his country and to die, if need be, on the battle-field. I need not specify in detail what Ameri- can Education should be. Even were I competent to do so I should require a treatise. But without making any pretence of being expert I may at least empha- size two defects which have struck me as an observer — first, the woefully deficient instruction given in rudimentary English, and next, the equally deficient teaching of American history. In my youth I studied both in France and in Italy, and I saw something of the education of young Ger- mans. The average French, Italian, or German lad, who could not write a correct letter in his own language or give a clear statement of the outlines of his national history, would not have been tolerated, much less would he have been passed on to the upper grades, to the Lycees and the 61 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Universities. By contrast, I meet every year now many American college men, not merely Freshmen, but Juniors and Sen- iors, whose handwriting is illegible, whose use of their native tongue is preposterous, and whose knowledge of American history is as incoherent and jumbled as the in- gredients the witches in Macbeth tossed into their cauldron. Now a knowledge of these two subjects, English and History, should be planted so deeply in every American child, that it would grow with his growth and endure to the end of his life. More than that, such knowledge should be the key to open literature for him and an understanding of American principles and institutions. We are told over and over again that the study of Mathematics or of Latin and Greek has the greatest possible value for the mental discipline which it supplies. I should be the last to belittle the value of the Classics — those languages through which as through musical instruments the beauty and wisdom and thought of the 62 DISCIPLINE Greeks and Romans have been wafted to our time and will carry their music and their message into the future as long as receptive souls shall exist to welcome them. Mathematics, too, toughen and clarify the minds of those who have an instinct for them. But the mental disci- pline which might come to the youngest pupils from English properly taught and from History properly told, would prepare them to profit by the later study of the Classics and of Mathematics and it would last throughout their lives. So I would urge that these subjects, which stand at the threshold of Educa- tion, be given the attention which they deserve by teachers adequate to the task; and that they be made the foundations of a curriculum, rational, illuminating, inter- locking, and elastic, which shall not only turn out graduates of the Universities who are specialists and educated men as well, but shall also implant the seeds of Ameri- canism so surely that whether a boy has to leave school at fifteen, or eighteen, or 63 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLmE: PEACE twenty, he shall understand the historical steps by which the United States have developed, the principles which underlie their existence and his own. I hope that even at the expense of repe- tition, I have made it plain that the first agency, and immeasurably the most pow- erful, for unifying our population and for making America not only a hope but a fact, is Education. The education of Jesu- itry and the Prussian education each aimed at and culminated in Absolutism — one ecclesiastical, the other secular. The transcendent task for American Democ- racy is to organize an equally efficient system of education in behalf of Democ- racy. The Prussian ideal, like the Jesuit, is the training to absolute obedience — to a state of submission which deprives the individual of liberty of conscience, and therefore of action. He responds as auto- matically to control from above, as does the electric bell when you press the but- ton. To convert human beings into ma- chines is the aim, and result, of Jesuit and 64 DISCIPUNE of Prussian. But the ideal of Democracy is to train every person in individual lib- erty, to enhance his value as a moral agent, and so to discharge intelligently the citizen's duty which Democracy places upon him. In Colonial days, when our population was more homogeneous, the teaching of the public schools and pioneer colleges fitted their pupils for the rather restricted political life which lay before them. The general rightness of the system into which they were born, was hardly disputed. But our public schools long since ceased to be nurseries of Democracy. With the en- trance of various elements, the tendency has been to teach nothing which might offend the parents of the children of any race or creed. History, as we have seen, the subject through which the newcomers ought to learn how American Democracy developed, is reduced to a formless mush, without savor or nourishment. But a brief, clear, straightforward story of the origin and growth of our Nation could 65 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE be written, and should be taught in all schools, public, private, and parochial ; and with it should go an explanation, adapted to young minds, of Democracy and of our Constitution. We are already suffering grievously from our ill-judged educational system, which seems to assume that chil- dren should not be forced, that their poor little minds should not be burdened too early, and that lenience, intellectual and moral, should supplant discipline in deal- ing with them. In truth, however, disci- pline should begin in the cradle, and American boys of fourteen should be as well trained as French boys and German boys of fourteen; for they have quite as much natural ability. Incontestably, the rudiments of Americanism should be as firmly rooted in American youth as were those of Prussianism in Prussian youth. A single generation of our wrong system has resulted in incipient softening of the spine — a symptom brought to the sur- face by the World War, and very ominous. The wonderful response of the Ameri- 66 DISCIPLINE can Nation, however, to the call for prepa- ration for this War showed that the American spirit was sound and that the latent ability of the American people could be quickly set in action. In a year divisions of American soldiers were on the fighting line in France, and in eighteen months two million of our men were help- ing to destroy the vast armament of the Kaiser. I do not mean to imply that an American, after six months' training, will always be equal to a German who has devoted several years to that task. But I do assert that nothing the German Mili- tarists have ever achieved equals the American achievement between April, 1917, and October, 1918, when, with the aid of British transports, they sent their armies across the Atlantic, with food and munitions and artillery sufficient for them, and constructed a railway many hundred miles in length, and vast docks and store- houses, and coordinated all the parts of this colossal enterprise. Germans prepared for war and heaped up their munitions 67 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE during forty years of peace. Comparison would be ludicrous. The magic by which America accom- plished this unparalleled work was the spirit of Liberty. Each individual knew that he counted, and he responded will- ingly to the call for arms, to the necessity of obedience, and to every whisper of Duty. The problem of the system of Ed- ucation which I have urged, will be to safeguard this spirit of Liberty while in- creasing the recognition and practice of Discipline through which Liberty itself will be able to accomplish its tasks still more effectually. The American must remain elastic, keen, self-reliant, quick to use his own resources or he will cease to be Amer- ican. We want no Hindenburg machines here which, in the form of human beings, click their heels together, and salute, and blindly obey like marionettes whose mo- tions, controlled by wires, follow the twitching of the showman behind the scenes; we want men, free and morally responsible men. 68 DISCIPLINE Our education in Discipline must in- clude training, not only of the mind, but also of the body. We must recover, after two thousand years, that balance of the intellectual, the moral, and of the physical without which neither can reach its maxi- mum. Every prospective citizen must be taught to defend the country in case of war. Ability to vote intelligently, to up- hold Democracy by wise counsel and up- right character, will not avail to drive back an armed invader. The truculent soldier knows no argument except the sword. We must be sufficiently prepared in permanent equipment and munitions to repel a sudden attack; and we must so train the great mass of our men, as the Swiss do, that they can be mobilized at a day's notice. We need not fear that rational measures for defense will lead to militarism. The countries which have become victims of militarism — Spain in the sixteenth cen- tury, France under Louis XIV and Na- poleon, Russia under Nicholas I, Prussia 69 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE under Frederick, and Germany under William II — have had this in common — their armies were the personal instrument of the sovereign, to be used by him for his own aggrandizement or that of his dynasty, however his motives may have been veiled under the pretense of national necessity. But we have no autocrat, and militarist ambitions are uncongenial to our people. Unless there were another Civil War here, there would be no con- ceivable need of maintaining huge stand- ing armies : but as our Civil War occurred when there was no standing army, the guilt for it could not be laid to militarism. Adequate provision for defense does not imply a vast military organization for ag- gression. Against aggression we must be prepared: because if a foreign militarist Power should occupy either Canada or Mexico, we could not defend ourselves against invasion. Until we have perfected a system for guarding ourselves, we shall owe our safety to the existence of the Brit- ish Fleet — as we have owed it throughout 70 DISCIPLINE the long suspense of the Atrocious War. But what if that Fleet had suffered disas- ter? Or what if, in a new international combination, the British Government should cool towards us and hold its Fleet in a state of academic neutrality which would be ruinous to us? The future of the American Republic, with which Democracy is bound up, must not be left to such a hazard as the change- ful temper towards us of any foreign nation. We must lay down our system according to our ideals, with the best wis- dom which experience and our observa- tion of human vicissitudes can teach us. Rational military training is one of the essentials of the preservation of our Re- public. We need it, first, because without it we should be crushed if war came. We need it, next, because in peace it will unify our miscellaneous population at its impressionable age. It will substitute one language for the Babel of polyglot tongues. It will teach discipline, which, 71 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE whether it be taught through material drill or through books, is indispensable. It will promote physical health, and abol- ish the slouchy carriage and shambling gait common to Americans. If Democracy is, as we believe, the far- thest goal yet visible, it is our duty to de- fend it in every honorable way. Since on its preservation peace depends, we must preserve Democracy even at the cost of war. Superior virtue does not excuse its possessor for being a fool. If a Quaker banker left his treasure unlocked, burglars would not spare it out of respect to his pacifist doctrine. When the land was in- fested by wolves and savages, our pioneer ancestors went armed: and so should we; most of all now at a time when wolves and savages are still abroad, and the leaders of the pack have announced that they will be satisfied with nothing less than World Power. The loss of our material treasure, if they succeeded, would be grievous; but the blow to Democracy would be irreparable. 72 DISCIPLINE We do not surrender one jot of our be- lief in the sanctity of the Individual; we simply give each individual the opportu- nity to learn for himself that he will re- main stunted unless he works with and for Society, towards collective, higher ends. That is Discipline. We teach him the patriotism of Democracy, which regards it as a self-evident truth that every citizen is bound to protect his country. The serv- ice of the Democrat is in the highest sense voluntary, and so it differs totally from that of the conscript under a militarist Despotism. The Democrat does his duty as an act of his own will, and thereby proves himself a moral agent: the subject of an Autocrat, or of the fictitious supreme State behind which the Autocrat may try to screen himself, is, and can be, a ma- chine only. The difference is as funda- mental as that between soul and body. Democracy and Freedom are inseparable — two aspects of the same soul. Discipline — Discipline ! That is our tragic need. Only through Discipline 73 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE comes Freedom. Lawlessness is not Lib- erty. The really free man is he who, under- standing the master laws of life, works with them so harmoniously that he has indeed behind him, not only the physical forces that move the sun and stars, but the Moral Law that has chosen humanity as the instrument through which to reveal itself on earth. The discipline of Autoc- racy destroys the Individual, by requiring of him absolute obedience. The discipline of Democracy should so develop the rea- son and conscience of the Individual that he will serve Democracy willingly, joy- fully, at whatever cost to himself. The patriotism which depends on compulsion differs completely from the ideal patriot- ism of Democracy. It is a contradiction in terms, like compulsory love or compul- sory worship. Without freedom of choice, you can no more attach moral significance to love, worship, patriotism, than to the wild play of lightning or to the whirling of a blizzard. This quality of freedom sanctifies De- 74 DISCIPLINE mocracy. No doubt, the blind devotion which other forms call out, has many noble aspects. The fealty of the knight to his lord, the clansman to his chief, has often flowered in splendid self-sacrifice. Who has not thrilled at the story of that spectacle when Empress Maria Theresa — young, beautiful, beset by a ruthless and cunning foe — Frederick II — faced the Hungarian House of Lords, of whose al- legiance she was not certain; and they, at the sight of her, carried away by a whirl- wind of devotion to the sovereign and of sympathy for the distressed woman, shouted, '^Moriamo pro rege nostro!" (We will die for our King!) To attain American Democracy we must lay hold on Americanism. We must be united, in speech and aim. We must be educated. Only through Education can we learn that Discipline without which every system is as helpless as a rudderless ship. So true is this that the natives in India, for example, appeal to the English Courts rather than to their own, when they desire 75 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE real justice. Entrusted with the most in- tricate poHtical mechanism yet devised, a mechanism caUing for special knowledge in those who use it, we have taken it for granted that somehow the machine would teach the machinist. But mastery of chemistry does not come by intuition; neither does Democracy. Have I made it plain how the difficulty, which the very idea of Democracy raises, can be overcome .^^ True Democracy not only cannot exist without Liberty, it is the actual embodiment of Liberty and it must be upheld by free Individuals. Yet, each Individual and the community must be restrained by Discipline. How is this con- tradiction to be settled .f^ It is to be settled precisely in the same way in which we set- tle the problems of our daily conduct. Just as he who loses his life shall find it, so he, who of his own choice gives up his Will, shall find it. He sees that submission to moral laws does not enslave him but liberates him. The man who following his appetites disobeys the laws of health, does 76 DISCIPLINE not thereby prove himself of superior free- dom, but makes himself the slave of vices, foul habits, and disease. Since Democracy is the highest form of government by which peoples can manage their collective affairs, we must learn, obey, and teach its laws, resting sure that in obeying we become better Democrats, and, therefore, freer men. We shall give a willing service. The voluntary accepting of the restraint of laws, the merging of our individual Will in the larger Will, solves the dilemma. And when you examine closely, you discover that the laws which make a good Democrat are the laws which make a good man. For the concerns of Democracy are more than political, they are moral. So let us chant the Hymn of Discipline — the training which gives swiftness and strength to the runner and sureness of aim to the marksman; the self-restraint which brings self-mastery; the knowledge and obedience which enable man to make the forces of nature work for him; the devo- 77 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE tion to spiritual laws which lifts his soul to its full stature and makes him a citizen of the Eternal. Democracy implies Disci- pline. What Dante said of the Blessed in Heaven is equally true of us on earth: "E la sua volontate e nostra pace." (And the Divine Will is our peace.) Ill PEACE How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace. Peace? What do you mean by Peace? Is it the desire of the weary, the hope of the heavy-hearted and bereaved? The dream of those who, baffled and misled and de- jected by the strife and tumult of this world, look forward to another which shall redress the wrongs of this? Political peace, the opposite of War, the state which quenches the flames of War, we all know and understand. But Peace as an ideal of the soul, grows more and more remote. In most religions it seems to be nearly identi- cal with the thought of the perpetuation hereafter of the dearest pleasures — in- cluding the pleasures of the affections and of worship — which men have. We learn very early that disappointments and cares, the commonplace lot of everybody, 79 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE whether young or old, millionaire or mill- hand, prevent any of us from enjoying a life of Peace; but we never quite accept our doom. We feel instinctively that were this or that changed, a trifle perhaps, had we a little more money, or better health, or a more fortunate position, we might attain to Peace. During the last half -century, however, the men of science have tried to persuade us that there is and can be no Peace in the organic world, that the law of organic life is an incessant struggle for the survival of the fittest. The German doctrinaires, with the characteristic narrowness which makes them doctrinaires, seized upon this so-called law, transferred it from the ani- mal world to man, and declared it to be the key to human history. From it they deduced their monstrous assertions that might makes right, that the strong shall enslave or exterminate the weak, and that War, not Peace, should be the normal state of man. I will not stop to refute this falsehood, which, if it were true, would 80 PEACE make annihilation preferable, to most of us, to any life on earth conceivable under this rule of the shambles. I refer you to the brief and beautifully clear essay in which Dr. George W. Crile has once for all ex- posed the damnable German fallacy.^ Since human beings are moral beings, a premiss which the German denies, we de- clare that right is right, and that to steal one's neighbor, or his property, or his land, and to kill him and all his tribe, is wrong. I shall endeavor in the present lecture to state some of the existing obstacles to in- ternal Peace in the United States, and to suggest how they may be removed. In the previous discussion I have laid before you, by hints rather than by formal demonstration, what seem to me to be the essentials of Democracy. I asked you to regard Freedom as the very breath of its life, and to consider how the inviolability of the Individual, which Freedom de- mands, can be reconciled with the ideal of ^ George W. Crile: The Fallacy of the German State Philosophy. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, 1918. 81 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE subordinating the Individual to the com- mon good which the Democratic State de- mands. The true Democrat shall have obedience without servility or self-inter- est; zeal without superstition. Civilization begins, as I measure, when the idea of the Family emerges from among the promiscuous relationships of barbarians. The Family reveals how both sexes, and the young and old of different generations, are naturally bound together by the simplest but strongest ties in a bond of affection, health, and peace; and I believe that no State can be healthy and permanent unless it is based on the funda- mental good- will and justice which unite the ideal Family. To have a common pur- pose, a common standard of conduct — in a word, a real harmony — which does not preclude different tastes or different opin- ions, are also necessary to the Family. Nor can the State do without them. Now look, for a moment, at what the recent decades have brought us. The sur- vey is of things so familiar, that we have 82 PEACE mostly lost our sense of their signifi- cance. I pass over the amazing achievement of binding our country together by railroads and telegraphs, of clearing, settling, and civilizing it — that seems now not a sub- ject for epics, but a mere matter of course, like housekeeping. But consider the colos- sal questions — political reconstruction after the Civil War — economic and fi- nancial readjustment — the dislocating and demoralizing effect of sudden and fab- ulous wealth — immigration — industri- alism, tending to degrade workers to the status of the machines they serve — the dividing line for all classes of a material prosperity : these are the questions — • stupendous tasks, rather, which have challenged our newly welded American Democracy. Any one of them would have taxed the wisdom of a generation, and its strength. Hercules surmounted his labors singly. Suppose that, while he was cleansing the Augean stables, he had also been forced 83 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE to repel the combined attack of the Ler- nean Hydra, the Nemean Lion, and the StymphaUan Birds? What victory could he have hoped for? And yet during the last fifty years our Democracy has had to battle against an equivalent coalition of enemies. Many of these problems — Industrial- ism, for instance — being common symp- toms of the age, have wound their coils round other countries: but take one which peculiarly affects the United States — take Immigration. In 1860 the population of this country was thirty-one millions and a half. During the fifty years up to 1910 we received twenty-three million immigrants — or three quarters of the entire population in 1860: and, except for a small fraction made up of English, Scotch, and Scandi- navians, these strangers came from lands where Despotism, mild or harsh, still pre- vailed, or had only lately been modified. They knew neither the language nor the traditions of America. They counted many illiterates. They brought their own 84 PEACE dialects and customs, their racial creeds and antipathies. Year by year the stream flowed from lower economic and social levels, until it was chiefly swollen by the proletarians of Europe and Western Asia. Once here, they naturally herded to- gether, thereby rendering it more difficult to Americanize them; and, un-American- ized though they were, we gave them the ballot, which they were as unprepared to use as five-year-old children would be to handle loaded revolvers. From such a spectacle, critics, native and foreign, argue the failure of Democ- racy. In truth, however, the task of re- ceiving twenty-three million aliens in fifty years, and of establishing them in living relations, even if they were not well assim- ilated, is new in history. Until Despotism, limited Monarchy, or Oligarchy is put to this test, and succeeds better than we have done, it wfll be premature to charge our partial failure to Democracy. But history shows us that governments which look down on our "Democratic 85 DEMOCKACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE inefficiency," have been wholly incapable of assimilating aliens. Take Despotic Prussia, for instance, the most rigid and externally efficient governmental machine the world has known. If twenty-three mil- lion foreigners had settled in Prussia be- tween 1860 and 1910, they would remain as foreign today as the peoples that Prus- sia finally brought under her rule. After one hundred and forty years the Poles remain Poles; after nearly half a century the people of Alsace-Lorraine are French. Either servitude or extinction was the Prussian substitute for assimilation. But extermination does not solve the problem. The mention of Prussia calls up the radical difference between her growth and that of the United States. No one has ever voluntarily migrated to Prussia since the kingdom was proclaimed in 1701. Every addition, in territory and population, has been made by the sword; and by the sword she has still striven to subdue the foreigners she has conquered. The millions and tens of millions who have flocked to 86 PEACE the United States, on the contrary, have come wilHngly, eagerly, and often franti- cally, in their desire to escape from the perils or burdens of the countries of their origin. From that fact I deduce that American Democracy, slipshod though it has been, possessed certain attractions that Prussian Autocracy did not. Mere attractiveness, however, never saved man or woman from the wolves. Our hospitality, which has been by no means disinterested, because our indus- trialists have welcomed the foreign prole- tariat in order to exploit it in the form of cheap labor, has resulted in creating here a vast, polyglot population, which tends more and more to become un-American. We lack a unifying bond. The only prin- ciple which seems to actuate Croesus and Choreman alike is, "Every one for himself and the Devil take the hindmost." But union cannot be based on individual self- ishness. Each individual must give up a part of himself for the benefit of all — must recognize that the good of all has a 87 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE claim upon him superior to any personal concern — before there can be union. The ideal of the Family foreshadows the ideal of the State. Just as nobody can live for himself alone, so each must give abun- dantly of himself wherever he has joint interest with his fellows. Only when we give ourselves do we really share in the fruits of our gift. We know that the Fam- ily withers, if selfishness, instead of love and concord, prevail. Much more is this true in the case of the State : for the State lacks the natural magnets which draw to- gether normal members to the Family. I dwell upon the problem of the foreign- born, because it adds greatly to the diflS- culty of perfecting our Democracy; and from being a diflSculty it has grown to be a menace. You cannot go on pouring dirty water into a jar of milk and have the com- bination remain clean milk. But our troubles do not spring only from immigra- tion. Even in the earlier days, when the newcomers were still too few to be a dis- turbing element, our forerunners showed 88 PEACE signs of that slackness which is supposed to be inseparable from Democracy. And which of us, though he can trace his American ancestry back to the Mayflower, can honestly say that he has done his full duty by the Republic? When at last the aliens came in swarms, the native Americans made almost no effort to Americanize them, but used their labor and in return allowed them, as the phrase goes, to run our politics. As long as the so-called "best men" themselves could go on making fortunes, it was cheaper to pay for the waste entailed by unskilled or tainted government, and even to compound with "strike" legislation, than to give their time to public affairs. They excused themselves on the plea that "politics were too dirty for a good man to go into." I always distrust the virtue of those who claim to be too good to grapple with the evil which corrupts the world. The greater the evil, the greater the need of good men to fight it. One of the best men I know has devoted himself to letting 89 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE in mercy, kindness, self-respect, and a sense of human fellowship and loyalty to the prisoners at Sing-Sing and at the Portsmouth Navy Yard Prison. He is not too good to shrink from the task of prov- ing that you cannot make honest men of criminals by applying to them an inhuman system which would make criminals of honest men. Our merchants and other leading men in the cities used also to reassure them- selves that they stood ready, if ever polit- ical corruption became too bad, to take a hand themselves and turn the rascals out. This is rather a simple form of self-delu- sion; for any one who has watched politics knows that amateur reformers cannot dart in at a moment's notice and remedy evils. If an orchestra ran down so that its mem- bers neither played well individually nor obeyed their conductor, what should we think of "best citizens" who should say: "Don't worry, if it really becomes intol- erable we will take the places of the vio- linists ourselves." 90 PEACE I am not excusing the evils in our Amer- ican public life; I am only suggesting that, before we can remedy them, we must un- derstand their cause, and that we must not argue from them that Democracy is a failure. Not until we realize how far our troubles arise from the mixed ingredients of our population shall we take the road towards the remedy, which is, also, the road to true Democracy and Peace. Op- ponents argue against Democracy that very few are capable of wielding it, but this is true also of children and minors in any society: you don't kill them or im- prison them, you teach and wait. Ger- mans have shown what education can do. They educated for bad, why should not we for good ? Consider for a moment the notorious contempt for law in this country. Each immigrant brings with him the notion of law that he had in his native land. Usu- ally, as he migrated to escape burden- some or unjust laws, so he instinctively regards law ii^ general as his enemy. 91 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Landing here, and not finding either the laws he winced under at home or any symbol of the enforcement of the laws, he concludes that this is in truth the Lawless Land, which he mistakes for the Land of Freedom. He may wander through our large cities for hours and, except at crowded street-crossings, he may never see a policeman, to him the living symbol of the law. In the country, since he meets no mounted rural police, as in Central Europe, and no alert carbineers, as in Italy, his natural inference is that there is nobody to prevent him from doing what he likes — and he often does it. For twenty immigrants from twenty different countries to come, each with his own notion of law, is confusing enough: but how is any one of them to acquire re- spect for our American laws, when he finds that there are as many varieties of these as there are States in the Union .'^ And besides the State laws, there are the general national laws and the municipal and local liaws. Take the most important 82 PEACE institution of all — matrimony : how is reverence for it to be inculcated under the existing contradictions and anomalies? A man who would be guilty of bigamy if he married in New York City needs only to cross the ferry to Hoboken with his com- panion; he marries and returns in an hour to New York with his lawful wife. This is as absurd as if burglary on one side of the street were punished as a crime and not on the other. Small wonder that the immigrant con- cludes that there is nothing binding in a law, or that he listens to incendiaries who tell him that laws are the device by which the powerful oppress the weak. The out- rageous delays in our court procedure, the costliness of justice, and the endless chain of appeals and retrials based on legal quibbles, can but confirm the alien in the belief that the first prerequisite of an American is to be a law unto himself. If he comes from a country where the police is the tool of a tyrannical and cruel gov- ernment, he will regard the policeman as 93 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE his natural enemy, and not as his protec- tor, as has long been the Anglo-Saxon at- titude. Our assumption is that the police exist to protect the innocent, not the guilty. When the immigrants collect in colo- nies, they perpetuate in their relations with each other the customs they and their ancestors lived under abroad. This inevitably generates a tribal loyalty, which eyes the other tribal groups with suspicion if not with hostility, and regards the protection of its own members, right or wrong, as its first care. How far this can be carried appeared in the case of Jack the Ripper, whose crimes horrified the world. The London police discovered that he was a degenerate Pole, but they could not catch him because his fellow Poles se- creted him.^ This is an extreme example; ^ "The conclusion we [London Criminal Investiga- tion Department] came to was that he [Jack the Ripper] and his people were certain low-class Polish Jews : for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End wUl not give up one of their number to Gentile justice." Sir Robert Anderson: The Lighter Side of my Official Life, pp. 137, 138. London, 1911. 94 PEACE but a similar spirit of tribal fanatical de- votion exists in our cities and towns which, like London, have large masses of undi- gested foreign colonies to deal with. Were this tendency to continue unchecked, the United States will be peopled before the end of our century by a dozen or twenty clans, each speaking its own language and practising its own laws, deprived of any common unifying medium. Without un- ion, there cannot be equality. The strong- est of these tribes will dominate the others; or, if no one be strong enough to dominate singly, it will form a league to share the dominion. Then there will be reenacted here the tragedy of racial feuds, dynastic ambitions, religious antipathies, and com- mercial envies which have made Europe a slaughter-house for the past thousand years. I dwell upon the problem of the lower grade of immigrants, because it is certain that if American Democracy cannot find salvation for them it will cease to be a De- mocracy. But every class needs to be de- 95 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE mocratized. We have all fallen into the habit of taking our country for granted. Do you take your mother for granted, leaving her to shift for herself without any loving sign from you? When some espe- cially rank instance of political corruption startles us, we try to reassure ourselves, as I have just said, with the thought that, if things become intolerable, the best minds in the country — now busy in run- ning vast financial enterprises or in the professions — will turn aside and save the State. Nothing could be more fatuous. Recently, this War has revealed that a certain foreign element — the German — has secretly plotted for a score of years to control this country in the interest of a European monarch, to wit, the Emperor of Germany. The promoters of this con- spiracy banked on the general theory that Democracies were too incompetent ever to be a match for an Autocracy rigidly organ- ized on militarist principles. Our happy- go-lucky ways seemed to denote not merely inefiiciency, but that loosening of 96 PEACE the sinews which forebodes death. They counted also on the racial diversity of our population to increase the feebleness which, they taught, is inseparable from Democracy. They believed so firmly that we Americans set dollars above every- thing else, that they assumed that we would not long resent it if by Prussianiz- ing our country they swelled our fortunes. The insolence of this insinuation appears, when we discover that the Germans plunged the world into war — a war which has already cost ten million lives and in- calculable misery and devastation — for the sake of increasing their own individual wealth and that of their Sovereign and Empire. The Americans are hard-headed and practical, and they know how to make money, but they are idealists. I defy any German apologist to cite a single example of public idealism or international liberal- ism and generosity that can be traced to Prussian origin, since the boorish Freder- ick of Brandenburg became the first King of Prussia. 97 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Without discussing the causes or issues of the Atrocious War, I urge you to con- sider what the existence of the Pro-Ger- man conspiracy here meant. It was a chal- lenge to American Democracy; a menace to our American Union. Foreigners come over here ostensibly to escape from evil conditions at home and to enjoy the pro- tection and privileges of our institutions. To make their treachery more Judas-like, the Germans even enrolled themselves as American citizens. The challenge was given: we accepted it; for any people which submits to such reptilian attacks cannot live honored and does not deserve to live free. After stamping out sedition and mak- ing odious all who directly or indirectly abetted it, our first duty is to Americanize the United States so thoroughly that no foreign plotters shall ever again dare to burrow here. The duty of Americanizing — as I have said — we ought long ago to have discharged : now, we cannot shirk it. And as fast as we Americanize our poly- 98 PEACE glot people, we shall fortify Democracy in the United States: for American ideals and Democracy, properly interpreted, are one. Just as far as we have drifted away from our x\mericanism we have aban- doned Democracy. What must we do.^* Without attempting to elaborate here the details of the proc- ess, I will suggest the general principles which must govern it. First, we must insist on a uniform lan- guage, and that language will necessarily be English. The attempt to perpetuate the original speech or dialect of the thirty or forty races and tribes that have immi- grated to the United States is an attempt against our national union. The children of immigrants ought all to use English as their native tongue: that is the lingua franca which will open communications for them in every part of the country from Tampa to Tacoma. Some will plead that the immigrants should preserve their na- tive language as a matter of sentiment — that if it is lost, their racial traits and tra- 99 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE ditions, their memories of the men of genius and of the heroes in whom they have gloried, will be rubbed off and for- gotten. Sentiment is not to be lightly brushed away. But there is false senti- ment as well as true; and an ounce of false sentiment often works more damage than a pound of true sentiment can repair. Every foreigner who comes to make this his country, and expects that it will be home and country for his descendants as far as he can foresee, must put off the sentiment for Europe or Asia and take on the sentiment for America. He must turn from the Past and dwell in the Present and the Future. Men and institutions and tribes that persist in facing backward are doomed to be left behind. To be at your best Today, you must use all the unex- hausted resources of Today. As an Ameri- can you will neither practise nor tolerate a divided allegiance. Our Congress must at once refuse to naturalize the immi- grants from any country which allows them to keep their citizenship at home, 100 PEACE while they pretend to abjure their alle- giance to their home, government, and sovereign and to be loyal citizens of the United States. This double shuffle of de- ceit was appropriately invented in Ger- many, and we have seen how efficaciously it enabled the German plotters to work here. The aim of the Italian here should be, therefore, not to remain as much of an Italian as he can, but to become an Amer- ican. His Italian heredity will not be lost, but it will enrich, and be enriched by, its new Americanism. And so of the Scandi- navian and the Czech and the Syrian, and of every other element. Thorough Ameri- canization, enthusiastic and without men- tal reservations, is the only condition under which each element can attain its highest development here and contribute its share towards making the whole better. For the prosperity of the part increases in direct ratio to the prosperity of the whole. If we needed other proof of this we should find it in the fact that the complete Americanization of the parts is precisely 101 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE what the enemies of our Democracy most fear and most antagonize. The late Hugo Munsterberg, the earliest of the Prussian propagandists here, who was consistently specious and sophistical, after he suddenly changed twenty years ago from a vehe- ment Socialist to an abject Kaiserite, preached everywhere, after the beginning of the War, that the foreign groups ought not to give up their hyphen, ought not to merge in the larger union of Americanism, but should keep each its native traits and insist on having its ideals incorporated into the life and government of the coun- try. Try to visualize this suggestion. What sort of a governmental system could be patched up with pieces of Prussian Military Despotism; Austrian, Russian, Turkish Autocracy; French centralized Democracy; Italian limited Monarchy — and all the rest.^^ A combination of wheel- barrow, motor car, dray, bicycle, hay- rigging, baby carriage, and the One Hoss Shay after its collapse, could not be more absurd or more incapable of motion. 102 PEACE Such a suggestion is made, of course, with the expectation that, as the German hyphenates were the best organized for treasonable non-American ends, so by keeping the other foreign elements sepa- rate and mutually distrustful, the Ger- mans could the more easily control them and move on to control the country. Quite logically, the national organization of German hyphenates — now happily disbanded by order of Congress — de- manded that the German language should be taught in the public schools and that the German holidays and heroes should be celebrated, and quite logically it proposed to consolidate the German voters, so that they should support only candidates pledged to uphold German plans. Equally disingenuous was another Prus- sian professor — who had been strategically planted in one of our great universities long ago and was the unenviable possessor of an amphibious conscience — who told us that we must stop thinking of the United States as "New England," and 103 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE must think of it as "New Europe." If this person were honest, he would discover by inquiry of natives of Missouri, or Virginia or Louisiana, or California or Kentucky, or New York or Pennsylvania or Okla- homa — or thirty other States — whether they regard themselves as New England- ers. But such an assertion is too patently specious to fool an American, for we Amer- icans know that before the Revolution the Colonies comprised several nationalities — English of one type in New England, of another type in Virginia, Dutch in New York, Germans in Pennsylvania, Swedes in New Jersey, Scotch in Georgia, and French Huguenots sprinkled in several sections; and that these adopted, without compulsion or even question, English as their common language. We know, too, that when the founders of the Republic debated what form of government to es- tablish, they considered very carefully other examples besides the English. They studied ancient Greece and Rome; they examined the medieval Italian Republics; 104 PEACE they took counsel of Grotius, the profound Dutchman, and of Montesquieu, the lucid and synthetic Frenchman. If they con- sulted no German, it was because the Ger- mans had never advanced, either in their theories or their practice, beyond the con- ception of Feudal Despotism. But the Colonists, of whatever tribe, believed in the Individual, and in his inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness. This English tradition, the ideal which served as a clue to the labyrinth of English history, dominated the framers of the American Constitution — not because it was English, but because, by a natural evolution, it postulated the Freedom and Democracy which they regarded as indis- pensable to the attainment of the highest good for the State and for the Citizen. To suggest that the Colonists who had barely succeeded, with French aid, after seven years of war, in wresting themselves from English rule, adopted English gov- ernmental theories simply because they were English, is comic beyond precedent. 105 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Equally slyly equivocal is the propa- ganda that, while it may be admitted that the English language and Democracy did well enough during the first century of the Republic, when the population was largely British, now, when it numbers many mil- lions from Continental Europe, the Eng- lish monopoly should cease, and a stand- ard acceptable to the Continentals should take its place. As one of the preachers of this sophistry puts it, in substance: "There are no Americans; there are Eng- lish-Americans, German-Americans, Ital- ian-Americans — and so on. We Germans are now going to Germanize America, just as the English earlier Anglicized it." Shall we wonder at the impudence of such a perversion of fact, or smile at the ludicrous suggestion, or pity the poor muddled brain that harbored it? The absolute refutation of this sophis- try would be given if we asked the immi- grants from Continental Europe whether they came here in search of Prussianized conditions, and whether, after making 106 PEACE their home here, they desired to exchange American Democracy, imperfect though it be, for Prussian Autocracy, perfect as it apparently was. What would Finns and Czechs, Danes, Swedes, Greeks, Dutch, Sicilians, Irish, Scotch, French, Spaniards, and Portuguese reply? What would three fourths of the Germans themselves reply? And what sort of logic would the other fourth use in order to persuade us that they were sincere in wishing to establish in the United States the system they fled from in Germany? If we are to give up our political ideals — our belief in Freedom, our conviction that the State exists for the Individual and not that the Individual exists to be the puppet of the State — because they are "English" — that is, because these principles, although they did not originate in England, have been best developed in modern times by Anglo-Saxons — then must we not also give up the great discov- eries and inventions of universal applica- tion which originated in English brains? 107 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE Must we not throw over the law of gravity which Newton discovered, and the steam engine, the invention of Watt, and Ste- phenson's railway locomotive, and Fara- day's discoveries which created the science of electricity and are the bases on which its use still depends? Such suggestions are absurd: and equally absurd is the plea that we aban- don any great political principle of proved worth, on the precise ground that it is the specialty of this or that people. These ar- guments are wilfully deceitful. The real objection of the Prussian propagandists to American Democracy was not that it sprang from English antecedents, not that it was, or has been since the Revolution, under English influence, but that it is Democracy. That was the cardinal sin, in Prussian eyes, for the Prussian knew that before his ideal of military Despotism could conquer the world, it must destroy the antagonistic ideal of Democracy. The cornerstone of American Democ- racy, therefore, is the preservation of 108 PEACE Americanism. In the interest of all groups we must implacably resist encroachment by any one group. When the hyphenated Germans demanded that the German lan- guage and German history should be taught in the public schools, we said no. When the Ancient Order of Hibernians resolves at its annual congress, that Irish history and glories be taught in the public schools, we say again no. When we hear that in one of the large cities in New York State thousands of pupils in the schools are taught in Polish, we know that every child so taught is being cut off from his first and natural initiation into American- ism, that his future is in so far being prej- udiced, and that the community must suffer when any of its constituents re- mains outside. A great obstacle to uniform American- ism has been the consolidation into groups according to racial origin. The Irish were the first to practise this; and for nearly a century our political parties and our timid public men have had the Irish vote held 109 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE over them as a menace. The harmfulness was increased by the fact that Irish Ca- thoKcism was identified with Irish racial ambitions here. Latterly, other nationali- ties have organized, until now in different sections of the country there are the Scan- dinavian vote, the Bohemian vote, the Italian vote, the German vote, and a dozen more to be catered to and caressed. Inevitably, when the groups of our foreign population herd together after this fash- ion, two things happen: the group thinks first of its own interests and not of the general welfare; and, next, it cannot resist the temptation to misuse American influ- ence for the benefit of its friends abroad. Think how persistently the vicissitudes of Ireland have been a disturbing factor in our local and even in our national politics ! Every year many candidates seek office, not primarily because of their views on American questions, but because of their views on the recent Irish sedition. Let us remember that every such perversion, no matter what group abets it, is a direct 110 PEACE blow to Americanism. For Americanism is our common asset, and to misappropri- ate it for a foreign object is as bad as for one partner to use the firm's money for his own profit. Now a great many of the persons who are drawn into these racial groups do not suspect that they are thereby injuring not only the American ideal but their own future here. If coming to the United States meant for the immigrants only that they were to organize in mutually exclusive groups and keep their old customs and aims, it would be far better for them to stay at home and suffer still more from oppressive governments until suffering goaded them into winning their own lib- erty from their oppressors. "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." Those who have settled in the United States since 1865 have en- tered into a commonwealth which they did nothing to create, but which it is their first duty — not to say, interest — to pre- serve and expand. They must not allow 111 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE themselves to be misled by striving for transient, selfish gains, much less to be deceived by disguised advocates of for- eign Powers into splitting into racial units which would make it easy to under- mine the Union, and with it, their own best hopes. As the incomparable Priv- ilege of America has come to most of us too easily, we hold it too cheap. We must earn it for ourselves by living up to American ideals. The motto — "America First*' — should not only be on every one's lips, but in every one's heart, the rule of conduct for every one's life. That is the touchstone which exposes the cunning of those who urge that the United States must be Ger- manized or Anglicized or Irished or Rus- sified. We will have in this country only Americans or foreigners — no mongrels with a divided allegiance — no hyphen- ates, whose hyphen, like the kiss of Judas, is a link for treachery. If I have outlined an ideal obviously too high for present attainment, you must 112 PEACE remember that two things are needed by every one who would live above the level of the beasts: an ideal beyond our reach, and a deathless resolve to strive for it. Unless we take steps today — practical steps, as the crisis demands — to restore and advance Democracy, the future will never see realized the ideal we dream of. In the past, the Roman Empire estab- lished itself by conquest over a large part of the then known world and it accorded to its subjects a little local liberty. In mod- ern times the British Empire, through conquest and colonization, has spread over a still larger part of the globe, and wherever it has gone it has carried the ideals of justice and individual freedom. The American Republic, which nature and fate seem to intend for an imperial devel- opment more beneficial than that of Rome or of Britain, differs from both in that every stranger who has come to our shores has come voluntarily. Neither by conquest nor by coercion has our country been peopled. America conquers by the 113 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE strongest of all means — by love. Neither terror, nor cruelty, nor craft can overcome or outlast love. All through the nineteenth century, the oppressed of the world heard yearningly of this land beyond the sea, where a man was a man and every honest man was welcome. Italians, groaning under Aus- trian or Papal tyranny, made their way here. Irishmen, mishandled by unjust English methods, migrated by the mil- lions. Swedes and Norwegians, chafing at harsh conditions at home, sought inde- pendence here. Germans, before their in- stinct of freedom was stifled by the poi- sonous gas of Prussianism, came hither to live free from military truculence and bureaucratic presumption. And then the refugees from remoter lands — the mis- cellaneous subjects of Hapsburg and Romanoff despots, the Balkanians, the Turks, and the Syrians and Armenians who survived their fury. Every one of these came because he thought he would be better here. The United States meant 114 PEACE for him hope, opportunity, self-respect, freedom, safety, peace. Immigration, the response of the peo- ples of the earth to the promise inherent in American Democracy, is the irrefutable proof that man intuitively craves Liberty. We cannot, of course, have real Peace, so long as there exist parties, sociological or religious, which place the success of their party above that of America. Es- pecially is this true of religious sects and denominations. The first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States de- clares, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." One would suppose that every sect would for its own welfare understand the neces- sity of preserving equality; but unfortu- nately history does not support this sup- position. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, has, from its start here, shown an unhealthy tendency to usurp a position of undue importance. Being the Church of the Irish, and the Irish being 115 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE the most inveterate politicians brought to us by any wave of immigration, the Ro- man Catholic Church here could hardly fail to be permeated by politics. Since St. Francis and Dante in the thirteenth century condemned its turning to poli- tics as the chief curse and pollution of the Church, as a spiritual institution, down to our time, when devout Catholics like Ros- mini, DoUinger, and Lord Acton inveighed against the Ultramontanes and the Papal coveters of Temporal Power, political am- bition has been the temptation and the perversion of Roman Catholics. Accord- ingly, it was unfortunate for this Church that its chief instruments in the United States were the Irish, to whom politics was all in all. Their establishment of pa- rochial schools was a direct blow at Amer- icanism, because any segregation of school children on sectarian lines must be un- American. It cuts them off from free inter- course with other boys and girls of differ- ent denominations, and it teaches them that their first allegiance is to a foreigner. 116 PEACE The same would be true if the Church were Methodist, or Lutheran, or Baptist, or Swedenborgian. No doubt each of these sects, and many others, have their own schools and seminaries, but their effect is not isolating and not clandestinely un- Americanizing like that of the parochial schools. This obstacle to Peace, therefore, must also be removed, and truly American Roman Catholics, like the late venerated Archbishop Ireland, candidly admitted it. Indeed, as I wished to imply in all that I have said, the Peace which Democracy alone can bestow on mankind is that in which no church, no class, no organiza- tion, strives to make itself strong at the expense of any other; in which the Indi- vidual will not encroach or infringe or usurp, merely because he has strength or the advantage of position by which to do so. In other words, everybody under an ideal Democracy will be so alive to the inestimable preciousness of the Whole that he will shrink instinctively from ap- propriating to himself the smallest jot 117 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE which would subtract from the complete- ness of that Whole. The worldly-wise shake their heads in- credulously and murmur, "This is all only a dream, iridescent, but unrealizable. Human nature never changes, and it can no more reach this than it can the end of the rainbow, of which the dream is spun." To those who doubt, I reply, "Woe to mankind when the desire for Liberty shall vanish. Then, indeed, shall the distinction between men and beasts be blotted out, and the hope which has led our race up from the beast towards perfection shall vanish, and the final epoch of human decadence, despair, and dissolution shall come." But I dare predict that men will forever be led upwards by their noblest dreams. Only when men cease to dream will they cease to rise. Though you may be skeptical of the existence of purpose in human evolution, yet you cannot fail to be struck by the fact that Destiny reserved this part of the 118 PEACE American continent to be the refuge of many races who were irreconcilable ene- mies at home, and that the pioneer race which set up the standard here to which all could rally, upheld Individual Liberty. From that, highest practice and equality spring; without that, there can be no De- mocracy. Do you think that if the Hohen- zoUern standard of Absolutism, with the abasement and corruption of the Individ- ual, had prevailed here, that the outcast and oppressed and heartsick and abused of all nations would have migrated to these shores.'' Have they ever willingly migrated to Prussia or Germany.'* Had any other nation settled our Atlantic sea- board and established a government with other ideals, we may be very sure that there would be nothing equivalent to our Republic. Foreigners by the million have never sought a home under the Spanish or the Prussian flag, or even under the French. Some persons do not really desire Peace as a permanent condition. They think 119 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE that it softens and deteriorates a people, but the magnificent response of our Amer- ican youth to the call of this War, and their conduct in it, should silence those who declare periodic wars necessary to keep a nation strong, courageous, and alert. Surely, Peace has equally searching tests for these qualities. The great strug- gles in Peace will be intellectual and moral, but not less tense than the physical struggles of war. Think of the immemorial evils that still await their conqueror! Poverty, crime, social vice, class injustice, disease — when the imagination shall per- ceive the tremendous labor that will be required to abolish any of these, the men and women who devote themselves to such a task will be rightly held in equal honor with the heroes of war. On what battle-field, ancient or modern, has any hero displayed greater valor than that displayed a few years ago by Dr. Richard P. Strong, when he went, accompanied by only one assistant, into Manchuria, where the pneumonic plague destroyed every 120 PEACE human being whom it attacked. He stayed there unperturbed, studied the disease calmly, and discovered its cause and how to prevent it. By his courage, he may have saved more lives than Hindenburg has destroyed. And not in medicine only, but in many other walks in life does Peace afford opportunity for the highest spirit. Never fear ! Men do not need to blow their fellows to atoms every fifteen or twenty years, in order to safeguard the vigor of the race. Through that brief space of Time which history records. Fate has watched, as in a review, the procession of empires and kingdoms, of princedoms and states. In the vast Despotisms of antiquity — China, Egypt, Assyria, Persia — the In- dividual is lost. In the Greek Republics the Individual grows rank, hysterical, un- able to work with his fellows; and each little State feels towards its neighbors such jealousy, hate, and fear that they are all consumed by their mutual, fiery 121 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE rivalry. Fate looks long at Rome which marches with an Imperial tread unknown till then — an Empire under which all tribes might prosper if they bowed to her primacy; but by and by the Reviewer sees the insufficiency, gives the signal Enough, and Rome falls in the dust. Lovingly and long Fate gazes at Venice, so nearly per- fect in so many ways, but too special, to meet the needs of an expanding world. Then Saracen, Ottoman, and Muscovite wheel slowly by, and the medieval Ger- man's political ideals, gargoyled like his buildings; but Fate sees their insufficiency and quenches them one by one. At last, behold a new dawn, and the vanguard of the American Republic rises above the horizon. Here is the promise for which the ages have waited; here the cul- mination which Fate has slowly prepared. The ample land, the foundations of Indi- vidual Liberty, the voluntary assembling of peoples of every tongue and tribe, the desire to dwell together in union and equality, all filled by the same ideals and 122 PEACE seeking the same goal — for the first time in history Man and Opportunity meet. The Past is Fate, and Fate has done this for us. But on our own wills depends the outcome: for we too are Fate, and through our choice, as through the elec- tric wires which supply invisible power to the loom, the web of the future is being woven. Are we choosing up or down.f* The career of mankind is a progressive escape out of the material, out of the animal, out of the mechanical stages into the moral and intellectual and spiritual. Has it not been proved since the time of Cheops, and long before him, that it is comparatively easy to organize a nation at the level of machines.'* The animal, too, is always breaking out and reverting to his primal ways. Democracy, the state in which each individual has rights, and free scope to develop to his maximum, and the maximum of each shall be for the benefit of all, has still to be tried. Despotism and half Despotism of all kinds inevitably plot to destroy it. On our action it depends 123 DEMOCRACY: DISCIPLINE: PEACE whether the next age shall be Despotic or Democratic. Let us set up and preserve a standard to which all good men may repair! THE END dbc Biter jJitie J^reitfji CAMBRIDGB . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 305 De Neve Drive • Parking Lot 17 • Box 951388 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095-1388 Return this material to thie library from which it was borrowed. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 954 612 8