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Tous les autres exemplaires originaux sont film«s en commenpant par la premiere page qui comporte une empreinte d'impression ou d'lllustration et en terminant par la derniire page qui comporte une telle empreinte. Un des symboles suivants apparaitra sur la derniire Image de cheque microfiche, selon le cas: le symbole — ♦» signifie "A SUIVRE", le symbole V signifie "FIN ". Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent «tre filmds A des taux de reduction diffdrents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour etre reproduit en un seul cllch«, II est film* i partir de I'angle supirieur gauche, de gauche it droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'Images n*cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mdthode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 MICROCOPY RESOlbHON TKT CHART ANSI nt-d ISO TEST CHART No 2 1.0 I.I 1.25 ^m iiiiiM 2.2 136 |40 mil 2.0 1.8 1-4 nil 1.6 ^ APPLIED IfVMGE Inc THE NEW POLITICS BY FRANK BUFFINGTON VROOMAN, B.Sc.(Oxon.), F.R.G.S. AuUwr of Theodore Rooievelt, Dynamic Geographer OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN BRANCH 35 WEST 3 2ND STREET NEW YORK |■<|^^■RI(,nT I,,, m- oxFoKi, i-.vi\i:rsit\ trkss .\Mi;k:c.w uram ii f TO ONK IN WHOM I Il.Wr. FOUND THAT RAKKST OF COMHIN ATION'S A liAKiNG IMA(UNATin.\ ANT) A ( ONSKKVATIVK J L'OGMENT MV IlkOTIIKR CA!M. VI-OOMA.\ CONTENTS Prefncf '*o» LttttT of Introduction ' Foreword 9 «3 Book I. Tm, P.iiloscpmv or Ishmael I. Political Chaos H. Ethics and Individualism '' mI' l^'' ^•'Paration of Ethics from Economic. 11 ,, Ir^ Separation of Ethic* from Politic. ,* V The Rise of the Democracy of Individuali.m k* V I. Spint of Jacobinism ' '5 Book II. The Philosophv of tub Common Good 1. Politics Hnd Kthics II. The Greek Contribution to Politics '*"! III. Paternalism "'* IV. Socialism '37 v. The Individual and Political Environment !*f VI. Foundations of Nationalism ' ' '73 Book III. The Democracy of Nationalism I. The Old Issue II. Nationality and the Public Domain '" III. Nationality and Internal Improvements. . . . .' 1" IV. Back to the People ' V. A Word about Sovei«iunty. * VI. The NationalParty '*' VII. To Sum It Up '" Epilogue .... »»3 PREFACE The reader will observe that this volume is neither a treatise nor a collection of essays. The result of the leisure hours of many busy days, the author has decided to let it go forth with all its repetition of phrase and idea, which, while doing violence to his literary tastes, he hopes has not been overdone in his effort to emphasize a few fundamental principles. The author desires to acknowledge his obligations to his brothers. Rev. Hiram Vrooman (Author of "Religion Rationalized") and Mr. Carl S. Vrooman (Author of "American Railway Problems," Oxford University Press, etc.), for their helpful criticisms; as well as to Professor Charles A. Beard (Columbia University). Perhaps here it will not be out of place, in behalf of his brother, the late Walter Vrooman, Founder of Rus- kin College, Oxford, for the author to extend to Profes- sor Beard for his assistance in that great movement those public acknowledgments of appreciation which his tragic and untimely death has made forever impos- sible. For of all the men Walter Vrooman gathered around himself at Oxford a dozen years ago, the writer personally knows, there was no one to whose zeal and abilities he attributed so much as to those of Professor Beard. Washington, D. C, July 4, 191 1. LETTER OF INTRODUCTION To Anglo-Saxon Youth : Young men and women of Great Britain and the United States, this century belongs to you. It will be what you make it. There is something fundamentally wrong in the civilization to which we were born. If you do not make it right it never will be righted, for something is being crystallized in the social melting pot and soon will be precipitated once for all — at least so far as this new world epoch is concerned upon which we are now entering. Your opportunity to-day is like the White Steed with hoofs of lightning in the Arab's fable. It will pass your way but once. If my observations have been to the point, they assure me that those of you, mostly, who have your ideals left — whom the "New Paganism" has passed over and left unscathed — are in little sympathy with that era of revo- lution and disintegration which is now coming to a close — the era of individualism — and which must come to a close if the British Empire and the American Republic are to endure — if the world-supremacy of the Anglo- Saxon is to be maintained. The question of national survival is offensive to the egotisms of our race. Commercial journalism and vaude- ville literature and candidates for office avoid it. But the sur\'ival of our nations on any terms recognizable to posterity as the states our fathers founded and died to 9 J lO LETTER OF INTRODUCTION found them so, depends upon the democracy of national- ism superseding the democracy of individualism, and whether your patriotism prompts you to give as much as your fathers gave. Are we not by this time sure — those of us who have dreamed that this world might be made a better place to live in— that the selfish instinct and brute force of the prehistoric man-beast on which our Politics and Eco- nomics are frankly founded, and in which are imbedded all democracies of individualism, are fundamentally and irretrievably wrong? Are we not to be more than wit- nesses of the passing of the civilization of the Ishmaelite and its sullen gospel of anarchy and rapine and strife? There is something the matter with the man who is satisfied with the world as it is and has been ; who can- not see that too much of the whole life struggle of the human race has been given to the bare maintenance of physical existence ; a game for the vast majority hardly "worth the candle." Christian civilization cannot be said to have penetrated, to say nothing of having permeated, a system which requires of the vast majority of the human race that virtually all the conscious hours of life be given up for insufficient food and clothes and place to sleep. If labor is the sole reward of a life of unremit- ting toil; if over and above all this hangs the two-edged sword of Damocles in the certainty of no better and the uncertainty of as good; if phantoms of weakness, pauperism, disease, and death lie in ambush in the road ahead for myriads of your brothers and sisters and mine, young man and young woman, and if you are still satis- fied with the world as you find it, that which is distinctly LETTER OF INTRODUCTION II human— certainly every vestige of the divine — has been left out of your nature, and you would better close this book here, for you will never be able to understand it. Let us hope that we are at the beginning of a new era, for we are certainly at the end of an old one. There is a new spirit abroad. It is not merely reaction, nor reform. It is renaissance. Anglo-Saxon youth is wak- ing to new ideals, embracing a new chivalry, embarking on a new crusade. There is a new ideal and a new faith. Give these a chance. Science will take care of itself. The emphasis this moment belongs on Soul, not Things. With our transitional age rent wide open in the cata- clysms of readjustment — the spirit of man limping so far behind his advance in material achievement — who would not lose faith in that new all-sufficiency, that new infallibility called science? The spirit of man must master science or science will destroy the spirit of man. A generation ago we were afraid it would disprove Gene- sis and make atheists of us. There is a greater menace. Is it not making materialists, and will not this make atheists of us? The spirit of this age is openly and pro- fessedly pagan. Our ethics and economics and Politics are founded on interests, not principles. The spirit of the age is a spirit of open and unblushing self-aggran- dizement. This boasted twentieth century world of ours is a world of Things. The best elements of human life are being suffocated in Things. Our morale is so low that we have sought to achieve success by any means which could be made to appear legal, and have thought no shame of a business system based frankly on an illimitable greed ; or of a Politics on the same foundations 12 LETTER OF INTRODUCTION without the fundamental consideration of right and wrong. What this century is to be depends on you. The future of the Anglo-Saxon race depends on what this century makes it. We cannot survive individualism. The future belongs to the or/anized races of mankind. Let us adopt a philosophy of life which will allow us to get together. We are all more or less lonesome. Let us have a social philosophy without socialism. Let us understand that more good may be wrought by working together for tlie same thing than by working against each other for the same thing. Let us know that if ever there is to be "peace on earth," there must first be "good will toward men." Let us entertain great ideals and seek great aims. We are no longer doers of great deeds. We are makers of great trades. Where once were heroes are money heaps, degeneracies and decay. Great deeds may be wrought again where luxury and idleness walk hand in hand to-day. The spirit of our fathers may return— the spirit which founded great nations, fought great battles, bequeathed great principles, recorded great deeds, registered great prayers. Where George Wash- ington carried the surveyor's compass through the path- less woods and started the advancing hosts of American :onquerors over the Alleghanies, what have we to-day? Pittsburg ! Where the land is dim from tyranny There tiny pleasures occupy the place Of glories, and of duties : as the feet Of fabled fairies when the sun goes down Trip o'er the ground where wrestlers strove by day. The Author. '•Disthu/Hishcd German philosophers who may acci- dentally east a glance over these pages zvill superciliously shrug their shoulders at the mcagerness and incomplete- ness of all that zMch I here offer. But they will be kind enough to bear in mind that the little which I say is expressed clearly and intelligently, whereas their ozvn zvorks. although very profound— unfathomably profound —very deep—stupenduously deep— are in the same de- gree unintelligible. Of zvhat benefit to the people is the grain locked aivay in the granaries to which they have no key? The masses are famishing for hwzdedge and zvill thank me for the portion of intellectual bread, small though it be, zvhich I honestly share zvith them. I believe it is not lack of ability that holds back the majority of German scholars from discussing religion and philosophy in proper language. I believe it is a fear of the results of their ozvn studies zvhich they dare not communicate to the masses. I do not share this fear, for I am not a learned scholar; I myself am of the people. I am not one of the seven hundred zvisc men of Germany. I stand zvith the great nias.^cs at the portals of their zvis- dom. And if a truth slips through, and if this truth falls m my zvay. then I zvrite it zvith pretty letters on paper, and give it to the compositor, zvho sets it in leaden type and gives it to the printer; the latter prints it and then if belongs to the zvhole ti-orW."— Heine, Religion and Pliilosophy. rj BOOK I THE PHILOSOPHY OF ISHMAEL 15 CHAPTER I. POLITICAL CHAOS The chaos reigning over Anglo-Saxon Politics to- day is a pathetic commentary upon the vanity of all human hopes. We find everywhere democracy dis- credited and a disappointment, and liberalism bankrupt, and that after all the millennial dreams of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Everywhere we see simul- taneously, in the old world and the new. liberalism leap- ing with starving avidity upon the program of socialism, with no justification in logic and with no excuse but its own sterility and emptiness. In England it is Cob- denism, which represents the democracy of ir ual- ism and lahscc fairc, abandoning the principle^ /hich once made it a rationally consistent (for it never was a consistently rational) political creed, for a program of socialistic opportunism. The only difference between British Liberalism and its present tendencies, and British socialism and its present status, is that socialism is built in the foundations of principles consistent with its articles, whereas modern liberalism issues a propaganda whose articles are founded on che principles of neither individualism nor socialism. This political melange is a sorry commentary on the intelligence, or on the sin- cerity, of modern British liberal statesmen. In the United States it is the self-styled JefTersonian democrats who, in the very moment of shouting for the Declaration of Independence (which they still consider, 17 ,8 THE NEW POLITICS by the wav. a political issue), abamlon ever>- principle of the iiKliviilualisin which gave it birth atul clamor for an extension of national Roverninent to a degree even un- dreamed of by Alexarder Hamilton— extending JefTer- son's theory of a national government, which he de- clared must be a department for foreign affairs only, to the extent of government ownership of radroads. Whether this is a puerile abandonment of every vestige of political theory, and every safeguard of political principle, or a shameless opportunist appeal to catch the pjpular "ote. it is. in either ca c. a pathetic spectacle and illustrates the inadequacy of individualism as a workmg theory of life. How rapidly the world is drifting away from the theories of Rousseau, that organization is a blunder and civilization a crime, and of Adam Smith, of the essential harmony of discord, may be seen by the way the loudest professors of these doctrines are turmng to socialism. . Anglo-Saxon Politics is opportunist and destitute of a guiding principle. Starting off over a hundred years ago with the negative idea that we should keep just as near anarchy as possible and still have an excuse for a government, we, the American contingent, have blun- dered along making such headway as was necessary to a race which blind luck had given the best chances in the history of humanity; making such progress as we could not well avoid because of our geographical and economic position. Neither England nor America enjoys the luxury of solitude in its political confusions. The whole Anglo- Saxon world presents a political chaos, in which all POLITICAL CH vOS 19 parties are indiscriminately mixed; devoid of any funda- metital line of cleavage and iutiocent of the very sus- picion of a first principle. We arc brought to face the indisputable fact that laissec fairc liberalism is inadequate to tlie necessities of twentieth century politics, or to any national life in its foreign relations or its domestic concerns. If there is to Iw an .Anglo-Saxon hereafter, the day has come for something more than the political opportunist. We must understand that the party boss is a traitor to his country, and that there is just now no treason more worthy dire and summary doom than the selfish program of the individ^'alist. I challenge i • pretensions of the modern individualist, Republican or Democrat : the hisses faire liberal whose latitudinarianism is sufficiently spacious to engulf a socialistic program. I challenge his right to political leadership on the ground that he himself does not know where he stands; that there is fundamental and irre- mediable antagonism between his policies and his politics ; that his inherent and opportunist ideas, the best of which are without root in any rational system, have been sown into such a jungle of political undergrowth as to unfit him for serious leadership in any national or imperial crisis. Politically, the Anglo-Saxon peoples have instinctively felt where they could not see their way. They have groped blindly toward a saner future, toward a juster social environment, and, to a limited extent, have actually incorporated into their national institutions certain great principles which they have not yet recognized as such. 20 THE NEW POLITICS We have made one great blunder, and that is, in the assumption that the world of politics is a chance world and not built in law and order ; that it is a hisses faire world over which is written, "Abandon reason all ye who enter here." There is no political science in America far separated from the science of demagogj- — of manipulating shib- boleths and news])apers, and controlling those forces which control public oi)inion — which fills public office with men and clothes men with power, and too often prostitutes power to tyranny. We have come to a point in the history of the United States when we can foresee the ilestruction of our lib- erties. The failure of the democracy of individualism is registered in the multibillionaire. "Felix qui potuit rcriim cognosccrc caitsas," quoth Virgil. The time has come for some fundamental thinking. We must go straight back to first principles and reex- amine and restate our political creed. Frankly, we are getting tired of hiisscs faire — the Ishmaelite theory of a free scramble with every man's hand against his brotlier. We may see all over the ci\il- ized world to-day a drift away fmrn the individualism and anarchy of the cighteentli century — a movement in every realm of liuman tliou.^ht and action toward coordination, combination, organization, socialization. There is a danger that this movement may proceed too far. In politics this would plunge us into socialism. The world is growing weary of individualism and lonely in its unsocial life and thought. It is quite certain we are POLITICAL CHAOS 21 through with the revoUitioiiary ideas of the eigliteenth century. It is not at all certain we will not go to the other extreme. We have seen in the nineteenth century the movement away from laisscs fairc and toward nationality in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain, and United States. But there is another world- movement alongside it, and that is socialism. In the Anglo-Saxon world the reaction from individ- ualism is toward socialism. The question arises, can we not find a middle ground common to what is true in both these antithetic systems, excluding, as far as possible, what is false in both, in what might be called the democracy of nationalism — a nationalism which is really democratic, and which is at the same time rational, ethical, and efficient, a national- ism based on the idea that the state has an etliical foun- dation and a moral mission? That the state is a mere contrainion devised for the protection of "vested interests"; for securing a laisscs fairc competition to guarantee a free field in which the strong and cunning prey upon the weak is a conception which is losing its hold upon the humaner elements of mankind. The American people need a reexamination of their political faith, a realignment of political parties. There is no evidence that our "statesmen" will essay this task. Has not the time come for some one at least to raise the question? Is it not time to strike a new note, to insist upon finding a fundamental political idea, to discover an elemental line of cleavage, if there be such, between the two great political parties? Is there anywhere ground for hope of a realignment of parties along the line of 22 THE NEW POLITICS cleavage, which appears more or less distinctly from the beginning of American Politics to the present day; of abandoning the selfish and whimsical opportunism which constitutes the center and circumference of American political life and building toward a sound and rational future, toward an ethical and constructive democracy, on the basis of a few principles whose value has been amply demonstrated in a century and a third of our national existence? Shall we have a political philosophy in this country? If so shall it be also an ethical philosophy? Is there enough moral fiber among us to shift the foundations of American Politics from interests to principles? Are we capable of rising above the plane of profit and loss? Are we completely besotted in our selfishness, or have we sufficient intelligence to serve as a clearing house for fir=t principles? Dare we hope that the riot and anarchy of self-interest, the void )f reason and ethic which prevails in our political machines, plat- forms, speeches, and bosses shall give way to a succinct challenge of principles under which issues will take care of themselves? Shall we meet the twentieth century issue squarely in the approaching titanic struggle between the democracy of individualism and the democracy of ethical and con- structive statecraft? The first thing we want is our fundamental idea. For behind political policies is — or ought to be — a rational Politics. And behind a theory of political association is a theor>' of life. And the fundamental fault in American Politics is the American theory of life, and that theory of life is egoism, individualism, breaking POLITICAL CHAOS 23 out now as commercialism, now as financialism— always materialism. We have played all the variations on freedom and equality, individual liberty, natural rights. These hav.; become the undisputed theoretical possession of man- / kind. We want a nev; viotif. That motif is the common good. We have laid claim to all our rights and some of us to more. Who wants to name his duties? We have harped on tlie phrases of the Declaration of Independ- ence until the harp is out of tune. We must turn to the purposive, ethical mission named in the preamble to/ the Constitution "To promote the general welfare." Th? task of the statesman of the twentieth century is to protest without calculation against the hell of indi- vidualism; to create a rational theory of political asso- ciation on American and real democratic foundations, drag it up from the turmoil of conflict, give it ethical motive and rational form, and breathe into it a spirit which shall lift it to the level of a patriotism. Our task is to discover the principles underlying our great movements, the unclassified upward struggles of a mighty people; to be able intelligently to guide the rebound of political theory and practical statecraft in the present and unmistakable reaction from the extreme of individualism to the extreme of socialism. To crush" anarchy and prevent socialism ; to hew the highway straight for the middle way; to direct the development ot American Politics on safe and yet human lines — this is our task. The best way of framing a rational Politics is to begin 24 THE NEW POLITICS by reading history backward. If we have a nation, a national hfe, and a national idea, national institutions worth preserving or worth improving, no one will deny the right of search for those principles which have made us a nation instead of a bunch of feeble and warring States. It is no more difficuU to trace the history of an organic and rational Union back to the atomism of Con- federation and State Rights than to trace a rational and orderly universe back to the fire mist. From such a proc- ess we may do more than draw seemly conclusions. We may discover laws and principles, and they always lie alongside law and principle. As in physics or astronomy, so in politics. It is scarcely suffit t that eacli expanc'ing bosom solemnly announce as law such theories as seem to him good. As to first principles in politics, history leaves the only unimpeachable testi- monies. For after all, there is some truth in Freeman's favorite phrase that history is past politics and politics is present history. Is there not some abiding principle somewhere out- side individualism and socialism— outside unorganized or organized selfisli instinct— by which we can regulate our political life, and wh. ch will oflfer a rationale for human existence and present the basis of an environment where the spirit may Yve and man may grow? De Tocqueville pointed out over two generations ago that the progress of democracy meant the final annihila- tion of those ties which held together the old regime; and that anarchy would follow the disintegrating process. Th'- is exactly what has happened, for perhaps in America more than in any other country where democ- POLITICAL CHAOS 25 racy has gained headway, the principles which brought democracy into being have issued through laisscs faire into a free-for-all race with no recognition of the prin- ciples of handicap, in which industrially, commercially, and financially, competition has at last destroyed or is destroying itself. The principle as a working theory of life was beneficial to a certain epoch with certain con- ditions intolerable because things were so bad that any- thing which would destroy would benefit. After its revolutionary work was done, it became a denial of law and order and the rationale of law and order, except as law and order were considered as a very crude protec- tion of the individual against violence aimed at his person or property. It was not to the interest of the exploiter, the financier, the politician (in the American sense and spelled with a small "p") to have the weak protected or to have the devious methods of cunning subject to the state control. Thus democracy arose in individualism, and individ- ualism in anarchy, and anarchy is protest against human government. The democracy of individualism arose when anarchy compromised with such government as was considered a necessary evil and would protect life and property from overt physical force, leaving wide open all the approaches to cunning, exploitation, and chicanery. Here is where the experiment of the democ- racy of individualism has failed in every European country, and wliere in the Western Hemisphere it stands to-day discredited and a disappointment. This is why, the world over to-day, liberalism is bankrupt. Out of the existing confusions of prevailing atomism 26 THE NEW POLITICS which nowhere contain the potency of an ethical state, certain new elements appear, both ethical and rational, which give the promise of an adequate environment for that mighty organism of humanity, whicli shall some day do no violence to the thought of God. Tlie individualism of the eighteenth century has been weiglied and found wanting. Our ethical Hedonism is an inadequate foundation for a rational state. Professor Butcher says that the Epicurean theory of the state, an association for the protection of rights and nothing more, "gained acceptance in the decline of Greek life and was itself a symptom of decline," and Lecky says of it, tliat it has "proved little more than a principle of disintegration or an apology for vice." "Anarchy is the creed of unreason in Politics." says the late Pro- fessor Ritcliie, "and is a political philosophy only in the sense in which absolute scepticism may be called a meta- pliysical system." f Natural Rights, Pref.) The story is told of the boyhood of Epicurus, that, with his teacher, he was reading the lines of Hesiod : Ihiit /uv TzpiuTtaa A'anf Y-'-'-'t "-"'"^P stzhtu A Oaviirutv "Eldest of beings, Chaos first arose, Thence Earth wide stretched, the steadfast seat of all The Immortals." The inquisitive youth at once asked his preceptor, "And Chaos whence?" Whence Chaos? From Epicurus I should say. CHAPTER II ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM There is naught in these pages inteUigible to any man with whom it is not agreed at Jie outset that nothing human can be settled apart from the ethical con- sideration. The problems of politi' j will be held as unsolvable without going back to the everlasting questions of right and wrong and rationality. By reason of their essential nature, they invade those chaotic voids which individual- ism has bereft of law and order and where a state of anarchy has left free play for an unbridled scramble for the wealth, place, and power of the world; wliere the greeds and hatreds of men masquerade under the unctuous catchwords oi Jacobinism: "freedom of con- tract," "free trade," "free competition," "individual ini- tiative," laissec fairc, etc. These phrases once had a meaning. But they no longer even cloak the hypocrisy and greed they once tried to expose. What we want to-day is an ethical theory of politics based on an ethical theory of life. If we agree to agree so far with Kant that the only unconditioned good in the universe is the element of good will, we must abandon at once the whole theory of in- dividualism, that "free competition" where the big eat the little, and both the politics and economics which are the conclusions of a philosophy of life which justifies a man's selfishness to himself. 2? M jS Till-: XKW POLITICS But tlic ctliical form is not enough. Art and Science are powerless to accouche the new age because tlie ethi- cal objective is incomplete without its sjjring ami motive force, tlie ethical subjective. Xo beni,i,Mi future lies over the sensuous hills of ci>lor and form, and there is no "surcease of sorrow" fnjm "man's inhumanity to man," without the viial fountain of all rational human conduct, the ctliical motive of ijood ivill. Our ground ideas must not only provide an answer which shall say why a soldier will rush to death in battle for his country or why men toil without hope of reward, that life may be sweeter for those still unborn, but they must somewhere unfold a faitli puissant and adequate to kindle patriotic fires and inspire the spirit o:' liolitical heroism once more. \\t must find that which not only accounts for nobility of life, but which cads it forth. Any political theory neglecting this elenic-at is false or faulty because Politics looks forward as well as backward, and considers the ought a^ well as *; e fact. If we are to solve our political problems, wx must first know what is the matter with us. The matt**! with us is that our theory of life dominates our politics and economics and our theory of life is a slightly modified Epicurean Hedonism, egoism, atomism, anarchy. The most of us are too old in heart if not too old in years to face the present economic anarchy with an ethical ideal and a principle and a point of view. Shall the present "moral wave" sweep over this country, then blow out a stop cock and escape in hissing steam? Is it any more than a craze ? Will it last longer and accom- plish more than our mad, national enthusiasm for ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 29 I Trilby's foot or Teddy's bear? We Americans are mercurial. We do not hold form or heat. Just now we are very angry because we have been buncoed by a set of financiers whom a little while ago we worshiped as certain gilt deities of a new order of Golden Rule. Now we, the American people, d(j nut like t(j be buncoed. In our indignation we resort at once to writing a few articles and making a few speeches. Then when we have blown our blast — lawyers, preachers, journalists, artists, professors, stockholders and hired men among us — we step ciieerfully into the procession again and stand in line with an open and irritated palm behind our back and without batting an eye, take our tip like a head waiter. Let it be made as clear as possible just here that no one in these days but tlie professional anarchist lays claim to the theory of pure individualism. Those who classify themselves under this category profess to believe in a highly modified article, and there are as many modi- fications as there are individualists. It is plain that any attempt to define them all would lead to an unending confusion. I beg to refer at once, therefore, to the some- what brief and inadequate definition of individualism in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. "Individualism is : "(i) Regard for cxclusk'c or crccsstTT self- interest. "(2) The doctrine that the pursuit of self -interest and the exercise of individual initiative should be little or not at all restrained by the state and that the function of government should be reduced to the lowest possible terms." 1 30 THl- NEW POLITICS ' The definition goes on to state that in ethics the term is apphed to those theories deriving the moral .deal or standard from the individual man. I hope, however, the contention will be considere it may be applied to Anglo-Saxon Politics since the century of individualism and revolution. Instead, we have, for the most part, the tragedy of the frank avowal of a life philosophy which faces the universe and attempts its riddles upon the simple propo- sition: "What is there in it for me?" We have ex- posed the age we live in to a criticism as old as Plato's restrictions on Antisthenes and the Cynics who ignored all they could not "grasp with teeth and hands." It is a sorry coincidence that our national life had its beginning in that era which, more than any other era of recorded history, was fullest of the disintegrating phi- losophy which was revolt against rationality, govern- ment, architectonic statecraft. If. later, we turned our- selves to constructive state-building it was only because the wiser men among the fathers found that Jacobinism offered no rational foundation for an enduring state; 3-2 Till- NKVV POLITICS and tlins one was made out of thirteen— surely an un- lucky number. Tlnis it came that tliis "business tIieor\- of the state" of (uirs, l)asc(I on llie Kpicureati etln'cs and tlieorv of life. is tliat into whidi (in r new American nation was b an( 1. as it were, l>a|.tized. At bottom orn. we are stil Hedonists in morals and atomists s in iM)litics. A serious survey of the sordid and pathetic spectacle of American Politics— a calm perusal of the selfish and uiiiiitellifjent story of American political history— will not justify the Fourth of Jidy orations which have been emptied upon them, nor tlie American Jacobinism which is here dis- closed. The ethics of individualistu has majjnified the acquisi- tive instinct. It is tlie system winch, in justifying a man's selfishness to himself, has carried on the work of the disintcfjration of society and of our political in.stitu- tions until our whole contribution of modern democracy has been framed with reference to the su^r-ess and per- petuation of the acquisitive instinct. A political system founded on interests, not princijiles, can meet with no other fate. An economic system framed in the interests f>f "economic man" which (one cann(.t say who) is simply a covetous machine, can reach no other conclusions than to present us with one man who owns or controls one- eleventh of all tlie wealth of the richest nation the world has ever seen. How soon will he control it all? The narrow Hedonists to whom we owe our .tjround idea in ethics, economics, and politics, framed a strinsj of notions so concrenial to the immature and unregen- ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 33 eratc soul of man that tliev- have been followed niore joyously, atid their teachings lived up to more piously, tlian any other ethical system devised by man. It is so >im|)lc. Tliere is but one ethical motive — appetite. /\1I iiideavor is prompted by appetite. The desire for selfibh ;,'ratilication is the fount from which all blessings flow. Ihcre is but one standard of judgment — the selfish opinion of an egoist. There is one mainspring of action — tlie desire for one's own selfish gratification. "What- soever, ' quoth Ilobbes in Leviathan, "is the object of any man's ai)i)etite or desire, that it is which he for his ])art calicth good, and the object of his hate and aversion, evil." My pleasure is my siiiniiitiin boniim, and as I am the only judge of what I want, I am the only judge nf my chief good. Thus Ilobbes, and his disciples, I-ocke, Rousseau, and all otlier Epicureans and Utili- tarian atomists and materialists before and since his day. Tliis is the prevailing Anglo-Sa.xon theory of ethics. Tliis is the foundation of our politics, and economics, and much of our religion. Tliis is the si!ii;,1e ethics of individualism. The individualism of to-day is different from what it was in the first crude and barbarous ebullition of its youth simply and solely because men found they could not hold society together and lead the lives of human beings while allowing the selfish instincts of the strong and cunning to run rampant and uncontrolled by society. Adam Smith's contention that the good of all would some- how follow the selfish antagonism of each, soon found itself enveloped in a halo of interrogation points in the factory legislation and the great masses of other acts 1 34 THE Xi:\V POLITICS passed since liis day, every one of whicli has llatly denied his fundamental (hesis. Eigliteenth century indivichiahsm offered no otlicr standard of action tlian acquiring profit and esca{)ing harm. It became the principle of the political philosopliy of the French and luiglish-speaking peoples, and has dominated them for a hundred and fifty years. Hobhes's theory of the reduction of all tlie activities of the human will to self-preservation and self-indulgence, in other words, to a modern Epicureanism, became the philo- sophical foundation of those forces of individualism whicli dominate whatever of political theory we have in America, showing itself in the "business theory of state." One need not look far to see how the creed of Ben- tham, that benevolence must give way to self-interest; of James Mill, that there is no place in a theory of society for a moral sense; of Malthus, who opposed brute instinct to benevolence as the foundation of ethics and of the busi- ness and social order; of the Manchester school, which brooked no legislative control of industrial-commercial ra\ening more than maniacal — demoniacal — how these and other such monstrous beliefs prevailing in a world nominally Christian and really individualistic, have domi- nated nineteenth century civilization, and to this day. If the French Revolution was the offspring of individualism, no less was the commercial and industrial anarchy of England, which has so much to answer for in dies tree, for every hollow-eyed child of the tens of thousands of unhappy children whose very flesh and bones were woven into the cotton fabrics of Manchester and ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 35 r.irniin^rliani, who.se souls were transformed by the alchemy of iiicliviclualisiii into the golden foundations of l-.ngland's wealth. Bcntham and James X 11, indectl tii.- whole early school of laisscc fairc econom^ts and Radirals, preached a simple way to the millei.Mnm. All that kept humanity fp:ni achieving it were aristocratic rule and monarchic Kcvcrnment. Sweep these away and place the manu- facturer and millionaire tradesman in the place of king and noble, and labor would be protected and mankind would come to its own. The middle classes would guar- antee tiie lower classes in their rights. The younger Mill, seeing the miserable failure of these crude dreams, lost much of his early faith in democracy ; i. e., the democracy of individualism which he grew to look upon as \hi misrule of mediocrity which would crowd the higher ^ irtues of mankind to the wall, enslaved by an insidious despotism. A dead weight of democratic conservatism, massed and bound in its own inertia, would, because of its own incapacity for framing a rational program, set itself across the path of progress and keep the status (j!ii> by a policy of veto. It is greatly to die credit of Mill that his defense of utilitarianism has done more to undermine the system tlian any other book written in his century. If he accepted Bentham's doctrine of pleasure and pain he transmitted the dogma through his own superb character into something totally different from what Bentham actually taught. In a nutshell. Mill taught that happiness IS the result of goodness ; therefore, the love of pleasure IS the love of virtue; and, therefore, the pursuit of virtue ■I % 3^' THE NEW POLITICS IS the pursuit of pleasure. But Mill, with all his powers of argument, has not been able to make real morality subservient to Hedonism. A system must be judged by us effect upon tlie masses of mankind and disinterested acts of self-sacrifice will never be done by the masses -for tiie fun of i,." To say that tlie patriot immolates himself on tiie ahar of his country because it is a pleasure to h.in IS to beg the question. It is to deny the existence of a disinterested motive. It might be admitted tliat Morence Nightingale or Clara Barton found more pleas- ure m ministering to human suffering than in a life de- voted to the game. c. g.. of social precedence. I5ut unfortunately tlie majority of the human race is not constituted that way. Therefore, the doctrine of pleas- ure and pain-utilitarianism-does not mean the same to them. This d„ctrine means to the masses of mankind that pleasure is self-in.hilgence, and. to the masses of mankind under utilitarianism, self-indulgence is erected .nto a moral principle. B. this is assuredly and openly admitted by the classical economists ^vllose millennium hes m the direction of each indivi.h.al pursuing his own pleasure: i. e., the masses of mankin-- ^'- country. He goes into battle and gets hnuself shot because it gives pleasure to a patnot to get hi.nself shot. A man loves his son. He does tlKngs for his son because it gives the father pleas- ure. Rut this is no adequate account of patriotic or paternal love. Neither a home nor a nation can be budt upon .t. American Politics needs a new patriotism a.Kl patnofsm is not possible under a strict individualist theory of life. Mill cut away the last prop from the totcering utili- tanamsm m which he was nurtured in his essay on Bentham After a searching criticism of Bentham's theory of hfe (which is the first question to raise, he claims m regard to any man of speculation) he shows how httle It can do for the individual. Then he shows how much less it can do for society. It will do nothing for the spiritual interests of society ("except sometimes as an instrument in the hands of some higher doctrine"^. That which alone causes any material interests to exisi which alone enables any body of human beings to exist' as a society, is national character; that it is which causes a nation to succeed in what it attempts, another to fail- one nation to understand and aspire to elevated thin^^s' another to grovel in mean ones; which makes the great- ness of one nation lasting and dooms another to eariy and rapid decay." ^ Bentham made the mistake "of supposing that the -.ne.s part of human affairs was the whole of them busir 38 THE NEW POLITICS all at least that the legislator and moralist ha. do with. Again. -. thilosothy of hnvs aud institutions not founded on a thUosothy of national character is an absurdity." Miirs statcnient is irrefutably true. It is wliere the whole school of philosophic radicals and orthodox econonnsts nuserably failed in being unequal to framing a theory of politics or econon.ics on any but the founda- tions of n^aterialism. Their fault was fundamental. Ihcr theory of life was wrong. It nowhere contained the elements necessary to a sound philosophy of national character It was incapable of supporting a rational heory of national character because it held no rational theory of individual character. The theory was un- social. It predicated of the state-of society-of liumanity, so many human units in a state of war It denied the element of good will. Each man was trying to get the most pleasure and escape the n,ost pain This theory of life, in short, was what Hobson calls "the protean fallacy of individualism, which feigns the exist- ence of separate individuals by abstracting and neglect- ing the social relations which belong to them and make them what they are." Mill's growth is all tiie more interesting in that the Anglo-Saxon world has not kept up with it. We are still as a race groveling in the lairs of individualism which this man grew up in and grew out of Woodrow Wilson has sai.l In a recent thought- ful address before the National Bar Association. "The whole history^ of liberty has been a struggle for the ETHICS AND INDIVlDUALISxM 39 recogtiition of rights not only, but for the embodiment of rights m law. in courts and magistrates and assemblies." This is an exact statement of the modern highest type of much modified individualism. Where the nationalist will take academic issue with him is in that lie nt 'ects entirely the element of reciprocity. It is always and only rights." The nationalist would say, "The whole history of freedom has been a struggle for a recognition of rights not only, but an assertion of duties, and the embodiment ot obligations as well as rights of both man and nation in law, in courts and magistrates and assemblies." This is a statement of nationalism, the old and the new. It is here that individualism fails. It neglects the principle of reciprocity, which is the soul of sociality It offers a declaration of rights and no duties, and we cannot avoid the conclusion of Thomas Hill Green that "all rights are relative to moral ends or duties " This system declares for all rights and no duties, and sets up boundaries between individuals through which the gates swing but one way. When the element of duties enters it means simply that what the individual does not wish to be done to himself he must not do to others. The principle of ethical democracy cncers in the voluntary aspect of reciprocity, that the reciprocal law is not imposed from without but from within. Thus we may see that a philosophy of rights and duties, or reci- procity, ,s simply a realization (if only in the ideal) of the Golden Rule. 40 THE NEW POLITICS The soul of the democracy of altruism is reciprocity- tl^e Golden Rule. Individualism is based on the phi- losophy of hfe, which is a search after happiness without ul.hgafons, and this theory of rights, stated by individ- ualism, means every time, under analysis, brute suprem- acy, and, behmd it, the sanction of might. Tiie weak perish; the strong win.' Individualism, therefore, is the bulwark of the con- tent,on tl,at Might is Right. Starting with the proposi- .on ,„ poht.c. which, in economics, Adam Smith, and he other economists have preached to the business vorld for a hundred years, Hobbes claimed that the selfishness of many conduces to the happiness of all -asm.ch as the state is a machine for purposes o^ reahzmg enhghtened selfishness. "Two conceptions " says Arnold Toynbee, "are woven into every ar^me;t of mdudual hberty, and conviction that Man's self-love IS God s providence, that the individual in pursuing his own interest ,s promoting the welfare of all." It is easy to see that, if under a political or economic mechanism! selfishness works toward good, selfishness becomes a moral principle and makes Might Right But then this is the theory of laisscc faire-free and unl,mned_competition, where the strong or the cunning memory, ha,l adiure.l hi, coM a/ues^Tr '""P'"""" ^^ich will .,o honor to his classes, to open bureaux orcharity.oest^.'.'"^ "rr""'"""" '"^ '°' °' '^'-^ng arose : they passe,i on ?I^, ".'f^^^ workshops for labor. A low noise to a dcclara' on of rights The p'Zt. " '° •*'' " ''^^''^^"'°" "' "utie! .hat there were " quifbUngs thercTnw' "h"" ''>T"' ^''"' "'"'^eau wrote Mirabea. called a quibble was a revo.uron" ' '°"''"' '^"'^'^•' ^'"^ •• Thus the two doctrines began to separate." (Louis Bhnc. French Rtvolution. vol. i. p. sSi.) ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 41 win. For if they win it is on the principle that each acts for his own interest, and that the rtsultant is the aggregate of individual good, there being no common good. So thai Thomas Hill Green's caustic criticism of the theor>- of Hobbes (Principles of Political Obligation, P- 370, par. 47 \ is unanswerable: "Where there is no recognition of a common good there can be no right in any other sense than power." It is the doctrine we are accustomed to under the regime of individualism, in the absence of ethics or the possibility of etiiics. under free trade laisscz faire where the weak perish and the strong or cunning win' where the selfishness of the many is the good of the all' This fundamental and false foundation of the democracy of individualism makes two things necessary-that Might makes right and that Progress is fortuitous and not rational. I say that this apotheosis of unrestrained and irre- sponsible greed called individualism, and which, reduced to Its lowest terms, presents self-seeking as the sole object of the human will, is the negation of all ethics and all religions, and is not the motive, nor does it lie in the direction of the highest development of the human race. That theory of life called individualism, which has ruled with scarcely a shadow of turning the life history of this planet for a myriad of centuries before there ever came a creature who could frame a theory of life is only too palpably insufficient for a modern state, in' its ideal, Its motive, and its point of view. Its ideal is that each particular organism confined to .#1 4-' THE NEW POLITICS Its particular torso shall manage to thrill to as many as possible pleasurable sensations (and as few painful ones) before m the course of human events it ceases to respond to anything at all. Its motive is self-interest. Its point of view is self. This is individualism. This is the philosophy of Ishmael. This is the philosophy of life of the Anglo-Saxon world to-day. It may not be confined to the An-do- Saxon world, but the world's business is being carried'on and the world's life is being lived under a philosophy of hfe which has no adequate ethical foundation, and IS devoid of the very possibility of an ethical foundation. Pe.I.aps I may be permitted to register a personal con- viction that the present world activity, world aim. and outlook will never be profoundlv modified except by a world religious movement. Should ever we find an abso- utely true ethical philosophy it can appeal only to a few It will be adequate to such philosophers as may both comprehend, believe, and follow it. It will sustain those who already constitute the elect, but for the strugc^lin^ and stricken hordes of humanity, their souls can never be welded into a fundamental and sustaining prin- ciple except in the white heat of passion. Ethical sys- tems will continue to throw light upon the pathways of men, but men are so constituted they must haye heat as well as light, and action must follow direction and behind knowledge there must be the active will It has been growing upon me the more I read of ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 43 human history, and the more I see of my fellow men. that what this world needs more than all else just now,' •s not so mu-h more knowledge as living up to the best we know. It needs Kant's only unconditional good—good will. CIIAPTKR III THE SEPARATION- OF ETHICS FROM ECONOMICS Tl,e divorce of ethics from modern economic theory has resuhed in the separation o. n.orals from modern bus.nes. hfe. This separation is due more to Adam fem.th tiian to any other man wI,o ever lived, excepting perhaps the man wiio di- which isolated the human bodv, separated it from soul, stated human life in terms of chemistry and spirit in terms of physics, e. g., a mode of motion. The divorce of ethics from economics has resulted in what Carlyle characterized as the "dismal science " Hence the Englishman under the system of economic 46 TFIF. XF.W POLITICS ni.l.vuiualisni which flowcrcl „„t of the fJIasRow School "ito the Manchester School became si.ch a creature that to awaken his real beliefs Carlvlc sai.I of him: "Vou must descend to his stomach, purse, and adjacent regions. 'Ihis "dismal science" was founde.l on an attempt to create a certain phase ..f human economics without reference to the Inmian. having foisted in its place a certain "covetous machine" which for want of a l>etter name-or worse-was calle'. p. 157.) Alas, to fail from jealousies, dissensions, strifes— individualism— at last! One is not surprised at the political ideals of the Re- tiaissance. when he knows something of the ferocity of the people of the period. But one of the tragic things over which a man of ethical insight loses his reputation ETHICS AN'D POLITICS 59 for patience, if not his faith in mankind, is the spectacle of Machiavelhanism triunipliant in the twentieth century. Says Lord Acton of Machiavelli (Introduction t(j II Principe. Essays on Liberty, p. 231 ) : "He is the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world. Religion, progressive enlighten- ment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion have not reduced his empire. ... He obtains a new lease of life from causes that are still prevailing and from doctrines that are still apparent in politics, philosophy, and science. . . . We find him near our common level ... a con- stant and contemporary influence . . . rationally intel- ligible when illustrated by lights falling, not only from the century he wrote in but from our own. which has seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime." This age. with its life and thought— especially its economic and political theories— is thrice accursed in that like the criminal of old it is condemned to carry a corps* chained to its back — the corpse of Machiavelli. Machiavelli was first among the modern advocates (not first in time but first in his i.align ixiwer)— first to state clearly the political theory tvhicli justifies a man's selfishness to himself. This is what Christendom, and science, and philosophy have not yet refuted but adopted — what the "Christian" world stands for; whose doctrine modern life apologizes for — this historian of "not the desperate resources of politicians at bay, but the avowed practice of decorous and religious magistrates."— (Lord Acton.) Who has not read The Prince? Who has tried to f >* 60 THE NEW POLITICS take any responsible part in the worlds life, or has read any considerable record of it in the histories of men dead and gone, or in the last morning paper, who has not run up against the openly avowed principles of The Prince? To be sure we have not many of us been sti- lettoed or poisoned, unless a few by the distinguished countrymen of our philosopher whoiTi we have, in our loving kindness, made our honored guests at Ellis Island, and given the Black Hand the glad hand ! Felicitations to our superlative complacency I One finds room to mention but one example, and that briefly. Let us say of Caesar Borgia, "vulgarly spoken of as Duke Valentino," who laid broad the foundations "whereon to rest his future power." Let us see just what this man Machiavelli means — this man who, more nearly than Jesus, rules the world to-day. Speaking of the Duke, the historian philoso- phizes : "And since this part of his conduct merits both attention and imitation I shall not pass over it in silence." The subjugation of Romagna to the Holy See was accomplished on paving stones of assassination. The Duke set over it, in order to establish 'good government,' Messer Romeiro d'Orco, who, with 'much credit to him- self,' restored it to tranquillity and order. . . . Knowing that past severities had generated ill-feeling against him- self . . . and availing himself of the pretext which this afforded, he one morning caused Romeiro (who had but served him faithfully) to be beheaded and exposed in the market place of Cesera with a black and bloody ax by his side. The barbarity of which spectacle at once astounded and satisfied the populace." ETHICS AND POLITICS 6i This is one of the incidents to merit "both attention and imitation." After relating much more and perhaps worse of this man, the philosopher and founder of modern political ethics says without a shiver: "Taking all tliese actions of the Duke together, I can find no fault with him." Taine, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art (p. 97 ct seq. ), brings out very clearly the fact that political ethics — indeed, morality in general — is not at all depend- ent upon culture and art. He cites the case of Caesar Borgia and says: "You have but just seen the repeated proofs of this high culture; while manners have become elegant and tastes delicate, the hearts and characters of men have remained ferocious. These people, who are learned, critical, fine talkers, polished, and men of society, are, at the same time, freebooters, assassins, and murder- ers. Their actions are those of intelligent wolves. Sup- pose, now, that a W(jlf sliould form judgments of Iiis species; he would probably found his cude on murder. This is what happened in Italy ; the pliilosopliers erected the customs of wliich they were witnesses into a theory, and ended by believing or saying that if you wish to sub- sist or exist in tliis world you must act like a scoundrel. Tiie most profound of these theorists was Machiavelli, a great man, and indeed an honest man, a patriot, a superior genius, who wrote a work called The Prince to justify, or at least to sanction, treachery and assassi- nation." "Everybody knows how laudable it is for a Prince to keep his word," says Machiavelli. Let us not be deceived. We are not reading the Institutes of Calvin, or a modern iiu 62 THE NEW POLITICS Sunday School Quarterly. Machiavelli, preacher of righteousness, appears now and then in the praise of virtue: It is better to tell the truth than to lie— when- ever it pays as well. Better let a man live than to poison him— if it equally suits your purposes. Assassination should not be consitiered a pastime. "Everybody knows how laudable it is for a prince to keep his word but those princes have accomplished great things who have made little account of their faith and have known how, through craftiness, to turn men's brains and have at last destroyed those who built upon their loyalty. ... A wise seignior cannot or ought not to keep his word when that is injurious to him. ... It is necessary ... to be a competent cheat and dissimulator. . And men are so simple . . . that he who deceives always finds some one who lets himself be deceived." Lord Acton (Essays on Liberty, Introduction to II Principe, p. 214), himself a Catholic, declares that Machiavelli was popular at Rome, and that the Medicean popes "encouraged him to write, and were not oflFended at the things he wrote for tliem. Leo's own dealings with the tyrants of Perugia were cited by the jurists as a suggestive model for men who have an enemy to get rid of. Clement confessed to Contarini that honesty would be preferable, but that honest men get the worst of it." How long after this was it that Walpole wrote: "Xo great country was ever saved by good men. because good men will not go to the lengths that may be neces- sary." Romulus is justified in slaying Remus on the proposition that "a good result excuses any violence" (Discourses on Livy). ETHICS AND POLITICS 63 One almost fears, in studying the Machiavellian remains in human society to-day, that there is truth in the words of Guicciardini, his contemporary : "That past things shed light on future things, for the world was always of the same sort, and all that which is and will be has been in former times; and the same things return under different names." But Machiavellianism is the same thing and can be called by the same name. There is an unholy vitality in Machiavelli's doctrines. Everywhere, from Machiavelli until this minute, we find the vicious Jesuit maxim : "Cui licet finis, illi ct media permissa stmt." In politics, in business, in society, we are referred to the results rather than the motives — and the results of this doctrine h-'/e led to the interpretation of resuhs in materialistic tt iS. "The end justifies the means." Who has not met it, if, out of his teens, he has ever tried to do business. Good faith in business is almost a negligible quantity on the North American Continent — perhaps in a much wider field. Do our politicians keep faith ? Who will say so who has dealt closely with them ? "It is easier to expose errors in practical politics than to remove the ethical basis of judgments zvhich the modern 7vorld employs in common with Machiavelli" (Lord Acton, Introduction to II Principe, Essays on Liberty, p. 219). It is not within our province here to discuss the naive brutality of Machiavelli's teachings as relating to matters of international ethics. But it is pertinent to ask if the foundations of Machiavellianism are the foundations of the modern "ethical" state. 4[ 'In 64 THE NEW POLITICS Is this world, as Machiavelli saw it, without principle or conscience? Is man, as Machiavelli saw and under- stood him, without conscience or principle? Professor Villari, Machiavelli's biographer, says we must leap from the "Politics" of Aristotle to iMachiavelli "to gain a.» other step in advance" (vol. ii, p. 94). "The problem proposed by Aristotle in his Politics was mainly an inquiry into the best form of Govern- ment. ..." <'But Machiavelli had another object in view, and tlius the governments imagined by philoso- phers was not of the slightest importance to him. Aris- totle cliiefly sought to establish that which men and governments should be ; Machiavelli declared such inquiry to be useless, and rather tried to determine that wliich they are, and that which they might actually be," whose foundation is the stiletto and whose bulwark is poison. Machiavellianism is not the justification of an occasional murder. It is the propaganda of a philosophy of cnme. It is not non moral, as so many have called it. It is not even immoral only. It is criminal. And the modern worid upholds it and the philosophy of life underneath it, the justification of a man's selfishness to himself; the theory that miglit is right, that success justifies itself— the Real Politik of Schiller, Die Welt- Gcschkhte ist das U'elt-Gericht. HI CHAPTER V THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRACY OF INDIVIDUALISM It is more than a coincidence for the curious that the year 1776 saw the pubUcation, with Gibbon's Rome and Tom Paine's Common Sense, of Adam Smith's Weahh of Nations, Jeremy Bentham's Fragment of Government, and Thomas Jeflferson's Declaration of Independence. It is as if three stars of the first magnitude had risen over the horizon, each promising to be a new world by itself, in Economics, Jurisprudence, Politics ; and these three men stand for these three realms— first and foremost spokes- men of the New Thought and philosophy of individualism out of which grew the age of revolution and revolt. The world movement of which these incidents were indications was the resilient reaction of the human mind from at^e-long oppression toward personal liberty. We can hardly wonder that the swing of the pendulum carried to the other extreme. It cannot be said that in the past human government was all that could have been expected of it. It not only had been tyrannical and oppres- sive, but for thousands of years tyranny and oppression had been the principal subject of those who essayed to write history. Perhaps the future reader of history will say that the most wonderful thing revealed in it is the im- measurable patience of mankind — that so many kings have died in their beds. "Before the revolution," says Louis Blanc, "the domi- nant fact was the oppression of the individual. Until 6s 66 TH1-: Xi:W POLITICS then tlie movements of governments had been known only by their tyrannies and rapines. Men aspired only to break tlie molds of despotism in the fonii in which they were" (French Revolution, vol. i, p. 259). The dominant note of aspiration before ami during the revolution therefore was relief. Liberty was both catchword and watchword, and in those days hisses faire was big with meaning. No wonder the people listened to Jean-Jacques when he wrote: "To find a form of association which defends and protects the person and property of each associate with all the common force" ; and followed him as they would a new Messiah. The eighteenth c^inury seems to have been one of those few disintegrating periods of the human mind which have been only too few in the history of our race. So wide an indignation, followed by so universal a revolt, must have had some puissant cause. It is not so easy as may be imagined to trace the sources and causes of Anglo-Saxon democracy. They are found in the main, however, in the ideas which dominated the eighteenth century— the century of revolt and revolu- tion. Although these ideas may be found scattered all along the history of human thought, it was not until the eighteenth century that they became the powerful causes of a world movement of the democracy of the modern world. In one word, modern democracy had its rise in indi- vidualism. "It is impossible to understand the errors of a great writer," says the late Professor Edward Caird, "unless we do justice to the truth which underlies them." RISE OF DEMOCRACY 67 The same thing may be said of world movements. There was a profound reaUty underneath the world movement of eighteenth century individuahsm. While it is incontestable that Jacobinism is the logical developmeni of individualism it is also true that modern history begins with the rise of individualism. The contribution to progress of individualism as a theory of life must not be belittled. It was one of the great phases of transition, and once lay toward progress. But it lies in that direction no longer. Individualism per- formed its mission. But individualism is a revolu- tionary creed. It was the vehicle of transition. Revo- lution is not a rational and permanent status. [-■ The century in which and of which the American nation was born was one which Carlyle declared has no history and can have little or none, "a century so opulent in accumulated falsities — opulent in that way as never century was! Which had no longer the consciousness of being false, so false had it grown — a hypocrisy worthy of being hidden and forgotten. To me the eighteenth century has nothing grand in it, except thai grand uni- versal suicide, named French Revolution, by which it terminated its otherwise most worthless existence with at least one worthy act; setting fire to its old home and self, and going up in flame and volcanic explosion. . . . There was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid, frivolous children of men if they were not to sink altogether into the ape conditions" (Frederick the Great). "How this man," continues Carlyle, speaking of Frederick II, "officially a king withal, comported him- 68 THE NEW POLITICS self in the eighteenth century and managed not to be a Liar and Charlatan as his century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings." One of the regrets that Carlyle is no longer with us, is that it is now forever impossible to call his attention to the American continent — to our George Washington and a few other men — a LaFayette — a Steuben — who were not liars (how he would have relished the story of an eighteenth century boy, a hatchet, and a cherry tree), and were not charla- tans either. Perhaps the fact would have interested him, too, that there was an American Revolution with the adoption of certain eighteenth century principles in '76 and certain nineteenth century principles in '87 which it may take the whole twentieth century to catch up to. If it was not the spirit of this unmen- tionable eighteenth century, which was the dynamic cause of two revolutions which have made over the world, and which have set human footsteps in a pathway never before trodden by mankind, it was the spirit of the eighteenth century which became the melt- ing pot, in which world-thought was reduced to fire mist again, and out of which chaos, cosmos, has (let us dare to hope) begun to cast up its rugged headlands. Nevertheless, when all has been said, Carlyle's char- acterization is in substance correct and it is one of those calamitous coincidences whose evil effects a thousand years may not overcome, that the philosophism of the eighteenth century has had so much to do with the begin- nings of our nation, with its institutions — that our national life was, like Noah's Ark, launched on this chaotic flood. RISE OF DEMOCRACY 69 It is a fairly wide field — which we could not traverse in a lifetime — this pitiful, and uninteresting, and reeking life and thought of the eighteenth century. The thinkers who have most profoundly affected it are those, unfortunately, to whom in a great measure we still are bending the knee of obeisance. The century was materialistic. This is perhaps the most that can be said of it in four words — and perhaps the worst. The eighteenth century is an object lesson of a materialistic philosophy. Perhaps this is the worst that can be said for a phi- losophy. Carlyle speaks of a similar object lesson in Diderot: "So that Diderot's Atheism comes if not to much, yet to something : we learn this from it, and from what it stands connected with, and may represent for us : that the Mechanical System of Thought is, in its essence. Atheistic; that whosoever will admit no organ of truth but logic, and nothing to exist but what can be argued of, must ever content himself with this sad result, as the only solid one he can arrive at; and so with the best grace he can. 'of ether make a gas ; of God a force ; of the second world a coffin; of man an aimless non- descript 'little better than a kind of vermin' " (Carlyle, Essay on Diderot). The blight of eighteenth century life and thought still hangs over the earth like a pall. It is the same curse which darkens the days we live in, immensely modified but in no way mitigated by our great prosperity and our physical science. It has been immensely modified and mitigated, but it is because we are changing our 70 THF. N1<:\V POLITICS eighteenth century point of view. We are abandoning atheism, materiahsm, Hedonism, individuaHsm. We have discovered tlie spirit again. Patriotism and the ideal may Hve once more, to the contrary Dr. Cabanis and his doctrine that poetry and rehgion are "the product of the smaller intestines." A great deal — and perhaps a great deal too much — has been said as to the Frencii Revolution being the begin- ning of modern history. It is also a shabby truism that the nineteenth century is unintelligible without reference to tlie same event. The real truth is that which Carlyle missed, that the beginning of the American nation is the beginning of modern history, because the whole world has been modi- fied by the development of democracy in the United States. It is not cosmopolitan judginent to reckon the French Revolution as the beginning of millennial days. Parenthetically it has not fulfilled its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity. We must consider the American and French Revolu- tions as both the outgrowth of the spirit of tlie eighteenth century, witii a strong probability that the second would not have taken place had not the first been a succe.'^s. If Napoleon was right, or even nearly so, when he declared that if Rousseau had not lived there would have been no French Revolution, may we not conclude with some assurance that the conflagration broke out in France be- cause the "heather was afire" here? As a matter of fact the influence of the French Revo- lution upon the world, and even upon France, iias been greatly overv amated. It is one of the most lurid RISE OF DEMOCRACY 71 dramas ever presented on the stage of history. And there was some element of play acting in it, too, with some of its second rate gilded and garish humbug and unreal emotion. Of course only some. Wliatever germinal ideas there were in that soil of French thought came mostly from Great Britain. And germinal initiative came from America. This particular cataclysm at least is the offspring of British thought and American e.xample. Nor has America been without her germinal thinking, for the theories and formulas and phrases which saw service in two revolutions and which perhaps defined Jacobinism on two hemispheres were all debated and threshed out, stated and accepted in national and local declarations in America before they became cur- rent in France. "Ten years after the American Alliance (with France) the Rights of Man which had been pro- claimed in Philadelphia were repeated at Versailles" (Lord Acton, History of Freedom). Read the names of those who were makers of Revo- lution in France. We find the most of them in London with Pope and Addison and Bolingbroke and Swift, with Newton and Hume and Hobbes and Locke. We find them in the coffee houses, salons. We see them studying English laws and institutions with English literature — Voltaire and Montesquieu, Brissot and Buffon, Mau- pertius and Gournay. Jussieu, Morellet and LaFayette, Helvetius, Cloots and Mirabeau, the Rolands and Rous- seau.* Through these minds tlie Revolution siphoned its force from the germinal minds and institutions of Britain into France. ' Mnrl?y> Voltairf 72 THE NLW POLITICS Both England and America had more influence on France than France has exercised on either country. As Professor Ritchie has said, "When LaFayette sent the key of the Bastille by Thomas Paine to George Wash- ington, he was in a picturesque symbol confessing the debt of France to America" (Natural Rights, p. 3), "What gave Rousseau a power far exceeding that which any political writer had ever attained was the progress of events in America" (Lord Acton). That was a strange and fateful alliance between the successors of the Grande Monarche and the American sans-culuttcs, for French nobles and common soldiers alike went home from the American Revolution to pro- claim the blessings of freedom and the dignity of revolt. In any event even without the alliance the whole French nation would have been ready to sympathize with the American insurgents. Were they not enemies of Eng- land? Were they not allies of France? Were they not uttering thoughts which Frenchmen hardly dared to dream? The spirit of the eighteenth century was be- coming clothed in flesh, and blood, and gimpowder — especially blood and gunpowder — and as some one has said, the whole people of France were watching with bated breath the struggle for liberty as if from behind prison doors, and, as it were, through iron bars. "American independence was the beginning of a new era," says Lord Acton. "Not merely as a revival of Revolution, but because no other Revolution ever pro- ceeded from so slight a cause or was ever conducted with so much moderation. The European monarchies sup- ported it. The greatest statesmen in England averred RISE OF D''MOCRACY 73 that it was just. It establishetl a pure democracy. . . . It resembled no other known democracy, for it respected freedom, authority and law. . . . Ancient Europe opened its mind to two new ideas — that Revolution with very little provocation may be just; and that democracy in very large dimensions may be safe." The philosophy, oi ratht - philosophism of the eight- eenth century did not profoundly affect public opinion in France until the century was half gone. A few words were on men's V.ps — reason and tolerance, liberty, equality — and a na*'on made them catchwords — formed a creed. The philosophers had abandoned the Cartesian- ism which had reigned in French thought and they had learned the precepts of Bacon, the physics of Newton, and the sensationalism of Locke. These they brought across the channel. The translation of English phi- losophy into French life lost the conservative and judi- cious British temper. It became aggressive with being radical. The Briton could think radically and act con- servatively. Not so the Latin. The restated material- istic individualism of Hobbes and Locke became revo- lutionary. But it rediscovered th t individual and his dignity was asserted as it never had been even in the morning of Greece. To Voltaire, Diderot, and the En- cyclopsdists, the masses were unconsidered canailie, but Rousseau conceived his philosophy as Michelet after- ward recorded the revolutionary record of his work from the standpoint "of the principal actor, the anonymous hero, the people." The doctrine that the individual is both starting point and end of political philosophy, implied in the writings 74 THE NEW I'OLITICS of Grotius, had been elaborate*! by llobbes and Locke, and taken by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. It be- came the foundation of the prevaihng philosopliy of the siccle. Locke had i)ersuaded eighteenth-century France that all knowledge proceetls from exi^rience. that experience is the outcome of combinations or permutations of our physical sensations. Despising metaphysics, the move- ment of the new philosophy seemed to tend toward those things within the field of the five senses and conse- quently an impetus was given to the sciences, in all of which great progress was made, but with reaction toward an atheistic materialism as hopeless and desolate as tliat in which any nation was ever lost. But under the new enlightenment there were strange paradoxes and incon- sistencies. The somber messengers of atheism rolled stones away from sepulchers where the Church had laid the crucified virtues, and Christian principles came forth from the dead ; liberty, equality, justice, fraternity. It is impossible to connect logically with a blank atheistic materialism the divine sentiment of fraternal- ism or to conceive of a logical place in a Godless uni- verse for a brotherhood of orphans. It is impossible to Iiarmonize a conception of man as a sensuous conscious- ness without a soul, with a faith in liberty, justice and toleration. There is no logical sequence between a belief which not merely negatives, but which holds that science proves there is neither God, soul, freedom, or hope of here- after, and a belief in the essential anrl inliereiit dignity of the least and humblest of all the human race. Neither RISE OF DEMOCRACY 75 I is there logical relationship between their altruism and their individualistn. We must look further for explanation of the fact that they so often api)ear together, and wonder how religious a race eighteenth-century I'rance would have been, had only the Church been true. The French Economistcs (Physiocrats), who were the precursors of Adam Smith and ortho\vcr and deitia- gugues when not. Jefferson," he said, "returned from France a missionary to convert Americans to the new faith of Philosophical Jacobinism." Jefferson left Paris, soon after the fall of the Bastile, full of the theories of the Revolution and the ideas which generated it. In this he was at one with the mass of the American people, and perhaps it was due to this that he so soon rode into power. The Americans were grateful to France for their assistance. They hated England. They did not analyze the causes of the French alliance. They soon came to discover the anti-British motives cropping up in Napoleon which had prompted the action of Louis. They turned to those who inspired the Jacobin Terror. They took no trouble to distinguish between the King and nobles who had sent them aid and the mob who had cut off their heads, and from whom LaFayette and his associates were fleeing for their lives. As Oliver .says:' "What had benefited the colonists, if we may borrow the felicitous phrase whicli Jefferson subse- quently adopted to designate the most unfortunate of monarchs, had been the cold-blooded calculation of 'a human tiger.' What had comforted their hearts had been the high-flown chivalry of comrades in arms, to whom France now offered the generous choice of furtive exile, the dungeon, or the guillotine. The debt of Ameri- can gratitude was due, if at all, to a King and his nobles, ■ Alexander Hamilton. SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 87 but by an effort of the popular imagination the bill was made payable to the assassins of the true creditors." How easily a nation may be led to any extreme through the phrases of the doctrinaire, and without the balance wheel of a strong government, is seen in the prodigious i>opularity of Citizen Genet, which became so near a frenzy that that "gentleman" dared insult the President of the United States, and that President George Washington. Jefferson, who had secretly encouraged his intolerable insolence, and who had done his utmost to lead the United States again to war against Great Britain, as France's ally, was compelled by Washington to repudiate Genet and promulgate the Washington dec- laration of neutrality, which, it is said, was as violently execrated by the democrats as a declaration of monarchy. This war, into which the bumptious and intolerable Genet came from the Revolutionary tribunal to drag the new nation, offered what advantage? Unlimited cost in blood and money. For what? To defend the murderers of Madame Roland, Condorcet, Lavoisier — who wanted two weeks of life to finish some chemical experimc-nts — and did not get them. "Gratitude to France," under Jefferson and the individualists, wanted war with Eng- land to uphold the assassins of the friends of America who a decade or two since had fought here by their sides. Such was the party spirit of Jacobin particularism — so "intelligent" and so "patriotic." That which the Americans have been taught to look upon as our peculiar blessing may prove our special curse. Our nation was born, and, as it were, baptized MICROCOPY RESOIUTION TEST CHART ANSI and ISO TEST CHAST No 2 1.0 I.I : e Ilia '- *-£ 1 2.0 mil 1.8 1-25 I 1.4 iiii I. ^ APPLIED irvMGE Inc ■••^:- 05.'^} - Che 88 THE NEW POLITICS in the flood-tide of eighteenth century individualism, and we have made the awful mistake of basing a permanent philosophy upon a transitional idea. To this fact we owe the dreary wastes of our first three quarters of a century of history, our civil war, and the despotism of modern financialism — i. e., to a set of ideas under which might becomes riglit and the big eat the little. We set out on our national career lashed to the wild ass of license. We gained our liberty and we lost our freedom. We have not found out to this day that our whole trouble is mostly due to what Taine has called "the Jacobin mind." It accepts certain "principles" as political axioms — the rights of man — the social con- tract — liberty, equality, the people — "such are the ele- mentary notions. Precise or not, they fill the brain of the new secretary. Frequently they are there only as grandiose and vague words." The Jacobin mind "is not sound. Of the two faculties which ought to pull equally and together, one is smitten with atrophy, the other with hypertrophy. The counterpoise of facts is not there to balance the weight of formulas" (La Conquete Jacobin). He might have added that the balance wheel of principle is not there to justify the conflict of interests. The message of to-day is that the occupation of the Jacobin is gone. He shrieked loud and long for his rights — and got them — and more, too. He has been reti- cent about his obligations. He discovered that l;:w and government, two aspects of a "necessary evil," depend upon contract — a contract never made, in an age which never existed. Back in this state of nature — in a pre- SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 89 historic and mythic paradise whence man was driven by the serpent which was a strange compound of lawyer, priest, and king, the compact was made which gives vahdity to law and government, which are concerned merely with the protection of individual rights of person and property. The state has no other sphere. The state is an unpleasing and disagreeable fiction. Reality exists alone in the individual and, therefore, the state, having no reality, has no ethical function. Thus arose the modern democratic business theory of the state. The "pliilosophers" of the Jacobin era were solemnly accrediteo A^ith having discovered and brought forth the charter of liberties of the human race, and with having accouclied the muses of millennial dawn. A hundred years and more are gone, and in this land of fertility and plenty, the "greatest" (in a material sense), the "richest," and the "most prosperous" the world has ever seei or ever will see, the masses of the people are enmeshed in the sinuous toils of financialism; millions of the housewives of the men who are doing the nation's work are unable to make ends meet, owing to the universal rise in prices, and are haggling in the market place over the price of liver or the cut of a shank bone, while one man has ten or twelve thousand million dollars (perhaps he does not know how much) and eleven others like him could own the whole nation, and everything and everybody in it. Somehow the Jacobin has failed to ful- fill his promise, and democracy is somewhat tardy with the millennium. Swollen with the conceit of our hack- neyed phrases, and blinded by the tissue of optimistic lies with which we have surrounded ourselves, we have 90 THE NEW POLITICS boasted of our inexhaustible resources while a few financiers were taking them away from us. The views of many of the fathers are better knowrj than those of one whose writings could be studied with profit to-day. In his remarkable address before the Pennsylvania convention at Philad^phia in 1787, James Wilson said of the fruits of anarchy and Jacobin- ism (Works, vol, iii, Lorenzo Press, Phila , 1804) : "It has been too well knovvn — it has been too severely felt — that the present confederation is inadequate to the government and to the exigencies of the United States. The great struggle for liberty in this country, should it be unsuccessful, will probably be the last one which she will have for her existence and prosperity in any part of the globe. And it must be confessed that this struggle has, in some of the stages of its progress, been attended with symptoms that foreboded no fortunate issue. To the iron hand of tyranny which was lifted up against her she manifested, indeed, an intrepid superiority. . . . But she was environed by dangers of another kind, and springing from a very different source . . . licentious- ness was secretly undermining the rock on which she stood." "Those whom foreign strength could not over- power have well nigh become the victims of internal anarchy." "The commencement of peace was the commencement of every disgrace and distress that could befall a people in a peaceful state. Devoid of national power, we could not restrain the extravagance of our importations, nor could we derive a revenue from their excess. Devoid of national importance, we could not procure for our ex- SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 91 ports a tolerable sale at foreign markets. Devoid of national credit, we saw our public securities melt iri the hands of the holders, like snow before the sun. Devoid of national dignity, we could not, in some instances, per- form our treaties on our parts ; and in other instances, we could neither obtain nor compel the performance of them on the part of others. Devoid of national energy, we could not carry into execution our own resolutions, decisions or laws." The individualist of to-day as of yesterday has missed his guess on this question of centralization. It is not stronger self-government, it is not national self-govern- ment we need fear just now, but the riot and anarchy prevailing over those areas where there is neither state nor national control and over which it is coolly proposed by Mr. Bryan, an exponent of individualism and state rights, that forty-eight popular majorities of "earnest men with unselfish purpose and controlled only for the public good will be able to agree" on such legislation as shall "preserve for the future the inheritance we have received from a bountiful Providence." The individualist is not only afraid of centralization, but, like his predecessors, he is afraid of the very prin- ciple of union and of national sovereignty. He hates unity per se. He hates nationality. He sees monarchy in cooperation and absolutism in an attempt to get together. Therefore, he is raising a hue and cry. The old noises which assailed the ears of Washington and Hamilton, and their patriotic confreres are prevailing in the market place to-day. The particularists and nulH- fiers are again abroad battering the Constitution of the ;i^' 92 THE NEW POLITICS United States. These confusers of opinion still live in a revolutionary world. Like Rip van Winkle, they have slept through years of progress, but unlike him they have not wakened. They consider the Declaraiion of Independence a living issue — on Fourths of July — and deny in practice the principles they eloquently maintain. They have not advanced beyond the Declaration of Inde- pendence. They do not think politically in terms larger than a state and practically no larger than each man for himself. They fail to grasp the idea of nationality, and ignorantly or maliciously accuse of tyrannical and im- perialistic tendencies those who lean toward nationality instead of state rights ; who believe, in short, in the possi- bility of a whole people governing itself. It is not quite clear whether the present confusion of the individualist of strong central control of national concerns with monarchical, imperialistic, and tyrannical tendencies is due to the incompetence of its advocates to understand the nature of tnie democracy, or whether it is a deliberate attempt to confuse the mind of the people for paltry partisan purposes. It is, however, as certain that there are a few left who still think of all government as extraneous and super-imposed, and consequently all government as an evil, as that their position is antiquated and inadequate to the demand of an intelligent democracy. This fear and hatred of government, this confusion of liberty with license, this leaning toward the unre- strained impulse of savage man, this jealousy of construc- tive reason and of orderly life, constitute the faith of the eighteenth, not the twentieth, century. It is the old revo- SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 93 lutionary spirit of rebellion against government qua gov- ernment, when the idea was inconceivable to the masses of the people that government was the articulation of a united and free people attuned to the constructive ideas of synthesis, cohesion, organization, as opposed to the destructive idea of atomism, anarchy, and strife. The sinister hatred of the Jeflfersonians for Union and National Government was due partly at first to hatred of monarchy, partly to provincial habits of mind, and partly to a love of particularism and all it stood for as expressed in State Rights. But this soon passed to a party slogan and a partisan desire to discredit Washington and Ham- ilton. While Jefferson was pleading for a "little rebellion now and then" to clear the atmosphere, and Shays's Rebellion and the Whisky Insurrection were weather vanes of the prevailing spirit, Washington was complain- ing of the "combustibles in every state which a spark might set fire to." He spoke of the disorders of the rampant individualism of the States, and cried, "Good God, who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, or a Briton predicted, them." During these days Washington wrote that "Even respectable characters" were talking without horror of monarchy, and Hamilton was writing for a "Strong Coercive Union." Now, then, the Democrats (I mean, of course, their predecessors, the Jeffersonian Republicans) believed in nothing coercive, much less a Union, especially a strong one. Coercion, even self-coercion, was pernicious and hateful to the individualist who believed in the individual doing as he pleased. It was, therefore, tyrannical. And tyranny of course was monarchy. From this point they i'ti 94 THE NEW POLITICS attacked Washington and Hamilton, and rung all the changes in "associating the quality of strength in Gov- ernment with the idea of a despot," which was synony- mous with coercion. This motif, with all its variations, has been harped on until this day. Neither Jefferson nor his followers believed treason of Washington or Hamil- ton, nor is it credible to-day that his successors believe what they say of modern nationalism. If the presence of a common peril in the War of the Revolution had been scarcely able to preserve the semblance of Union, and if Civil War so nearly prevailed at the time of the war with Britain, how little cohesive force would remain when that pressure was removed? As Hamilton predicted, so it happened. Little minds pre- ternaturally swollen with the all-prevailing phrases of "Natural rights" unanchored to corresponding duties, hardened their hearts to the prophetic voices of Wash- ington and Hamihon and Jay. Eacii chesty individual unit enlisted in the common cause— about the only common cause — of the deification of selfishness and the apotheosis of mediocrity. This spirit of individualism was manifested in the states which established thirteen tariffs and came nearly organizing thirteen standing armies. Two states arose in rebellion and war seemed inevitable between Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, between Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Petty interests, without national spirit and patriotism, led to strife, and strife led to hatred and the desire for a common defense until it soon became clear to every man of vision that the Confederation was fit for the purposes of neither war nor peace. SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 95 When the war was over, it was only a farsighted few who saw that tlie real crisis had begun. The Confedera- tion had been nothing but a "league of friendship" for a common defense, superseding the Continental Congress under which the war had been prosecuted, and its ineffi- ciency during the last two years and six months of the war, and the years following till the adoption of the Constitution, gave Washington some provocation to say with pardonable bitterness that "Influence is not Govern- ment." And no one kne\v better than he what he had put on record of the miseiable makeshift of the Govern- ment of the Confederation, that the war would have ended sooner, and would have cost less in blood and money, had the Government possessed merely the power of taxation. To those who look back from this vantage ground ot experience, it seems nothing less than monstrous that the issues of war and peace should have had no other sanction than the sentiments of honor of men who pro- ceeded at once to the selfish repudiation of a national debt by ingrates, whose behavior can never be erased from the page of our history, but which has been partly redeemed by Washington, without whose single and in- comparable character the war could not have been won; and by Hamilton, without whose daring campaign for the national honor, for an adequate central and national Government, the American Union would never have been achieved. When the Father of his Country first took the oath of office as President of the new nation, with a standing army of 80 men, without a shilling in the treasury, with 96 THE NEW POLITICS scarcely a rag of central government to cover the nation's nakedness, with the patriotic army, whose bloody feet had stained the snows of Valley Forge, clamoring for the paltry stipend a nation of ingrates was ready to repudiate; when the Jeflfersonian individualists were marshaling all the hosts of confusion and lawlessness and revolt, this superb character, who had led his country- men through Revolution and Confederation, with Ham- ilton at his side, fought another war and won it. He carried his country through a third crisis, preserved his government from disintegration and his nation from dissolution a third time. There is something awe-inspiring in the ponderous inertia of this immobile figure, to whose unchanging and impregnable character a nation was anchored through three storms. It is perhaps too early to judge the living, but of the immortal names which have passed into our history, save Lincoln, there are three who have been indispen- sable lo the nation, without any one of whom this nation would have been something different, perhaps no nation at all — perhaps now the discordant factions of helpless chance and prey to the organized races of mankind. Washington — Hamilton — Marshall — these three. No other among the dead or living will measure with them. Why? Because their lives were immortal protests against the individualism and anarchy of revolution; because they were architects and builders of a national self-government. Washington and Hamilton, for nearly a quarter SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 9^ century, working side by aide, and seeing eye to eye— our American Jove and Mercury his winged messenger —wrought what even Jefferson, State Rights, repudia- tion, secession, nullification and all the brood of indi- vidualism have failed to undo. >^1 hli Ml BOOK II THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE COMMON GOOD 9» CHAPTER I POLITICS AND ETHICS We shall never get to the bottom of this question of American Politics without a more careful examination of its ethical aspects than any of us have seemed to be willing hitherto to give to it. American Politics is founded on interests, not principles. In municipal, state, or national concerns the most superficial observer will not fail to see that the prevailing motive is not the public good, but individual self-interest. There is an indescrib- able pathos in the spectacle of a whole people which might be a great people, working from such despicable motives as each one for his own self-aggrandizement. This is not so much the fault of the American people themselves as of their philosophy of life. Because the American Government was in a way the first fruit of the revolutionary ideas of the eighteenth century, in ethics, politics, and political economy, to say nothing of religion, everything everywhere became simply the ex- pression of the creed of revolution and revolt. The pre- vailing creed of individualism swept away the founda- tions of ethics in the destruction of an altruistic motive, although, of course, it is unnecessary to say it was not blotted out from human life. But it offered an ethics, so called, whose only motive is self-interest. The ultimate appeal of our morality was to selfishness. Even tlie utilitarians, who offered more or less of a humanitarian creed, placed it on selfish foundations, and no matter yii t:. t02 THE NKW POLITICS what good may have come from it, that good has been incidental, for Locke and Hobbes, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau and Bentham, Godwin and James Mill and their kind have saddled a curse upon future generations in framing a philosophy which justi- fies a man's selfishness to himself — m translating Machiavellianism into modern life. There is a growing conviction among an increasing number of men that our politics must be a part of our ethics. They protest "against tlie breaking up into frac- tions of human unity and demand its restitution." We can no longer tolerate theories wliich separate ethics from politics. Twentieth century politics must involve a considera- tion of the spiritual element in man. and in this the materialisms of both individualism and socialism fall short. The fact is that humanity l)egins in association, is inconceivable without association, and association is founded in spirit. Juxtaposition is not all there is to it. That men are social, and not merely gregarious, makes a state possible. They are social witliin a large area, wliich we may call tlie common good, and this is a rational whole toward which eacli human atom bends his will, submits to, obeys, as it were, adopts, and finds vol- untary satisfaction in ; and this is the basis of that which distinguishes civilized and savage man. "My dominion ends." said Napoleon, "where the dominion of conscience begins." There is an ominous sug- gestion in the awful ambiguity of this phrase. That a line can be drawn just here — where politics ends and wliere conscience begins — is sufficiently suggestive. That POLITICS AND KTHICS 103 it has been drawn in the separation of ethics from poli- tics is one of the most overwhelming calamities which have overtaken humanity. There can be no doubt but one of the greatest forces for good in the whole revolutionarj- period was that strange reformer whose ethical creed and moral purpose were at such cross purposes with each other through a long and useful life. The opening words of Jeremy Bentham's Principles of Legislation are: "The public good ought to be the object of the legislator; general utility ought to be the foundation of his reasoning." Again he says: "Nature has placed man under the em- pire of pleasure and pain. We owe to them all our ideas ; we refer to them all our judgments, and all the deter- minations of our life . . . the principle of utility sub- jects everything to these two motives. ... It expresses tlie property or tendency of a thing to prevent some evil or to procure some good. Evil is pain, or the cause of pain. Good is pleasure, or the cause of pleasure. . . . He who adopts the principle of utility esteems virtue to be good only on account of the pleasures which result from it. He regards vice as an evil only because of the pains which it produces. Moral good is good only by its tendency to produce physical good. Moral evil is evil only by its tendency to produce physical evil." Benthani does compromise with an anti-materialism by stating further that when he says physical he means the pains and pleasures of the soul (which I believe he practically denies) as well as the pains and pleasures of the senses. He states further that all the virtues or their opposites, whatever we might call them, 104 THE NEW POLITICS are to be classified under the category of pleasure or pain, and that pleasure or pain is what everybody feels to be such, peasant or prince, without consulting Plato or Aristotle. In chapter five he says also, "It is true that Epicurus alone of all the ancients had the merit of hav- ing known the true source of morals." Here in these bald, I might say stark-naked state- ments are the foundations of the ethics of political individualism. They are perfectly fair samples of the aphorisms of the day which outlined a pretty conserva- tive individualism (because Bentham was among the Conservatives), as is seen by the keynote struck in his first sentence in the Principles of Legislation — "The public good ought to be the object of the Legislator." Most of the individualists of that day denied pointblank that the end of the legislator was anything more than the protection of life and property from violence, and that to advance the public good was to violate the sacred principle of individual freedom. The reason the early individualists separated ethics from politics was because they destroyed ethics, by sweeping away the foundations of ethics, and, as in the case of Bentham himself, though mostly to a lesser de- gree, they would have destroyed politics in any sense except that of political opportunism had it not been for the ingrained and hereditary instincts and qualities over and above and better than their adopted creed in the Brit- ish stock. Bentham was an example of the man who is better than his creed. John Stuart Mill, "the saint of rationalism," is a better example still. But the fact remains that individualism was a dis- POLITICS AND ETHICS 105 integrating force, and left to itself was the negation of ethics and the destruction of the state with the exception of the policeman's office, which was only a compromise on the basis of its being a necessary evil. Mr. Leslie Stephen states this case pretty clearly (English Utili- tarians, p. 131): "A main characteristic of the whole social and political order, about 18 10, is what is now called 'individualism' ... or the gospel according to Adam Smith, laissez faire and so forth. . . . English- men took liberty mainly in the sense of restricting law. Government in general was a nuisance though a neces- sity; and properly employed only in mediating between conflicting interests and restraining the violence of in- dividuals forced into contact by outward circumstances. . . . The people would use their authority to tie the hands of the rulers and limit them strictly to their proper and narrow functions. The absence again of the idea of a state in any other sense implies another tendency. The 'idea' was not required. Englishmen were con- cerned rather with details than with first principles" (p. 133)- Mr. Stephen speaks further, with some refined scorn, of the French who had their political theories all worked out, but which fell flat on the English mind. Both were wrong. The English despised political phi- losophy because this involved ethics and ethics annihi- lated the laissez faire regime, and the laissec faire regime was necessary for the rich that they might become richer. The French, apparently oblivious to the testimonies of history and the fundamental assumptions of scientific criticism and the inductive reasoning generally, seemed i fi 1 II (■■ •-- i .-"1 io6 THE NEW POLITICS to spin their theories Uke spiders' webs from their own mouths. Dr. Pringle-Pattison suins up Benthamism in the fol- lowing words: "The abstract sitnplicity of the perfect state corresponds to the abstract simplicity of the philo- sophical principles from which it was deduced. Un- adulterated selfislmess is the motive, universal benevo- lence is the end — these are the two fixed poles of Bentham's thought." There is no possible way of harmonizing principles so diametrically opposing each other, except in the per- sonal character of Bentham himself. Unfortunately there is a very small minority of the human race who can seek universal benevolence as the end of their lives with unadulterated selfishness as the motive of their endeavors. There can be no doubt that vast good has resulted to the human race through the efforts of the school which Bentham founded, notwithstanding the ethical atomism on which it was based. It was not necessary to reconcile benevolence to selfishness in their theoretical bearings when, in the personal character of Bentham and the two Mills and their following, it was quite certain that their chief end and aim were benevo- lent, but where it is not certain that their motive was selfishness. Perhaps after all too much credit lias been given to Bentham and his school for the humani- tarian awakening of the first part of the nineteenth centur>', and too little to men like Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and especially Wesley, who perhaps had more to do with the awakening of the individual in bringing it to a consciousness of itself than any one force 4 ' Si iti POLITICS AND ETHICS 107 in the British nation in his century. After all, eighteenth century thought involved more than anything else the principle of analysis, and this was both cause and effect of individualism. The individualists, and even the utili- tarians for the most part, did not, because they consist- ently could not support the great measures for the public good, and in this they followed their ethical motives of unadulterated selfishness rather than the end of universal benevolence. "Some of the utilitarians, it is true," says Dr. Pringle-Pattison (Quarterly Review, July, 1901), "were better than their creed and supported the factory legislation, but the school was opposed to it on principle. The utilitarians were in fact . . . the chief elaborators of the classical political economy and they accepted its doctrines, not as abstractions and laws of tendency, provisionally true in given circumstances, but as an absolute theory of society." One is duly astonished, therefore, when he sees so able a scholar and so careful a historian as Professor Dicey claiming for individualism the results of the legis- lative reforms of England in the nineteenth century. Had he made this claim for utilitarianism he might at least have found sufficient footing to justify an attempt at an argument. As a matter of fact, individualism itself was sterile. It was negative, critical, destructive. It was not, and could not have been, and can never be, con- structive, to say nothing of architectonic. Mr. Dicey says, in Law and Opinion in England (Harvard Lectures) : "During the long conflicts which have made up the constitutional history of England individualism has meant hatred nf the arbitrary pre- ! .■.•»1 i ! f .i io8 THE NEW POLITICS rogative of the crown; or in other words of the collec- tive and autocratic authority of the state. . . . The strength of Benthamism lay then ... in its being a response to the needs of a particular era." The fact is, that Bentham was true to an ethical pur- pose and was not consistent with the unethical motive lie solemnly announced. He was bitterly opposed to anything like pure individuahsm ; so much so that of all his generation he was one of the most caustic critics of the Declaration of Independence and the Dec- laration of Rights. The first of these he called a "hodge- podge of confusion and absurdity." Of the second he writes, "What lias been the object of the Declaration of pretended Rights? To add as much force as possible to those passions already too strong, to burst the cords that hold them in . . . to say to the selfish passions — there everywliere is your prey ! To the angry passions — there everywhere is your enemy !" The philosophical radicals of the nineteenth century were for tlie most part very able and very earnest men ; men of the highest moral characters, and in their charac- ters perhaps the flower of tlieir age, notwithstanding their professions of "unadulterated selfishness." They were individualists so far as individualism served their purpose. As Professor Dicey says, their creeds served "a particular era." "It was, indeed, needed for a period," and was used "for a period" in its "hatred of the arbi- trary prerogative of the crown." or "the collective and autocratic authority of the state." Utilitarianism found that it had no raison d'etre as an exponent of mere in- dividualism, and in order to secure the vitality which POLITICS AND ETHICS 109 could allow it to exist at all, and do an ethical work, it took on a social and altruistic form. About all of con- structive ethical value utilitarianism has bequeathed to history has been that in which it has exceeded the motive of individualism and its outlook. It is a matter of com- ment that the learned Professor should have overlooked these facts; that the individualistic protest against auto- cratic and irresponsible monarchy having gained its point, which was a purely negative one, must take up a posi- tive and constructive and social issue in direct departure from the principle of individualism, or go out of busi- ness. It added to the creed of individual happiness an article on national well-being; in other words, the public good. For has not Bentham surrendered the whole of the position of individualism in this very criticism of the Declaration of Rights : "The things that people stand most in need of are, one would think, their duties; for their rights, whatever they may be, are apt enough to take care of themselves . . . the great enemies of the public peace are the selfish and dissocial passions." Professor Dicey was not unaware of this arraignment of the principles of individualism, for I have quoted it from his Harvard Lectures. It is a most interesting study to follow out Professor Dicey's confusion, in his development of the four objects at which Benthamism was aimed; the transference of political power into hands friendly to the greatest good of the greatest number ; the promotion of humanitarian- ism ; the extension of individual liberty ; the creation of an adequate legal machinery for the protection of the equal rights of all citizens. u f'^ m no T!1K NKW rOMTICS 'llic Keforni act gave predominant autliority to the middle clas^scs of Knj^laiid. llie .Municipal Kcfurm Act of 1X36 j;ave \o llie inhabitants of l)orou{,'h.s the govern- ment and management of the cities in which tiiey lived, doing nothing for country laborers. The new Poor Law, in placing \)nor relief imder the sujjervision of the state, inaugurated a precedent in socialistic legislation which had n(- movement who spent their lives in really trying to work out the betterment of mankind, started a real liberating and rejuvenating movement during the POLITICS AND ETHICS 115 revolutionary age, it also may be true that the utili- tarian propaganda based on an egoistic philosophy will result eventually in more harm to the human race than it ever has done good. There has been no single year out of these one hundred and thirty-five years since Jefferson and Smith and Bentham burst upon the world which has been without its witness to the fact that there is something fundamental in human nature which prompts its best productions to do noble acts without value received and to perform heroic deeds without counting the cost. The profound and far-reaching harm which the philosophy of these men has done and is doing and will continue to do is in offering a political and economic philosophy founded on an ethics that justifies a man's selfishness to himself. W! CHAPTER II THE GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS The New Politics presents a theory of the state of wider scope than the mere protection of life and prop- erty, and for the rest, the big eating the little. It offers a theory comprehensive enough to cover the whole wel- fare of all the people. Its creed is that progress is planned nnd wrought, that it is no chance flower in the Micawberish garden of hisses fairc. The relations established between men in the institu- tions of the state while not of the high-water mark, define pretty well the average level of national morality and capacity for reason. They define the element in common between the individuals of the nation, viz., nationality. The relations outlined by a civic com- munity are not only the embodiment of the moral ca- pacity of the nation, but are the absolutely necessary means or channels of fulfillment of the moral life of the nation, without which manhood itself would be stripped of its distinctive function and attributes. The state is, as it were, the composite ethical portrait of th° national rational character. Idiosyncrasies eliminated, tliere is a large common area. Here is the nub of the whole question of politics: This very idea of a common good and the fact of a common good involve by inexorable logical necessity duties as well as rights ; and conversely any rational theory of rights and duties involves (what a theory of rights denies or omits) this common interest, ii6 GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 117 this common aim and life, this common good where lies the state. "People are beginning to recognize," ys Michel Chevalier (quoted by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Modem State, p, 17), that the function of the state "is to guide society toward good and preserve it from evil, to be the active and intelligent promoter of public improve- ment." The same principle is recognized by Professor Wagner of Berlin when he places alongside the mission of justice another great function of state, the mis- sion ot civilization (Culturcu'cck des Stoats). Says Shebbare (The Greek Theory of the State), "The two great rival theories of the functions of the state are — the theory which was for so many years dominant in England, and which may for convenience be called the individualist theory, and the theory which is stated most fully and powerfully by the Greek philosophers which we may call the socialist theoiy. The individualist theory regards the state as a purely utilitarian institu- tion, a mere means to an end . . . for the protection of property and personal liberty, and as having therefore no concern with the private life and character of the citizen, except in so far as those may make him dan- gerous to the material welfare of his neighbor. "The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it like- wise regards the state as a means to certain ends, regards it as something more. . . . According to this theory no department of life is outside the scope of politics, and a healthy state is at once the end at which the science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are carried out." ii8 THE NEW POLITICS The use of the term "socialist theory" is very mis- leading, because that vast body of social and ethical doctrine which is pretty well known among scholars as the Greek theory of the state cannot in any sense be identified with the orthodox socialism of the present day whose foundations are laid in the economic material- ism of Karl Marx. The individualist theory of the state, however, on the American continent is the "police- man theory" of Jefferson and his school. This and the American socialist theory are both fundamentally dif- ferent from another theory which cannot by any twist- ing be called by either name. It did not start as a political philosophy. It did not start as a the^r^ of state. It was the creation of necessity. It can:'e into being as a theory because it was a growth of the ethical and political wisdom of the best minds of the early republic to protect the republic from dissolution. It has been wrought out of over a century of experience of a nation justifying itself and its right to live. "Whoever," says Guizot (History of Civilization), "observes with some degree of attention the genius of the English nation" (and he could have included the American nation, for it is an Anglo-Saxon characteristic) "will be struck with a double fact; on the one hand, its steady good sense and practical ability; on the other, its want of genera! ideas and of elevation of thought upon theoretical questions. Whether we open an English work on history, jurisprudence, or any other subject, w? rarely find the great and fundamental reason of thing:." It is no disparagement nf the power of finding the GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 1 19 "great and fundamental reason of things" to say that on the whole the practical and empirical method of the Anglo-Saxon with his conservative instinct has had bet- ter results than the more philosophical method of, for example, France. For without a Reign of Terror con- servative Br'tain has achieved more liberty under freer institutions than have the French, and that without the guillotine of Robespierre, which made way for the sword of Napoleon the Great, which in turn determined the day of wrath for France and Napoleon the Little at Sedan. One of the curious paradoxes of political progress is that the doctrinaires have not been the ones who have created rational and ethical institutions. Jacobin doc- trinaires become the ancestors of anarchy. The sensible, practical, concrete Washington fathers a nation. That the state has an ethical nature and a moral mis- r.ion is an idea as foreign to individualism as that the individual is not the final reality. Bat the ethical nature of the state first came within the point of view of the Greeks. How out of the limited area of political history behind them this gifted people were able to pluck torches to light all succeeding ages will never cease to provoke the wonder of mankind. But even they did not know the values of their Con- stitutions, for was not the Politics of Aristotle unnoticed by his contemporaries, and was it not hidden in a cellar in Skepsis and found and published in the days of Sylla by Appellikon of Teos? It is less likely that the modern publisher would buy that manuscript or could sell that book which is to 120 THE NEW POLITICS move future ages than that it is nailed away somewhere — an "Attic Philosophy" — in a box labeled "Mumm's Extra Dry." The politics we have been looking forward to as worthy the W'estern Hemisphere in future times must evolve on rational, net hit-or miss, lines; and it must reckon with those two great contributions of human spirit, the Greek form and Christian content. The peculiar contribution of the Greeks, without whicli it is impossible to conceive of the future of human thought or human ])rogress, is that this universe of ours is not a laisscc fairc universe, that the world has not been abandoned to caprice, but that Reason rules the World and Men. The late Professor Drummond has described a book he read in his childhood called The Chance World. It described a world in which everything happened by chance. The sun might rise, or it might not, or it might appear at any hour, or the moon might come up instead. W^hen children were born they might have one or a dozen heads, and those heads might not be on their shoulders — there miglit be no shoulders — but arranged about their limbs. If one jumped up in the air, it was im- possible to predict whether he would ever come down again. In tliis chance world cause and effect were abol- ished. Law was annihilated. And the result to such a world could only be that Reason would be impossible. It would be a lunatic world with a population of lunatics. Now thi= is no more than a real picture of what the world would be without law or the universe without continuitv. GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 121 This idea, the Greeks, the first of all men, discovered, and the first — would it be too much to say the last — of all men, applied to Politics. It was impossible for them to dissociate this idea from that of justice, for justice is rational. We find, therefore, in the prose and poetic literature of the Greeks, the reiterated proclamation that just relations must be maintained between men, because just relations are rational relations. Here the individ- ualist spirit was found to be irrational and here altruism first found rational mtI irrefragible foundations. Greece has given us the doctrine that Logos, or Reason, rules the world — a doctrine first promulgated to man- kind by Anaxagoras, who appeared, as Aristotle says, "as a sober man among the drunken." From him began the first great systematic protest against individualism. When the Greeks first oogan to distinguish between nature and culture, Barbarian and Greek, they developed and explained their ideas in the growth of the mind from individualism to the larger life of rational ethics. Their contrast between Greek and Barbarian was based on the distinction between socialized and individualistic society. This idea began to dawn upon their Jiinkers at a very early time, long before the age of Anaxagoras, and has always been closely associated with justice and altruistic spirit. Even in days as ea''!y as those at Chal- cis and Euboea, when Hesiod is said to have striven with Homer and won, this former poet entered the lists of justice and good faith against the misuse of power. It was he who wrote the first fable of its kind in all European literature and elucidated the hawk's theory that "might makes right." A hawk was soaring in the i 122 THE NEW POLITICS clouds with a nightingale in its talons. Transfixed by the cruel claws, the suffering songster cried out in pain. "Silly creature." said the hawk, "why dost thou scream? Thou art in the grasp of the stronger. Thou shalt go wherever I take thee, songster as thou art. I will make a meal of thee, if I please, or I will let thee fall. It is folly to think of striving against one's betters." Thus early in the first dim day's dawn of the authentic records of European mind, the first fable in European literature pictures the "divine" law of the "survival of the fittest" — unrestricted competition — laisscs faire — — individualism — when the claw instinct for a mouthful qr^nched the voice of song. Those must have been "human" days, as we have learned to connote "lurnan," for Hesiod saw that around him which called for this fable — as true to-day — and he uttered a lament which a singer (if we had one) might utter to-day. "Would that I had died earlier, or that my birth had faii.n on later days, for now there is a race of iron." Would it have fared him better to liave had his chance now. nearly three thousand years later, and have been born to a race of steel? "The evils of Athens are due not to the gods but men. The leaders of the people, the nobles, are possessed by an insatiable love of riches, and do not shrink from injustice to acquire wealth, ' quoth Solon, a statesman whose poetr. was but a commentary on his own emanci- pating career. "I have framed laws," he says, "securing justice for the humble and the miserable, dispensing to all a just equity." In his poem on Salamis, he says, GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 123 "Disdain of law has filled the state with evils. Where law reigns it produces order and harmony, and restrains the wicked. It smoothes the rough places, stifles pride, quenches violence, and nips misfortune in the bud. It straightens crooked ways, subdues haughtiness, and re- presses sedition. It tames the fury of baleful discord; and so men's affairs are brought into harmony and reasott." Is there not kinship between these ideas, and that of the Sicilian in the eighty-fourth Olympiad, named Em- pedocles, who taught that Love is the creative and bind- ing principle in the universe, and that the separating, disintegrating force is Hate? who taught that the per- fect state of the earthly existence is Harmony and the imperfect state is Discord? that Love is the fountain, Hate the destructive principle of things? This is the underlying principle of the tragedies of i^schylus, who began to interpret the old mythology in the light of a guiding Providence which rewards man according to hi? works. The spiritual world, according to .-Eschylus, as well as the natural world, is ruled by reason — where prevails law instead of anarchy. /Eschylus and Aristophanes, and to a degree Sopho- cles and Euripides, were preachers of righteousness to a degenerating age. They failed to bring Athens to repentance because their message, brilliant as it was, could not much check the ini'n-idualism and the tendency to anarchy and dissolution to which they were swiftlv hastening. It was here that Socrates came — for the Greeks, too late, but for us. let us hope, not too soon. Socrates took up the principle of the control of Provi- ',1 I 124 THE NEW POLITICS dence (to say the same thing rehgiously). and made the first advance toward a comprehensive statement of the tmion of the concrete with the universal. Jesus took the second and final step, and future human thought on historic lines, at least, can make no progress outside the Greek form and the Christian content. For, as Hegel has said, "We affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion. Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of an investigation, the first the idea, the second the complex of human passion; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast arras-web of universal history. The concrete mean and union of the two is liberty, under the conditions of morality in a state." We must understand once for all — and this the Greeks have taught us in the splendor of their ideals and as truly in the tragedy of their history — that we did not somehow fall together without reason and without God. As no child ever grew to noble manhood following the blind paths of whim and impulse, so no great people ever developed on the hit-or-miss lack of plan and reason and mission — never will fulfill a noble destiny by a for- tuitous concourse of political atoms — cannot grow toward a divine humanity without reason and without God. This idea, before it came to its substanti-'.l per- fection, passed through three minds, which for power and breadth have never for a given space of time — if in all the spaces of time — been equaled in the recorded history of the world. Socrates, a true son of Zeus, found new and rational moral grounds for the being of the state and for politi- GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 125 cal association in the principles of pure ethics, so broad and so reasonable that their immanent rationality has laid itself lovingly on intelligent and unselfish beings to this day. He parted with his predecessors when he left the standpoint of individualism and looked upon humanity as a whole and found in it that which dis- tinguished it from all other sentient creation— reason. Thus he arrived at the purely Greek idea in another and systematic way and placed it on a permanent foundation. He taught that in his very nature as a rational being man was intended for a social and political life, to which the individual may not place his will in opposition. His immortal pupil, Aristocles, whom they nicknamed Plato, because he had broad shoulders undertook the burden of systematizing the teachings of his master and if from all the splendid mass of his inspiring work we elimi- nate the Utopian and retain the ideal, we find his teach- ing reduced to this, that the adequate life worthy of man's estate is the life of reason as opposed to impulse. It is in the ideal state the ideal man is found, the state where the ideal of justice finds visible and concrete embodiment. Aristotle, pupil of Plato and tutor of Alexander, laid the idea on scientific foundations, and gave a new direction and a new content to the future political history of the world. In Aristotle, reason is the final arbiter of political life, and law becomes the vehicle of the public conscience, not something extraneous as a policeman with his club — for his was not the modern policeman theory of the state. He makes a fundamental distinction between those who obev the force behind the law and tr.osc who ij6 THE NKW POLITICS obey tlic reason within tiic law. The imlividualistic coniiJCtitive coiitlict of liuinaii passions was as irrational to him as tiie will of an iron despotism cbiiming blind .ml sullen ol)C(lience. Law compelled society by its "sweet reasonableness," as I'lato beautifully expresses it in the Crito, where the laws came in person to Socrates in prison — came to him not as jailers, but as his friends, counselors, coadjutors, and partners in all good. And so Aristotle says, "Men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution, for it is their salvation." "It is evident," he says further, "that that government is best which is so established that ez'cry one therein may have it in his power to act virtu- ously and to live happily." Shall we with Plato con- ceive of the legislator as dpv«Te«Twv laying foundation and framework of a rational human society which is the "just man writ large," or with Aristotle, that the state not only exists for life, but for noble life, or with Socrates and Plato and Ari'^: >tle in th" eround idea common to all three that Politics mvolves knowledge of the highest good of man and means of the attainment of such values as are not monetary, but both human and divine? The conception that the state exists but to protect life and property never entered the mind of a rational Greek as an adequate content for a political philosophy. To the Greek the law which was recognized as binding upon all was in reason, not command. The law lay deep in the reason, and was the expression of that reason because it was adapted to the higher necessities of mankind. Without those laws which the Greek state threw around GRI:i:K CONTRIIiCTION TO POLITICS i-v her citizens and wliicli constituted the state in motion as it were, l.'.ws which were the results of political power limited only by the p' construes it as a bread and butter mutual insurance company. Pol., Bk. Ill, ix. 6: "But a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only; if life only were the object, slave and brute animals might form a state. . . . Nor does a state exist for the sake of alliance and security from injustice, nor yet for the sake of exchange and mutual intercourse. . . . Those who care for good government take into consideration virtue and vice in Whence it may be further inferred that virtue li Kit states. 13^' THE NEW POLITICS must be the serious care of a state which truly deser\-es tlie name, for without this ethical end the commi'Mity becomes a mere alliance." The;i Aristotle speaks scornfully of Lycophron the sophist, wlio seems to have held the modern democratic doctrine that the state is only a "machine for the protec- tion of life and property." CHAPTER III PATERNALISM There is a certain pathos in that confusion of mind prevaihng among many who are supposed to be think- ing people, regarding those ethical actions of the nation in recognition of the obligations it sustains to the indi- vidual whose duties it claims. If a certain legislation can be called "paternalism," or "socialism," it is at once rele- gated to the limbo of the shockingly impossible, as if these two classifications (were they true ones, which they are not) would affect the value of — for example — national legislation against tlie microbe, which knows no state boundary lines, or board fences; or, for example, again, our "paternal" public school system. It is interesting to note the difference between the theorist and statesman. Von Humboldt was a radical. His conception of the state was in keeping with the pre- vailing idea of his age, acknowledging very narrow limits to the functions of the state; i. e., as maintaining "security against both external enemies and internal dis- sensions" (Sphere and Duties of Government). He went so far as to condemn state education, but when he came to closer quarters with actual government he found that the best way to advance the intellectual equipment of the Prussian nation was in the establishment of state schools which he had condemned. He did not stop here, but extended further the scope and power of the state. 137 ■I I3« THE Xr:\V POLITICS Herbert Spencer's theory of politics realized would result in the dissolution of the state. He even argues against public schools and education at the public ex- pense. Perhaps his views would have been modified had he been called to tlie administration of affairs. It would be very difficult, even in this Itiisscz fairc country, to find any formidable array of intelligence sup- porting the limited reasoning of the Economist, the late Professor I'awcelt of Cambridge University, who was so opposed to the idea of state interference tliat he fought the principle of Nationalism as expressed in a pulilic system, and opposed the support of public schools Ijy the state, declaring that he was willing that the stigma of pauperism should cling to those who allowed the state to educate their children; because early in the last century the government poor laws had reduced to pauperism one in every four of the population of Great Britain. Our American common school system is not paternalism. It is not socialism. If it is either, then by all means let us have some more of whichever it is. I have often fancied the Cr 'gressional Library a public affront to the sensil)ilitics of every downright in- dividualist who might wave his hand in wrath toward the Caj)itol for unjustly spending the money of people who cannot even read for such a building — such a pile of books and such an incomparable system as Mr. Put- nam's. "Let every man buy his own books," I hear him say, and as he looks further down the hill he will con- tinue: "Let every man study his own bugs and do his own sanitation. These paternalistic sanitations of ours nre not consistent with my eighteenth century ideas." PATERNALISM 139 There is a pathos in the mutldlehcadness of most of our "great men" on some of these elemental questions. I do not find in the speeches or writings of most of our American politicians evidence of a clear idea of the modification of the principle of state interference and state control, by the simple fact of democracy — the fact that all this kind of ethical legislation is voluntary, that is. self-imposed. It is not socialism, because it up- holds the dignity and freedom of the individual. It is not paternalism, because true democracy is fratcrnal- ism, not paternali.sm. Tlie rational imposition of ethical legislation upon oursckcs — the surrender of certain of our rights to the general welfare — this is the soul of the democracy of nationalism. There is no paternalism without a pater. To speak of paternalisin under self-government is to publish a puzzleheadness quite truly American. To speak of it with feeling is a pathetic admission of label and livery in the service of some predato.y cave-dwellers of individualism, whose usurped precincts are fu'l of pirated goods in danger of some impending ethical Nemesis. Paternalism is impossible under self-govern- ment. It is only possible under a government of ruler and subjects. That this distinction has not been made is because we have failed to distinguish between those forms of government which for thousands of years have meant forcible control by power foreign to the will and interests and sentiments of the people and a form of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A concrete illustration of what T mean will be found I40 THK NKVV POLITICS in a comparison of state interference lunler a monarchy and a democracy. In Germany paternalism in the form, e. g., of government owncrshij) of railroads, means that tlie railroads have been taken away from the people and practically given to the I'mperor. 'llie railroad is a part of the i)olitical machine, if yon please, a part of the military machine — practically controlled by one man — the Emperor of (lermany. While in some respects the people benefit, after all the people are despoiled of prop- erty and power. In New Zealand the exact reverse is trne. The rail- roads have been taken from the hands of exploitation and tnrned over to the people. They have become a part of the Commonwealth. In this millennial island the people are friends, not enemies, without millionaires and witliout paupers. The New Zealanders have not only the largest private and individual wealth per capita in the world, $1,500 for every man, woman, and child in the country, but each individual is, over and above all this, a part owner in tlie splendid properties of the state, of which each individual is an organic and responsible part. There Government ownership does not militate against private property. But the fraternal spirit out of which government ownership has sprung has begun to solve the racking problem of older and less happy civilizations — the problem of distribution. Paternalism under tlie Louis who said, "I am the state," was essentially and fundamentally difTerent from what here, under democratic institutions, many alleged intelligent individualists speak of with rage and fear as paternalism. There can be no paternalistn vvithont a Jn^-« PATER.. ALISM 141 paternal government. Governvtcut control with us is the political aspect of self-control. Vunn tlie American staiulpoiiit law and constitution are not imposed upon us by a power extraneous to ourselves and successful because stronger. We are power. Law and coiistilu- tion are tliose forms of our own corporate reason which we have tlirown around ourselves in the compromise of civilized government. And we are the government through our representatives. If we do not like our own government we can change it. for we Iiave no irrespon- sible monarch prmiaimiiig, '"l am the state." Government control, if it be control, or national self- government, means the sclf-gjarding of the rights of 1// the individuals by all the individuals, which is all the people of a nation. It means that if under capi- talistic centralization the sphere for independent action is being narrowed and the field of individual initiative is being restricted, if under untrammeled competition the strong and the cunning tend to occupy the entire field of opportunity, the nation steps in— that is, the people organized, and bring this instrument— national Government— to bear in the interests of individual liberty, which is the sine qua non of true democracy. But the interests of individual liberty can be served only under constitutional liberty, not monarcliy, for real individual liberty does not mean license to capricious action. Individualism is defeating the very aim and end of democracy, in defeating individual liberty — not that liberty is the end of noble life, but a necessary means to that end. If we are incapable of self-government, so ■w^l 14-' THE NEW POLITICS niucli the worse for us. Government control under a government of, and by, and for the people might better be called an ethical democracy. If we are afraid of government control, we are afraid of law and order, c\cn though that law and order are the rational and ethical expressions of our best selves, and not the irresponsible ipse dixit of a military despotism. This distinction has been present to most Americans, if at all, in their moments of absent-mindedness. But it is a fundamental distinction, and it is because we are a self- governing people that a strong government is better than a weak one; a large and complicated sphere of government better than a police force. And this will appear more and more true in proportion as we increase in population and diversity of interest. The growing system which is at once the bulwark and pride of our nation is set in the foundation of a democ- racy, and is a recognition on the part of tiie entire people that the entire nation has duties toward all the people as well as that all the people have rights. When Diderot, Quesnay, Condorcet, Holbach pro- tested against slate interference with the religious be- liefs and the industrial pursuits of the humble citizens of France, there was reason in the doctrine of hisses fairc. But when it is applied to the institutions of a self- governing free people, the conditions are reversed, and there is new meaning in the purposive mission of the state. CHAPTER IV if SOCIALISM The most eloquent advocates of socialism the world has ever seen are "certain rich men" who need never say a word. It is not that they are rich men. Few rational pecple have any valid objection to rich men or to reasonable fortunes. Moreover, these men are as high types of rich men as ever got large fortunes to- gether, and the highest type who ever got so much, for they have a large portion of the entire national wealth. This is why the institution of financialism stands in advo- cacy of socialism instead of anarchy. If they, with their financial power, were like some of our financiers they would make anarchists. The scientifically inclined are drawing curves to see how long it will take for them or others to own it all. And how much will it take in hard assets, with the awful credit power that goes with it, for a few men to own the controlling interest in the United States. Do they do it now ? It was but a few months ago (as things go) that we were frightened at Harriman's two billions, and a year or two before at Rockefeller's billion. Before the Civil War all the wealth— the total capital of all the million- aires in the United States — amounted to one man's profits on one deal, or his income for a few months, or perhaps weeks. This is what is making socialists. If it comes to the point of saying whether all the people of the United 143 H 1'f i 'J ^fj 144 THE NEW POLITICS States shall own the controlling interest, or a few men shall own the controlling interest, the verdict of the American people will be for themselves — i. e., for socialism. It is quite amusing, though sometimes exasperating, to have socialists pick up here and there acts of legisla- tion tending toward social justice or industrial ame- lioration and hold them out in the palms of their hands and say, "Behold! so much redeemed to socialism!" There are great areas of life and thought common to the best minds and spirits of men which cannot be fenced off by a party or monopolized by a sect. The religion- ist cannot claim a reformed drunkard as a recruit to Methodism because he has sworn off, nor can the disciple of Brigham Young find an advance in Mormonism in every flirtation. Socialism does not mean merely asso- ciation. Nor does the antithesis of individualism mean socialism. Nor does political socialization mean that it is socialistic. Socialism is a system. It is a life philosophy and it hangs together. hidiiidualism is a system. Christianity is a system. It too is a life philosophy and it too hangs together. There are some of the teachings of the one to be found in the other. But this does net mean that they are identical. There is a certain area of socialization in society, if I may use the expression, which cannot be called social- ism at all. We must distinguish sharply between the purposive mission of the state and the aims of socialism, for it is SOCIALISM 145 only in the further use, I may say the historically intelli- gent use, of the principle of association as opposed to individualism, of the cohesive as opposed to the dis- junctive forces of the nation, that we shall find the cure for the tremendous socialistic tendency of the day. It is unfortunate that such words as "society" and "association" are derived from the same root as the word "socialism." The average unintelligent individualist has a certain pathetic and hopeless way about him of confounding socialism with that form of socialization which in a national state tends to "promote the general welfare." To surrender to socialism the ethical purpose and mis- sion of a state is sooner or later to surrender the state to socialism. T'e principle of government control or state inter- ference, as the English call it, or paternalism, as the unthinking call it, is not and never can be socialism. It is indeed difficult to define socialism. So many vague and Utopian dreamers have identified it with other things that the public is not aware tliat socialism, as socialism, as defined by European authorities and accepted by the great mass of those who call themselves socialists to- day, means revolutionary socialism. And revolutionary socialism means the abolition of practically all private property, and further, many believe in the abolition of the institution of the family. The most revolutionary exponents of this doctrine are the c iitinental socialists, where radicalism as expressed in anarchy or socialism is reaction against tyranny. Such theories as the Chris- tian Socialism of Maurice and Kingsley scarcely exist I 146 THE NEW POLITICS to-day. Socialism is sweeping over the world like a flood, and Canute cannot drive it back. This is the most tremendous social fact in the world to be reckoned with by the statesman of to-day. Socialism is not an ethical democracy. It is not fra- ternal. When one speaks of fraternalism he must be very careful that he is speaking of something which in- cludes the spirit as well as the form of fraternalism. Just here appears the danger of reaction. Society achieves no gain in exchanging one tyranny for another. We do not move forward by breaking up one despotism and setting up another despotism. We do not progress by turning out one set of rascals and setting up another set of rascals. The despotism of the many is no kinder than that of the few. We come in the last analysis to two things. We cannot build up a sound nation of un- sound men. We cannot bind men into a rational state with an unethical motive. A change of method is not a change of motive, and a change of method is all socialism offers us. The present world movement of socialism is the reaction against the baleful developments of individualism, resulting through untrammeled com- petition in the annihilation of competition by reason of the fact that competition, unrestrained, has carried its death instruments in its own bosom. The strong win. The weak perish. Everywhere and forevermore the strong exploit and prey upon the weak — under monarchy in one way, under democracy in an- other. This results in protest — reaction. That reaction is socialism. Nine tenths of the socialists have been made by the indictments of individualism, not by the SOCIALISM 147 panacea offered by socialism. What does socialism offer ? It is, after all, the "economic interpretation of history" and the promise of a shopkeepers' or proletariats' millen- nium. The teaching of Karl Marx is a materialism as unrelieved as the individualism which crushed the child- life c' Manchester and Birmingham a hundred years ago. Before Marx, Saint Simon and Fourier had poured scorn over moralist, idealist, and philosopher. To them these were the word-mongers of idealism- dealers in some distillation or other form of that spirit- ualist theory which finds its best known shape in religion. All alike attempted to rule the world by figments. "Duties," says Fourier, "are only the caprices of phi- losophers, they are human and variable; but the passions are the voices of nature and God, and the end of all desires, the fullness of happiness, is that graduated opu- lence which puts one above want, and through and in it the satisfaction of all one's passions." Marx, interpreting politics, religion, and ethics as so many phases of economics, and economics as the science of the welfare of economic humanity, and as the sum, center, and circumference of history, postulating the relations and rewards of labor as the only reality in all history, presents us with a dialectic of materialism as naive and brutal as anything the human mind has ever wrought. What motive underlies it? Self-interest. \\'hat end and aim lure it ? Material concerns. This is the philosophy of life it offers. And this will never lay the foundation of a great state, nor satisfy a great people. It is still Hedonism pure and simple— still ego- ism, still individualism. Individualism vs. Socialism ''■li I4S THE NEW POLH ICS >■ i means exactly in other words and terms : Egoism Hedon- ism vs. i'liiz'crsalistic Hedonism. Modern sociulisin is organized individualism. It is cooperative utilitarianism. It is the logical outcome of individual and competi- tive warfare. It is a protest against unorganized indi- vidualism and organized financialism on the same plane. It affords a trial of strength with the same weapons and in the same field. Devoid of the altruistic motive it is the struggle of soulless form with chaotic void. So- cialism is organized instinct and systematic and coordi- nated selt'ish materialism, and it fails fundamentally in its philosophy of life. Its motive is egoistic, not altru- istic. If it differs from individualism it differs only in method, not in motive. It has borrowed the forms of fraternalisiii with which to deceive the elect, but it has lost the soul because it does not believe in soul. It is a huge economic machine, unillumed by a ray of ethics, insi)ired by no breath of that spirit without which there is nothing human in man. What we want is a rational theory of an ethical de- mocracy. .\iid tliis must begin in the motive of good will. It must work from the individual conscience, freed and emancipated, toward a common conscience, a cooperative reason. Here modern socialism falls short. Marx practically begins with his corporate materialism and works back to the individual conscience and will, to find them enmeshed — enslaved. Individualism and social- ism are both economic materialisms, and offer two as- pects of the bread-and-butter theory of the state. Mr. Leslie Stephen calmly remarks, speaking of the individ- SOCIALISM 149 nalist point of view, that politics is a matter of business and resents the intrusion of first principles. The funda- mental maxim of Karl Marx is that all human institu- tions and beliefs are in their ultimate sources the outcome of economic conditions — in other words, a matter of busi- ness. One materialism is as brutal as the other. A generation since, when the philosophy of the world was more materialistic than it is to-day and life of the people was less so, Du Bois-Reymond claimed practi- cally that the history of man is the history of tools — that it is the history of the invention of those implements which enabled man thus far to conquer and control nature. Before this Marx had worked out his conception of his- tory. Before him still, the prophets of Manchester worked out their sodden gospel. The individualistic political economy is simply a statement of the principles of an- archy dipped in rosewater and applied to economics. It will be admitted at once that economic conditions have profoundly modified human history and must ever do so. There are elements, however, between the lines of economic latitude, a spiritual longitude, as it were, which have escaped the historic or scientific materialist. A man is not merely the most intelligent brute in creation; he is not a disembodied spirit, and it must be admitted that the future does not belong to the cultured and refined except on condition of a certain physical basis of blood and bone and brawn. The economic aspect of life offers but one set of the vital problems connected with human progress, and to other than bread-and-butter consideration we turn in our weariness and ask with Savage Landor, "Show me how ii n 4 k ISO THE NEW POLITICS great projects were executed, great advantages gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to them in reverence. Let the books of the Treasury lie closed as religiously as the Sibyl's. Leave weights and measures in the market place, commerce in the harbor, the Arts in the light they love, philosophy in the shade. Place History on her rightful throne, and at the side of her Eloquence and War." The reconciliation of the individual and the state rests in good will and moral purpose. There social and individual rights meet and lose their antagonisms in this larger freedom of the good will. The departure from individualism, organized or ram- pant, begins in the dawn of the motive of good will. I mean that kindly and sweet-tempered spirit which has ceased to raise an ethical standard on the point of view of the individual selfishness and starts out on the long upward process of evolution toward human sympathy and helpfulness. I mean that good will which is opposed to the principle of war as the ruling instinct of humanity, and conceives the better part in working together for the same thing instead of against each other for the same thing — tliat good will whicli Kant called "the only unconditioned good in the universe." The departure from the individualistic point of view is where the individual ceases to be the final court of appeal, when the individual begins to consider itself from the standpoint of the universe and not the universe from the standpoint of the individual. In politics and economics the problem becomes one as SOCIALISM »5i to whether the element of good will shall find less or more scope ; whether the area of the common good shall be enlarged and restricted — whether, in fact, the "harmo- nious development of the human race" lies toward the motive of good will and the ideal of a united and friendly humanity, or in the motive of the selfish instinct and the ideal of atoms at war. Here lies the problem of politics and the fate of democracy, in which, i. e., in the true democracy, not the false, is involved the future of human freedom. Will the "harmonious development of the human race" and human liberty, in so far as it contributes to that kind of development, result from a government more rational and more ethical — which is to say of more solidarity — or from one whence the cohesive power and aim of reason have been taken away — and which in losing the boundaries of rational form and the binding power of good will has lost both body and soul? If we agree that the state, like the Sabbath, was made for man and not man for the state; if we agree that the individual is the end of civilization and of nature, then let us ask a further question. Is this end so much to be desired attainable by each individual seeking his own expansion and perfection independently, through the motive of selfish instinct, each without reference to the interests of the rest, according to the platitudinous dic- tums of laisses faire-ism in general, that the good is the resultant of innumerable conflicting self-interests; or does the perfection of human character, or individuality, lie in discipline, in self-identification with the universal good, and does that perfection lie, so far as politics modifies it, toward anarchy or toward an ethical and sil '52 THE NEW POLITICS rational state? "Morality is the substance of the state, or, in other words, the state is the development and af- firmation of the people's united moral will; but religion is the substance of both moral and iiolitical life. The state is founded on the moral character of the people and their morality is founded on their religion. . . . The basis of the laws to which men must submit must exist prior to all the laws that are founded upon it. It is the root from which they spring or the developing substance of their c stence. Apart from all metaphysical discussion on morality and religion, the truth remains, that they must ever be viczved as inseparable. There cannot be two consciences in man, one for practical and another for religious interests. Accordingly, as he deeply and sin- cerely believes, so he will act. Religion must be the basis of morals, and morality must be the foundation of a state. ... It is the monstrous error of our times to wish to regard these inseparable (politics, morals, and religion) as if they have been separable one from the other: yea, as if they were indifferent to one another . . . as if the state's whole moral system, including its constitution and its laws as founded on reason, could stand of itself and on its own ground" (Hegel). The religion of a people, like the ethics of a people, must be immanent in their political ami social institu- tions. If this is not possible in a democracy, then democracy must go and the people witli it. But this is not possible under individualism, for political ethics and ethical politics are not possible under individualism. Hegel contends that the Ultramontane theory of re- ligious authority can never be made to accord with any :i SOCIALISM 153 political institutions that are not despotic. No govern- ment can be safe while the people regard it as existing outside the sanctions of a religion found outside the state. Not a state, I take it, does he mean, over which religious authority is exercised, but through which the authority of the spiritual reason is supreme. A rational analysis of the idea of the state will show not only that we owe duties to the state if we claim rights, but that the state itself has duties, if we allow that it has rights, and if it expects from us the discharge of our obligations. In the development of this idea of reci- procity lies a completer idea of a state; and in this lies a more congenial environment for happiness and virtue. For it is just at the point at which we depart from the reacting democracy of the revolutions of the eighteenth century — i. e., from the pigeon-breasted catch phrases of all right and no duties — it is just where we admit th« principle of mutual obligation that we lay the psycho- logical foundations of law and order and of the rational state. For the state is built in the idea of a common life. What is the substance of the word justice but the public good, the common weal? It is here — in the element of reciprocity — that we find the justification of the idea that the state itself has duties as well as rights, and it is through the function of the duties of a state that it proceeds on sound and legitimate lines to "promote the general welfare." I *■! %4 CHAPTLiR V THE INDIVIDUAL AND POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT The question must arise somewhere about here as to whether a system of anarchy or of law and order offers the better environment for the development of sound individuality, which (it must be admitted) is the only basis of sound nationality. This brings up the point that vc must distinguish sharply between the claims of individuality and tliose of individualism. In other words, is it under individualism or socialism, or that nameless middle ground wliich for want of a better name we have called nationalism, that the best type of indi- viduality may develop? Let it be said at once that those who fear socialism as much as they do individualism, and who fear both only less than they do Mephistopheles himself, are among the most strenuous advocates for the liberties and dignities of the individual. Where we differ from the socialist is in that we believe in keeping a large area out of the deadening influences of a bureau- cracy for private volition and initiative; and where we differ from the individualist is that we believe that "character building," which is unrecognized by modern legislators, as Herbert Spencer, the philosophical anarch- ist, laments, may be better pursued through rational forms of law and order in a highly organized state than in the quasi-anarchy which must exist under Herbert Spencer's watch-dog theory of the state. I will admit, for a moment, with a prominent individ- >S4 POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT J55 ualist (Crozier), that "the elevation and expansion of the individual is the goal of civilizati(Mi, the true end of government [the italics are mincj and the end to which nature works." If I go further than Crozier and say that there is no politics possible which is not based on a philosophy of life which, after all its labyrinthine wanderings, comes back as it were at last to Abraham's bosom and rests in the individual soul, I hope it will not be inferred that the individual referred to is the detached and solitary human monad hermetically sealed in 200 pounds o* acquisitive avoirdupois. I am speaking of an individu- ality which cannot be conceived apart from spirituality, "of the elevation and extension of the individual" which is "the goal of civilization, the true end of government," for I will not allow an avowed individualist to outdo me, whether it be Crozier or Herbert Spencer, in enlarging, dignifying, and moralizing state action, making "the ele- vation and expansion of the individual" the true end of government, or "character making" the most important end of the legislator. I am speaking of the individuality of the individual character, which is inseparable from, and which is the offspring of, sociality; an individuality which is impos- sible in solitude or savagery — whose secret has not been found by the wild man of Borneo. The simple propo- sition is that the most perfect character is not developed by shutting itself up, but by opening itself up. I am ready to repeat my contention that a rational theory of life, without which there is no rational poli- tics, must bring us to the bedrock of a sane theory of r vl *n 156 THE NEW POLITICS personal character. Hence the distinction that a study in individuality is far from a study in individualism. The latter is a theory of life. It is preeminently the self-centered tlieory. Its politics and ethics, if indeed politics and ethics are possible under individualism, are those of philosopliic niliilism, for this is equivalent to philosophical individualism. The British Constitutional Association (Introduc- tion to Doctor Saleeby's recent Lectures in Edinburgh on Individualism and Collectivism) states that "The Association contends that the following quotation from Herbert Spencer's First Principles proves clearly that the path of progress is from freedom to greater freedom, and that collectivist measures for curbing the individual in the supposed interests of the many are as retrogressive as they are unscientific and non-political: Our political practice and our political theory alike utterly re- ject those regal prerogatives which once passed unquestioned. . Thought, our forms of speech, and our state documents still assert the subjection of the citizens to the ruler, our actual beliefs and our daily proceedings, implicitly assert the contrary. ' • . . Nor has the rejection of primitive political beliefs resulted only in transferring the authority of an autocrat to a representative body. . . . How entirely we have established the personal liberties of the subject against the invasions of state-power would be quickly demonstrated, were it proposed by .^ct of Parliament forcibly to take possession of the nation, or of any class, and turn its services to public ends; as the services of the people were turned by primitive rulers. And should any statesman suggest a redistribu- tion of property, such as was sometimes made in ancient democratic communities, he would be met by a thousand-tongued denial of imperial power over individual possessions. Not only in our day have these fundamental claims of the citizen been thus made good against the state, but sundry minor claims likewise. Ages ago, laws regulating dress and mode of living fell into POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 157 disuse; and any attempt to revive them would prove the current opinion to be, that such matters lie beyond the sphere of legal control. For some centuries we have been asserting in practice, and have now established in theory, the right of every man to choose his own religious beliefs, instead of receiving such beliefs on state-authority. Within the last few generations we have in- augurated complete liberty of speech, in spite of all legislative attempts to suppress or limit it. .\nd still more recently we have claimed and finally obtained, under a few exceptional restrictions, freedom to trade with whomsoever we please. Thus our political beliefs are widely different from ancient ones, not only as to the proper depository power to be exercised over a nation, but also as to the extent of that power. Not even here has the change ended. Besides the average opinions which we have just described as current among ourselves, there exists a less widely diffused opinion going still further in the same direction. There are to be found men who contend that the sphere of government should be narrowed even more than it is in England. They hold that the freedom of the individual, limited only by like freedom of other individuals, is sacred ; and ' .it the legislature cannot equitably put further restrictions upon .1, either by forbidding any actions which the law of equal freedom permits, or taking away any property save that required to pay the cost of enMfcing this law itself. Sir Arthur Clay, Bart., says of Doctor Saleeby's lec- tures, "We must all feel grateful to our lecturer for his vigorous reassertions of the value and truth of Herbert Spencer's teaching, and we tnust all feel that we have ar- rived at a point in social questions at which the road divides and that one of its branches is the 'pathway to tlie stars,' while the other leads us, we believe, to social disintegration and a slow but sure reversion to lower stages of human condition than that to which we have attained with so much effort and through such bitter experience. The British Constitutional Association stands at the parting of the ways and urges our citizens to choose the nobler path." ■ :h 158 THE NEW POLITJCS Let us lose no time in congratulating the British Con- stitutional Association upon this clean cut distinction and this noble advice. Let us hasten to say that while we might make some restrictions as regards the bearing of Herbert Spencer's teachings up^n this subject, we agree wholly that we are at the fork in the road and that as between the two paths ahead we unhesitatingly warn the weary pilgrim to avoid that which leads to "social disintegration" and those "lower stages of human condition" which lie in the chaos of individualism in that remote past, where everywhere the egoistic instinct prevailed and out of which civilization, which is nothing more nor less than socialization, has been calling law and order in its slow but steady progress in its "pathway to the stars." "Says Herbert Spencer," says Doctor Saleeby, "in "words which I make no apology for quoting at length : " 'Let it be seen that the future of a nation depends on the nature of its units; that their natures are inevi- tably modified in adaptation to the condition:; in which they are placed ; that the feelings called into play by these conditions will strengthen, while those which have diminished demands on them will dwindle. " 'Of the ends to be kept in view by the Legislator all are unimportant compared with the end of character making; and yet character making is an end wholly un- recognized.' " Doctor Saleoby closes his lecture with this significant remark, "Either the state is very far wrong or the great individualist. I leave you to choose between them " !*! POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 159 Let us admit, confidentially, that it is the state this time. It is rare, and indeed one of the most unusual of pleasures, to be able to agree with Herbert Spencer. So much of Herbert Spencer's work has been devoted to the philosophy of individualism that it is rather startling to find Saul among the prophets. "Of the ends to be kept in view by the legislator," says Mr. Spencer— but tlien there are only two or three ends to be kept in view by tlie legislator, according to Herbert Spencer, and wiiat these are we might ask before going further. There are plenty of passages which outline the intensity of his individualism and his hatred of state action, but none which outline a better idea of his views than that which the British Constitutional Association presents as proving "clearly that the path of progress is from free- dom to greater freedom and that collectivist measures for curbing the individual in the supposed interest of the many are as retrogressive as they are unscientific and non-political." Here he contends "that the sphere of government should be narrowed even more than it is in England . . . that the legislature cannot equitably put further restrictions upon it either by forbidding any actions which the law of equal freedom permits, or tak- ing away any property save that required to pay the cost of enforcing this law itself." Just where the capital is coming from to set up the legislator in the business of "character making" under these restrictions is a question that, Herbert Spencer being dead, is left for Doctor Saleeby, or Sir Arthur Clay, to explain, and just where the principle of collectivism can be made to appear in a state so highly organized as to ill I I -I 1 ' M i6o THE NEW POLITICS assume the ethical and social function of "character tnaking- (and it is agreed that this is "an end wholly unrecognized-) will hardly be found in "Social Statics.^ iMrst Principles," or "Man versus the State." y the way, why Man versus the State? Have we not Herbert Spencer s whole philosophy in this title expressing an- tagonism between corporate and individual man?) I repeat that it is a rare pleasure to find the doctrine stated in no uncertain terms that we need more state interference rather than less; that the modern legislator as remiss m his duty; that he is shirking his responsi- b.ht.es; and that he is to compete with parson and peda- gogue m legislating for a state which after all then Gnu set dank, has a rational, constructive, ethical' spiritual, and purposive mission. While we are agreeing with Herbert Spencer let us express our further pleasure in his doctrine that "the future of a nation depends upon the nature of its units- that their natures are inevitably modified in adaptation to the conditions in winch they are placed; that the feel- ings called into play by these conditions will strengthen while those which have diminished demands on them will dwindle. There are two important considerations suggested here. The first is as to whether a state of anarchy or a state of law and order is the better environment for these human units or offers the better opportunities for "char- acter making" The second is. to paraphrase Herbert Spencer s statement, "let it be seen that the future of a house depends upon the nature of the brickbats." The question which Herbert Spencer does not raise is POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT i6i the one of architecture. It is apparent that if the materials are good the house will be both a beautiful and comfortable home. The bricks, planks, and plaster (which must all be of perfect materials in perfect rnits of their kind) will by some good laissec faire chance or other fall together without architectural forethought into a whimsical form and— well— behold ! Tiie Temple of Individualism ! To return to Spencer: "The feelings called into play by these conditions will strengthen, while those which have diminished demands on them will dwindle." We are told by the unctuous prophets of laisscz faire that competition is the law of life and that we develop strength in competition. This is quite true. "The feelings called into play by these conditions will strengthen." What are these conditions of modern com- petition? What kind of strength are we developing? And what kind of weakness are we eliminating from our twentieth century civilization? We are developing the kind of strength which prevails in our political and economic environment. That environment is one in which the strong sur^'ive P-d the weak are eliminated. And we are developing the kind of strength which is exercised in the struggle forced by an environment in which we have been unfortunate enough to have been born if we are unfinancial men. The strength this age of free competition is developing is that of financialism and almost nothing else. The financiers are masters of the world— the rest of us are m.ostly hired men. Finan- cialism is not only eliminating the weak, that is, the un- financial, but it is also framing and strengthening the '4 .11 * 1 6: THE NEW POLITICS social structure so that it reacts for the benefit and for the perpetuation of the strong; that is, when you sum it all up, the financial instinct. If there is any truth in the contention that competition develops strengtii, the kind of strength developed is that which competes and that on the plane of competition. Does the theory of individualism, which is that self- interest is the motive and self-aggrandizement the aim, and a free-for-all field for wolf and lamb alike, without recognition of the principle of handicap, oflfer a fair and even chance for making those perfect units which are necessary to a perfect state? Does this environment oflFer the legislator his best field for "character making"? Is nor. self-aggrandizement the overpowering aim of civilization ? Is not this what most of the world is work- ing for, competing for? Does this process exercise the altruistic muscles and is it likely that great souls will be the fruit of a hisses f aire competition of innumerable acquisitive instincts? Is it not likely, rather, that it will result in a few more acquisitive monsters and the apothe- osis of the multibillionaire? We are told that the race improves, but we are not informed what type of weakness is to be eliminated. Professor Henry Jones, of Glasgow, in a recent work (The Working Faith of the Social Reformer), makes a very important distinction. He says that both social- ists and individualists seem to take it for granted that the larger area of state control or public ownership restricts the field of individual initiative. "It will be well to ask the question," he says, "which both have practically overlooked. There is no doubt POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 163 that state and civic enterprise have increased, but has private enterprise contracted? Can the former increase only at the expense of the latter? Are the two spheres mutually exclusive, or is it possible that the general law of the growth of spiritual subjects, whether individual or social, holds here too, and that e;ssibIe for human beings to exert them- selves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we cons.dere.1 to be how to unite the greatest individual I-berty of action with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe and an equal participation of all in the combined benefits of labor." "We were now much less democrats than I had been ... an ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists."' What happened in the life of John Stuart Mill is too slowly happening to this age. We began where he began and we are experiencing a development similar to his' We are learning that liberty is something other than license, and that it is to be gained by a utilization of the principle of association and not of the principle of strife We are beginning to question the dogmas of an earlier age, that pleasure is the chief end of man and that un- restricted liberty is the chief means of its attainment. We are, however, more than ever convinced that the principle of liberty is something to be held at all hazards and that in all our theoretical wanderings we must never lose sight of individual liberty as the beginning of prog- fii k 170 THE NEW POLITICS ress ; but that individual liberty is the product of law and order. "To obey God is freedom" (Seneca). It is profoundly true that there is no 'reedom possible to the man who has not become master of himself, his whims and instincts — and there is but one road to this — through discipline. There is a discipline of free- dom and there is a discipline of law. "None can love freedom heartily," says Milton, "but good men: the rest love not freedom but license, which never hath more scope or more indulgence than under tyiants." "Moral liberation and political freedom must advance together," says Hegel, "the process must demand some vast space of time for its full realization; but it is the law of the world's progress and the Teutonic nations are destined to carry it into effect. The Reformation was an indispensable preparation for this great work. . . . The failure of the French Revolution to realize liberty was because it aimed at external liberation without the indispensable condition of moral freedom. . . . The progress of freedom can never be aided by a revolution that has not been preceded by a religious reformation." "Liberalism as an abstraction, emanating from France, traversed tiie Roman world; but religious slavery held that world in the fetters of political servitude. For it is a false principle that the fetter which binds Right and Freedom can be broken without tiie emancipation of conscience — that there can be a Revolution witlvout a Reformation. . . . Material superiority in power can achiez'c no enduring results; Napoleon could not Coerce Spain into freedom any more than Philip II could force Holland into slaverv " POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 171 rdsworth wrote on the margin of an article which dei.ounced him as a democrat : "I am a lover of liberty, but am aware that liberty cannot exist apart from order." Even the late Lord Acton, profoundly individualistic as he was, said once in spite of his polemic against nationality, that neither liberty nor authority is con- ceivable except in a well ordered society and is remote from either anarchy or tyranny. "Constitutional Government," says a biographer, "was for him the sole eternal truth in politics, the rare but the only genuine guardian of freedom." "Everything in nature," says Kant, "acts according to laws : the distinction of a rational being is the faculty of acting according to the consciousness of laws." The free man, therefore, is the man who does not what instinct demands but what reason requires, since reason is as much or more of the real nature of man than instinct. Wherever human liberty has appeared in this world it has quickly disappeared again unless it has been guar- anteed by law and order. Human rights are ordained by civilized society and human beings have never any- where enjoyed those riglits except through law and order as constituted by civilized society. Emerson speaks of what he calls "this law of laws," by 'vhich "the universe is made safe and habitable." My contention is that human liberty (and human wel- fare as well) is promoted and safeguarded by neither anarchv nor socialism, but in a rational social order swung in a proper equilibrium between local self-govern- ment and national self-government. 1 JE i •ii list I rJIM Hfl J 7^ THE NEW POLITICS Law and order are not the destruction but the safe- guard of individual liberty, and a rational state is the only environment in which the flower may grow. But the state is founded in the idea of reciprocity. So is the golden rule. Social ethics and individual ethics have the same foundation: therefore there is no diversity of real interest and no real dividing line between the individual and the social self. Liberty is not the fruit of the solitary life. For he who isolates his mind and heart as nature has isolated his body, is a freak or a criminal, for, as Aristotle said long ago, "he must be a beast or a god who would live alone." warn ih> CHAPTER VI KOUNUATIONS OF NATIONALISM The clue to the making uf nineteenth century thought lias been clearly given hy the late Professor i:(l\var(l Caird: "The idea of organic unity, ami, as implied in that, the idea of development." "Goethe and 1 Icgel in Germany : Comte in France. Darwin and Spen- cer in England . . . and a multitude of others in every department of study, have been inspired by the ideas of organism and development. . . . These ideas have l)etn the marked ideas of the century, the conscious or unconscious stimulus of its best thought" ; and they are working "in the direction of a deeper and more compre- liensive irenicon . . . than has been attained in any previous stage of the history of philosophy." "The peculiar nineteenth century movement begins with a reassertion of the universal as against the indi- vidual." "Philosophy was no longer content to regard the whole as the sum of the parts, but could look upon the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of the whole" (Progress of the Century, Harper, 1901). Professor Caird further develops the thesis that the best and latest thing in philosophic evolution is the spirit which does not oppose the universal to the individual, but synthesizes both. It is so with us. We want all the truth there is in individualism. We want all the truth there is in socialism. It must be a synthesis, which is neither individualisni nor socialism. Politically what 173 Ml \tl ? '■ m warn 174 THE NEW POLITICS shall we call it? Nationalism? It matters less what we call it than what we make it. Caird undertook a criticism of Comte's Social Phi- losophy (which might be said to be in a sense based on the proposition that there is no philosophy of the indi- vidual apart from a philosophy of humanity) from the point of view of the proposition tiiat "there can be no religion of humanity which is not also a religion of God." "And this means," continues Caird. "that it is logically imi)ossible to go beyond the merely individual- istic point of view with whicli Comte started, except on theassumi)tion that the intdligaicc of man is, or involves, a universal principle of knowledge." Until our appeal to reason goes back of the individual opinion and f^nds reality in the corp<.rate intelligence of man— an intelligence which "is, or involves, a universal principle of knowledge"— we are lost in the confusions of illimitable and irredeemable wastes. There is no possi- bility of a conception of an ethical state, on the basis of atomism, for the democracy of individualism is destitute of an architectonic idea, as well as of that cohesive prin- ciple which alone makes a state possible: viz.. the nexus of good will in a framework of the common good. There is no common good possible where tiie nexus is enmity and not good will. An aggregation of scram- bling, grasping selfishnesses does not make a rational '^tate. We have seen it illustrated only too well if we have given heed to the testimony of history. "If history can tell us little of the past and nothing of the future," says Froude. "why waste our time over so barren a study? History is a voice forever sounding FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 175 across the centuries the laws of right and wrong, Right, tlic sacrifice of self to good; Wrong, the sacrifice of [,'uod to self. . . . Justice and truth alone endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may be long lived, but Doomsday conies at last to them in French Revolutions and other terrible ways." If we study carefully those movements of thought underneath the growth of nationalism in the United States we shall find, although it has been for the most part unrecognized, that it has been fostered by a sense of the inadequacy of anarchy as a theory of government, and by the conviction that the centripetal force of society, tliat which holds it together, that which gives it unity, is good will, not hatred. Good will must be the basis of true democracy. The basis of the democracy of indi- vidualism is the principle of strife. If this then be democracy; if democracy is essentially strife, and if its direction is toward and not away from individualism, by all means let us have something other than democracy, fur there is no ethical meaning in any theory of inor- ganic juxtaposition of unrelated competing political units. If there is to be a realignment of parties on a philosophical which is to say a rational, basis, it will be somewhere along this line. To the democracy of indi- vidualism which is the party of the past will gravitate ever)' vested privilege, every sacred graft, every holy \ehicle of plunder, every sainted boss — the entire system revolving around the central sphere of selfish clainoring for liberty and rights; i. e., immunity. To the party of the future to which our young men are already coming, those also will c^/me who believe in the state as some- m &.1 176 THE Ni:\V POLITICS tiling better than an instrument to serve the stronger in- dividualistic interest : who conceive of the nation as an entity toward which we must discharge our duties if we claim our rigiits ; who will try to substitute for that ugly, greedy casli gourmandism wliich forms the nexus of our present predatory society, tlie kindlier, saner element of good will. We have progressed far enough in this di- rection, so that few of us, like the Shah of Persia at the Prince of Wales's tlinncr, would he so enamored of ciuumbers that we would empty the whole disli in our shirt bosom, and yet we will do it with dollars in the oftke and on the street. The princii)le has been estab- lished in polite society that we need neither hurry nor gorge at the table of a friend, for the pantry is full Liiit -"business is business." though it be neither moral, nor honorable, nor decent, nor civilized. Since I'.picurus the ethical system of individualism has been pretty dearly stated by pliilosophers and pretty clearly worked (Hit in modern history: and the ethics of individualism offers an inadequate foundation for a rational anil social state. By this time we know both its motive and its program. We know its results. Stated with brevity and completeness, its motive is self-interest. Its program is self-aggrandizement. Its result is anarchy. If certain of those who have called themselves indi- vidualists have labored for the welf.Tre of mankind (and there have been large numbers), it has been only when they have forsaken the motives of their creed and have transgressed tiie confines of altmi.sm; for individ- FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 177 ualism is the system "which makes self-gratification or pleasure the sole object of choice" and defines morality as "the intelligent pursuit of that which instinct compels us to pursue." The universal cry of individualism is for the liberty of the individual "so far as it does not encroach upon the like liberty of his fellows." That sounds fair. But I for one have not the least idea of just exactly what it means. It is one of those dangerous phrases which have served long apprenticeship as onomatopceian catch- words. It seems to have some of the magic consolation of the word Mesopotamia; but as to this concrete matter of actually encroaching upon a like liberty of one's fel- lows! Here is the crux. We are assuming (if we are Individualists) that if we have our liberty we will not encroach upon the liberty of our fellows. In the multiplicity of human relations this opens up infinities in the universe innumerable. A very desirable status, truly, if every individualist enjoys his liberty excepting in so far as it may encroach on the like liberty of his fellcws. But I arn not quite sure that I have ever read in Iiistory any juch status actualized in human society. A pretty millennial dream, truly! But I am not quite sure, as I look out upon the weltering throat-cutting race of men, that that millennial dawn is likely to be realized until after I have been an angel for a million years. Have we besotted ourselves in the fancy that the world is Christian and that the inhabitants thereof will act up to the golden rule and that no one will voluntarily en- croach upon a "like liberty" of his fellow even though he has the power? Even though he has the power! ,11 i;8 THK Nl£VV POLITICS The more cunning have the jHjwer. Those who have the tools have the power. Those who have the knife by the handle have the power. Those who know the game have the power. What about the others? The weak, the innocent, tlie ignorant ! What of those who hold the knife by the blade? Are we to assume equality? Then we assume a lie. It is the plainest kind of a sham and humbug, this pretension of equality, for there is no equality. Until we are all equal we cannot compete on equal terms Free competition is the competition of equals, if it is fair competition. Therefore, there is no fair free competition — no fair free trade. Therefore we need a state. Therefore the state must draw its lines and say, "Thus far and no further." The state must interfere and it is the state which must say, "Thou shalt not encroach upon a like liberty of their fellows." This is the individualist state at its best. The democracy of nationalism means more. It differs from the democracy of individualism in that it includes duties as well as rights. It includes more — the power and dignity and etliical mission of the state as something more than a business proposition. The democracy of individualism a hundred years ago, as well as to-day. considered "enlightened self-interest" a sufficient pre- cipitant of economic order and a sufficient account of political good. Its point of view can be summed up in the words of Wordsworth, who hit it off in "Rob Roy's Grave" : The (food old rule, the simple plan, Th.it they should take who have the power, .And they ^hould k«ep who can. rOUN'DATIONS OF NATIONALISM 179 And the point of view was clearly shown in the astonished remark of the fourth Duke of Newcastle in tlie House of Lords, December 3, 1S30, "May I not do what I like with my own?" The spirit which inspires the democracy of national- ism should be more like that of the pftcd saj^e of the Greeks. When Socrates was implored by friends to escape from prison he replie somewhere between unity and diversity — or rather — much rather — includes both — something neither eternal struggle nor eternal peace; neither never-endir,g storm nor calm. The diurnal and annual motion of the earth are botii necessary in the economy of the universe. And so the perfect state is made up of those individ- uals whose right is guaranteed to both individual ini- tiative and social well-being. The perfect state will provide for the more perfect development of the indi- viduality of man through and in harmony with the growth of liis social self. There is a very fine passage in one of the most inter- esting books published in this generation, namely, the Posthumous Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics by the late Professor William Wallace of Oxford : Man has become more and more convinced that the Divine must dwell among us. that it must be realized on earth as in Heaven, and realized not in the heart merely, but in tangible and visible forms. Or, to put it more definitely, the enthusiast whose glance passes through the dividing shams to the underlying unity is not content to build that long lost heritage of humanity in the spirit only; he will not tamely submit to the actual fragmentariness of life, content, if so be he can still enjoy the comforting sense of its ideal wholeness. He protests against the breaking up into FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 185 fractions of casual, unsystematic, inharmonious character of the minor groupings, which actually prevail: he shows how they are not duly dovetailed into each other, and that they do not tend to converge and form a collective universe of life; he condemns the inequalities which by slow accumulations have shut many men out of the common sunlight of humanity and forced thern either to cower despairingly under falling hovels or to entrench them- selves defiantly in palatial prisons. He demands that the social basis of human life and action shall be realized, not as a mere genera', supervision and police of occasional interference, not ^s a system of laws which, when definite acts against the common weal have been traced to their author, shall restore the balance and status quo ante, but realized as a reasonable organization which watches so carefully, so closely, so wisely, that every part of the social machine shall never fail to keep in mind its social duty, that no part shall be other than an individualized organ or mis- sionary of the whole, that no stagnation, no block, no purely special or local movement shall arise to mar the uniformity of action. But to have a state like this it must be based on some- thing wholly dissimilar and antagonistic to individualism. There can be no ethical politics without a state framed in the interest of the public good. There can be no political recognition of the public good without a theory of life which offers also a theory of the "public" as something other than a mass of unrelated atoms. What ont wants is that conservative middle ground which will insure the full and free development of both .social and individual self, if there is a distinction between them. "Sacred to us is the individual," says Mazzini. "Sacred is society. We do not mean to destroy the former for the latter and found a collective tyranny, nor do we mean to admit the rights of the individual independ- ently of society and consign ourselves to perpetual anarchy. We want to balance the operations of liberty and association in a noble harmony." "What we want, what the people want, what the age is crying for, that it m ' ''ft '4 i86 THE NEW POLITICS may find an issue from this slough of selfishness and doubt and negation, is a faith, a faith in which our souls may cease to err in search of individual ends, may march together in the knowledge of one origin, one law, one goal." The Democracy of Nationalism involves elements un- recognized by the Democracy of Individualism. It in- volves certain fundamental relationships which are ethi- cal — framed in the forms of its institutions for the com- mon good. This constitutes Nationalism. If power and administration are kept close to the people they are democratic. Corporate self-government for the cor- porate good as opposed to political laissec faire is some- thing like the Democracy of Nationalism. This form of a state is something new in the world. Democracy has always been the political aspect of individualism. It has been anarchic. The spirit of it is what Diderot called the spirit of the eighteenth century — liberty. But then that was only one conception of liberty — license — and this was what Louis Blanc said it was : "It was individualism which happened, not liberty." But the state must not stop here. It is quite impossible for one to say ofF-hand what are the "duties" of a state, but that the state is founded on principles which make duties necessary is unquestioned, for the state has obli- gations as well as rights. The state is the institutional- ization of the common reason and life for the common good. Thus prayed Cleanthes, the Stoic: "Lead thou me, Zeus, and thou world's Law whithersoever I am ap- pointed to go ; for I will follow unreluctant." FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 187 This is a statidpoint lofty enough for world politics or vvorld religion. One turns to the insignificant individualist with sorrow. Thou art sick of self-love, Malvolio, And taste with a distempered appetite. There is a better standpoint for one who is not afraid to look life and destiny in the face, who wants to know the dignity of man, and that is the standpoint which Professor Caird used so often in his Oxford lectures: "Sub specie atcrnitatis." %\ 6,1 IS BOOK III THE DEMOCRACY OF NATIONALISM i ft! 189 CHAPTER I THE OLD ISSUE For the first time since the Civil War, and for the third time in the history of the RepubUc, a fundamental idea has raised itself to the surface of our paltry political life to remind us that after all there is something besides individual interests in American Politics. It is the same principle in all three instances— involv- ing the same struggle-the principle of nationalism pro- testing against that of particularism, law and order op- posing the abuses of anarchy and inefficiency in our national affairs. Once more we are back on fundamen- tal ground. Once more the issue is raised between state and nation-whether the part is greater than the whole. Two recent movements, the anti-Trust and Conser^'a- tion movements, have disclosed the fact that there are certain large and important areas for which there is no law; over which there is no sovereignty. The self-con- stituted and self-perpetuating institution of financial privilege enthroned in Wall Street, with an unpardonable rapacity and with unprecedented insolence, has bulwarked its pretensions in the old claims of state sovereignty. The rise of interstate corporations incorporated within and responsible to a single state; the impossibility of one state to catch, punish or control the financial law breaker with another state boundary so near; the absorption by these corporations of so vast an area of the national resources and the national domain, without recourse or 19' hi m 192 THE NEW POLITICS possibility of punishment, has raised a problem of im- mediate vital moment to the American people. To use a legal paradox, we have discovered a vast area of crime over wliich there is no law — the interstices, as it were, between the states. The first question as to tiiis area of anarchy is under whose sovereignty does it lie, that of state or nation? It is on exactly this ground that we must fight out the whole progressive mcnement. If it is to be left lo the state it will be found tliat in a sense it does not fall within the states but l.etween the states; therefore by the states the question will never be solved at all. Shall the nation then or shall it not under the Consti- tution annex those areas of anarchy between state and state, and between state and nation over which there is now no sovereignty at all? Wiierc shall we look for sovereignty where now no sovereignty exists? The question is not one as to where lies absolute sov- ereignty. This does not exist in America. The indi- vidual qua individual has his inviolable rights and responsibilities. As a member of a municipality he has others. As a citizen of a state he has others still. In those relations in which he is bound to a life larger than town, county or state he is and must be held amenable to a national fundamental a id sovereign law on the simple theory that we are a nation and not a bunch of states. There is a party of reaction which has decreed that there shall be no further development of the Constitution of the United States. It is the party which almost pre- vented the founding of the nation, and failing, sought to THE OLD ISSUE 193 destroy it; who still want to return to the principles of '76 and ileny the principles of '87. Under the pleasing fiction of "strict construction of delegated powers" they would destroy the fundamental principles of democratic .government, viz., direct representation by the people, re- c>.tablish the principle of the Confederation, viz., repre- sentation through forty-eight distinct and separate sovereignties, called states. They would have us believe tliat our fundamental law is an imperfect and inadequate national instrument closed and sealed when tlie fountains of inspiration were dried up over a hundred years ago. Was it not Comte wiio declared if God was nearer tlie world in ages past than He is to-day. He is not the (jod of the I*"uture? And can we not say if the people were sovereign a hundred years ago, and are not sov- ereign to-day. we shall be slaves to-morrow? The State Right idea is that the Constitution is an instrument possessing only such powers as have been surrendered by thirteen or by forty-eight states to meet the requirements of the eighteenth century ideals; and that these powers are only such as are enumerated specifically and construed literally, even though they be inadequate to meet the necessities of our present national organiza- tion, to say nothing of those unknown issues which lie hidden away in a destiny unrevealed. Their contention is that all our new problems must be met piecemeal and solved in fractions. It lay beyond the range of any human foresight less than omniscient for the framers of the Constitution to make pro^ 'sion for such new problems as have presented themselves to this more complex age, to say nothing of 194 THE NEW POLITICS those which still lie undeveloped, and even unguessed, in future times. It was quite impossible for them to see, for example, the growth of modern corporations and trusts and to make constitutional provision for their control. They make no allowance for future annexation of territory or for any kind of public improvement. No specific po\,ers were given to Congress to deal with these or any such questions. How could the framers of the Constit ition. who never saw a railroad, a steamboat, a telegraph, a telephone, an air sliip, a steel warship, or a machine gun, frame an unalterable, inflexible, and ada- mantine instrument as efficient for the expansions and complexities of coming centuries as for their own pI -nple bucolic world? It is beginning to seem necessary to some of us that in building for a far away future, if our forefathers have not made provision for the devel- opment of such an organism as may survive the tt-ts of experience, that it is quite time we were doing the thing ourselves. It has been borne in upon us pretty clearly not only that there are concerns which affect all Ameri- cans and which are national concerns, but that they are outside the reach of the states; and even if they are not they cannot be successfully treated piecemeal as, for example, from forty-eight points of view, and each point of view necessarily diflFerent from all the others. The impossibility of ever getting forty-eight different legislatures to deal unanimously and simultaneously with common vital national concerns has brought the Ameri- can people to face the necessity of enlarging the sphere of nationcility as a measure of self-defense. How are we and how are future generations to deal THE OLD ISSUE 195 with national problems, needs, necessities, not specifically provided for in the Constitution of the United States? I am not raising the question of local problems, but of those which are national or lie outside the boundaries of the interests of a single state. The whole question was raised definitely at the White House Conference of Governors in 1908. Mr. W. J. Bryan is reported to have said, "There is no twilight zone between the state and nation in which exploiting interests can take refuge from both." Instead, he fills this "twilight zone" with too rosy coruscations of his own amiable and optimistic temperament. As to this neutral zone (which is a term, by the way, I like better than twilight zone), with which earnest administrators have had so much trouble of late, and where their search parties have discovered so many foul- smelling lairs of pillage and immunity, there are many who declare with Mr. Bryan that here we need no con- stitution; because some day it will be governed in forty- eight sections by a fragmentary altruism and fractional patriotism. "Earnest men," continues Mr. Bryan, "with an unselfish purpose and controlled only for the public good will be able to agree upon legislation which will not only preserve for the future the inheritance which we have received from a bountiful Providence, but pre- serve it in such a way as to avoid the dangers of central- ization" — just as we have been doing, perhaps, in the dispersion of ninety per cent of the entire wealth of the United States among a hundred men known as Wall Street. "I am jealous of any encroachment upon the rights of % ,1 I 196 THE NEW POIJTICS the state, believing that the states are indestructible as the Union is indissoluble." For my part, I believe it to be sounder democracy to be jealous of any encroachment upon the rights of man before the rights of the state, and that it is not a ques- tion as to the states being indestructible or the Union indissoluble; it is a question of finding a sovereign for anarchy. It is a question of bringing justice to national and colossal offenders whom the states do not and can- not reach. Mr. Bryan's vague and sonorous phrases mean nothing under analysis but a reafifirmation of hisses fairc and chance and drift, a denial of reason and foresight, that what a few of the best minds have been trying to accomplish for a century and a quarter will some day happen by itself and all of a heap — when forty- eight coordinated state legislatures of "earnest men with an tmselfish purpose and controlled only for the public good" will contemporaneously and simultaneously get together and "agree upon legislation" which will "pre- serve for the future the inheritance we have received from a bountiful Providence." When forty-eight popular majorities agree upon one method of preserving the inheritance we have received from a bountiful Provi- dence, we may believe that the sky will fall and that we shall all catch larks. When an individualist like Mr. Bryan protests against centralization in this sense he is protesting against or- ganization. Such a protest tacitly admits that some one has neglected to show him the difference between cen- tralization and organization; and, furthermore, that he is oblivious to the one and only danger of centralization THE OLD ISSUE 197 in this country at this time and that is the centralization of capital, which is the direct and net result of the democracy of individualism; the outcome of a compe- tition so free and untrammeled by national oversight and restraint as to have resulted in less than .ocxj6 of our population owning 25 per cent of our national f'omain and one citizen owning one eleventh of the nation. There are many views as to how and when we became a nation. The Constitutional Convention did not — could not — declare for nationality. The view of such a man as President Walker is not convincing that it all came about within the first three or four decades of our history ; nor is the purely legal one of Story and Webster and Curtis ; nor is that later view which dates nationality from the Civil War. The nation is still in the making. The fundamental question of nationality seems to be still an issue. We have not achieved our nationality so long as there are national injustices and outrages and indecencies unpun- ishable; so long as there are usurpations and exploita- tions immune; so long as there are offenses which are not named as crimes only because tliere is no sov- ereignty to raise over them the aegis of the law. We have not worked out our nationality so long as there is any national interest over which the national, funda- mental law is not supreme. Therefore, I maintain, that the adoption of a constitution can be considered as no more than the beginning of a nation. It did not create a completed nation. The literal text of the Constitution, which one of the : %■ i i ■ri. i ^1- 198 THE NEW POLITICS f ramers said at the time of its adoption, no one expected would be held for a hundred years, was a compromise with the advocates of individualism, state rights, and the Articles of Confederation. This is not the Constitution of the United States to-day. No one will pretend that anything connected with an institution is the same to-day as it was a hundred and twenty-five years ago. The adoption of the Constitution was the beginning. We have been adopting and adapting ever since. Who has the hardihood to claim the Constitution of 191 X is the same as the Constitution of 17B7? I^ '^ »* not the same why has it been changed? And how has it been changed? Why, indeed, if not to meet the intelligent demands of an intelligent people ex- panding to a larger life, meeting new problems and crises arising from new conditions? Is not the incon- gruity of the position apparent even to a strict con- structionist who adheres to the letter of the dead instead of the spirit of the living, while his master, Jefferson, the chief of all strict constructionists, advocated a brand new constitution every nineteen years? Not the loosest constructionist would to-day dare advocate so radical a policy as Jefiferson's (unless he were a strict construc- tionist and individualist— that is to say, one who has no political principle regulating what he thinks and says and does). Our fundamental law is in evolution. Indeed, every living thing is in evolution. Therefore, nationality is still incomplete. It is not a question of what the text of the Constitution explicitly declares. It is not a question as to whether the states were sovereign or not. The THE OLD ISSUE 199 time has come when we must take a larger view of our- selves and a broader interpretation of our nationality. Either the Constitution is a fixed and limited instru- ,nent, incapable of expansion or growth, or it is a living, growing instrument of a living, growing nation. If it Ts the former, another half century will find us with the most inadequate constitution in the civilized world. If it is otherwise, America may achieve its manifest destiny and future centuries will remain unshackled to an age which did not dare proclaim nationality in the new con- stitution; an age which nearly lost its constitution over such trivial pretexts as conflict o' interests between tlie oystermen of Marj'land and \'irginia. The only ade- (juate theory of our national government is that it began in the adoption of the Constitution which it was impos- sible to frame at one time for all time ; to meet the new problems of the new ages which lay out before a nation just beginning to be, and already destined to be great. The population of the whole nation then was not as large as that now of Greater New York. None of the revo- lutions had been wrought which were about to transform the world in that scientific century which in the material welfare of man was to accomplish far more than had all the ages since Lot's wife got out of Sodom. If the fathers had a right to question their institutions, we have a right to question ours. If they had a right to protest against the anarchy of State Rights and repudi- ate the .-\rticles of Confederation, we have a right to pro- test against the anarchy of modern times and construe a constitution— or make one— which is large enough for the needs of a hundred million people. We have the r! Mm % 200 THE NEW POLITICS right to construe our fundamental law on established and accepted principles of construction, to suit the peremp- tory necessities of a growing nation. The Constitution of the United States is a document no more sacred to-day than were the Articles of Confederation before it ; except as the former instrument better serves the welfare of the American people. The Constitution was not made as an idol. It is not something to be worshipped in and of itself. It is an instrument to "promote the general wel- fare." Some of us have forgotten this. We have rested our case with the "fathers" — what they taught — what they wrought. Their children who have grown gray — and theirs who are growing gray — these do not count. Those who have taken this view conceive a nation as a mechanism, not an organism of which no provision can be made for growth. By the way of parenthesis, it may be said here, that one of tlie most undemocratic of modem tendencies is the disposition of our people to assail those who have dared to criticize the Supreme Court of the United States. There seems to be an unwritten law of lesc-majcste. It has been supposed hitherto that our Government, like all Gaul and some other trinities, is divided into three parts, the Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, but some would add— "the greatest of the.se" is the Judiciary. We might a. m't that. But when the people assail the President and Congress — even the Speaker — the way they do without recourse; now and then, when some one dares to ques- tion the judiciary, he is belabored to the land's ends, it is quite the moment for asking a serious question or two. Nothing that I know underneath the throne of God is THIi OLD ISSUE 201 immune from honest criticism. Some have even dared that. They have criticized the Bible out of our educa- tional system — they have criticized the Church to the background— everything has had its whirl in the crucible but the throne of heaven and the Supreme Court — a fruitful thought when you know one may be occupied by Almighty God and the other by a corporation lawyer. Nevertheless, our Supreme Court is the best thing in America. Even then, when any human institution be- comes too holy to be criticized, it is time for that insti- tution to be abolished as dangerous to the liberties of the people. We are only a century old. How trite but how true that this is but a moment in the aeons the North Ameri- can Continent is to play in the history of the human race. From Washington to Taft— the span of two fingers out of infinite reaches of time! Who would mold gjves for the expounding future? We are not what we were when Columbus discovered America— when the English fought the French — when the Colonials fought the English— when Americans fought each other. We are what we are this and no other day. We cannot shackle the wrists of posterity nor shall our ancestors shackle ours. Our nation is not a machine. It is a growing organism. This growing organism is the ulti- mate factor, not the instrument of its welfare. This instrument must bean elastic instrument, or, like Goethe's vase, it will be broken by the acorn planted in it. f , I CHAPTER II NATIONALITY AND THE PL'BLIC DOMAIN One of the most important departures from tlie par- ticularism of tlie fathers was that when llie question was raised by Maryland of a national domain outside the jurisdiction of the state and under that of Congress. The importance of this was not realized at the time, but it was a revolutionary principle. Maryland asked Con- gress to determine the western boundaries of such states as claimed to extend to tiie Mississippi or the South Sea. Some of the states, like Virginia, claimed enormous areas lying west of them and more or less indeterminate. Maryland had no such area. Gradually there grew to be a district, whicli had been ceded by the states to the National Government. This became a national domain. Not only that but it became a national domain out of which states miglit be made. It was actually proposed to create new states out of this national domain. Not only tliis but it was proposed that the National Goveminent create these states. Not only this, but the National Government, whicli owned a national domain, actually created states out of this domain. The acquisition of Louisiana was a revolutionary pro- cedure undertaken by men fresh from the throes of revolution. The United States had a Constitution and was governed by men who never ceased their protesta- tions of adhesion to the principle of a strict construction 203 THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 203 tliereof. Let, however, the exigency be of sufficient im- jiortaiice, let the need be sufficiently great, let the domi- nant party sufficiently desire it, and the Constitution must be construed to be equal to the exigency and need. So it was. After the purchase of Louisiana, there was an era of commercial and political good feeling during which the coonskin cap brigade was pouring over the Alleghanies and settling the Far West between the mountains and the Mississippi. This great "unconstitutional" act of Jefferson's was a brilliant stroke of constructive state- craft, but which, by the way, was not his at all, but the act of Livingstone and Monroe. It may be doubted if Jefferson ever had a purpose or a hope toward the acquisition of Louisiana until the act was done. His threatening letter to Napoleon, which certainly had some influence, was for the purpose of keeping Louisiana in the hands of the weaker power. The episode is interesting. As Hosmer remarks. "When Bonaparte was tlie one to he frightened and Talleyrand tlie one to be hoodwinked, the 'naivete' of the proceed- ing becomes rather ludicrous." When ail the nation but New England had acquiesced in the act of the Republican non-Democratic Administra- tion in acquiring Louisiana, her representatives argued against it and threw themselves across the path of national progress in much the same way that the State Rights party has done to this day. If the strict construc- tion party in power, which was defending an act under their theory as unconstitutional, had followed the lead of the liberal constructionists, who were combating their li' 204 THF': NEW POLITICS own theories simply because tliey had become the policies of the opposing party; and if tlic contention of Federal New ICngland had prevailed that the treaty-making power does not extend to incorporating a foreign people or a foreign soil ; and that the words "new states may be ad- mitted by Congress into the Union" meant only such states as were carved out of the territory of the United States at tlie time the Union was founded, it would have meant that we had a Constitution which had forever fixed our territorial boundaries, and that we could never have had another foot of territory under the existing Constitution. It was a case of constniction by the Executive and ratification by the people's representatives and by them- selves — with the exception of New England. The case of the State Right survivals who would keep the Constitution within the iron bands of the letter and not the spirit of the fundamental law to-day is very much the same old issue, the same old spirit, the same old story. But as then, the expanding nation is answering its own questions by continuing to grow. When tliese questions are no longer met by the spirit of nationality it will be when and because we have ceased to grow. If the Jeffersonians could justify their action in 1803 on the ground of "sovereign right" and for the promotion of the general welfare, why cannot we to-day? All the feeble echoes of tearing the Constitution to tatters — all the anirnadversions on Jefferson, who was declared by New England to be administering a despot- ism in the shoes of Carlos IV — with a passion, too, that got New England ready for secession — is a familiar clap- THK PUBLIC DOMAIN 205 trap to- can politician, has been both nationalist and broad con- structionist when it has suited his policies or purposes. No President has been more revolutionary than was Jefferson in deliberately performing an unconstitutional act ; i. e., from the point of view he had always held and then held and admitted that he held. But the country wanted Louisiana — constitution or no constitution — and Jefferson bought it — constitution 01 no constitution. As a matter of fact, the Administrative, the Legisla- tive, and the Judiciary of this government have all had a hand in the expansion of the meaning of the Consti- tution and the powers of nationality, and their acts have been acquiesced in by the whole American people, who t '.;- -'o6 THE Ni:\V POLITICS ;ii can make and unmake governments — and construe con- stitutions — and no one can question their right to do so without throwing doubt upon the validity of much of the most substantial and vital progress we have ever made in nationality. Tlierc liai never been any usurpation of authority or "abuse" of power exercised by any l*!xecutivc, or indeed by any branch of government, in the history of the United States which was legally so unwarranted, reck- less, irresponsible, gratuitous, and revolutionary as that of Jefferson in more than doubling the area of the nation at one stroke of the pen and tnking it and its in- habitants, without the consent of the governed, into the United States forever. God bless him for it Why this reckless dictator has not been held up to the execration of the particularist disciples of the Jeflferso- nian democracy of individualism may be accounted for in the fact that he was, here at least, a statesman before he was a lawyer, a patriot before a pedant. Whut he was. so may others be after him, without blame. The Louisiana purchase was revolutionary in more senses than one. Xot only did it open a new future for the nation, but it brought up the whole question of the public domain in such a way as to change forever the question of state sovereignty by changing radically the conditions upon which states might be admitted into the Union, and by changing, fundamentally, the powers of states so admitted. THF-: PUBLIC l)OMAr>I 207 By an act of self-acknowledged imperii ism JeflFerson liad bought an empire more than 55,000 square miles larger tiian the whole territory of the United States. This was added to that Western territory whicii had been ceded by the states and had become a part of the public domain. I [ere was over one half of the national area which never iiad belonged to the thirteen original states. There was no (jucstion here of prior state soveieignty, for over half the nation now had been neither state nor sovereign. It was l)lain. raw, wild land — 883,072 square miles of it. It Iiad been a struggling dependency of Spain and France. France sold it. It now belonged to the American nation — was a part of the national domain as the territory ceded by the states was a part of the public domain — out of which new stat^. jjht be and were created. Later, other territory was dded to this. Out of this great Western area thirty-five states have been formed — crea- tures of a national government which was made by the people of thirteen other states. When it is solemnly proclaimed that the powers of the national government exercising jurisdiction over forty- eight states were delegated by the states, I ask by what states? The vaguest dreamer hardly dare affirm that constitutional powers have been delegated to the national government by the thirty-five creations of that same national government. How does the relation of the tliirty-five states, formed since the adoption of the national Constitution, differ from that of the thirteen states which existed before that national government was formed? Certainly the thirty-five states are creatures of the national government. Certainly the thirteen states ..Ik ■ 'I 208 THK NKW POLITICS are not. Wherefore tliis gulf fixed within our body politic — this irreconcilable and monstrous theoretical anomaly ? We see that Congress could and actually did carve new states out of this doniam, and set them up to arrogate to themselves all tlie pretensions of sovereign statehood, claiming equal power and jurisdiction with the thirteen original states, flouting the sovereignty of the parent nation which created them and made them states. The fact that the National Government created new states out of a domain of its own. part of wliich never had been under the jurisdiction of the thirteen states — the fact that the National Government could and did bestow all the powers and dignities of statehood upon them, is conclusive proof that the National Government is the sovereign government and the state governments are not, on the simple ground that one state cannot create another state and confer upon it greater powers than itself possesses. Here emerges a very interesting question. What is the diflference between the powers of those states which the National Government created and those which are alleged to have created the National Government? No one would dare assume but that each state of the Union is on the same footing as that of every other state. Let us see just exactly what this State Right theory means. It means that thirteen states divided thirteen sov- ereignties with a nation which they created, with which the future thirty-five states had nothing to do, except that the thirteen sovereignties passed over a frac- THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 209 tion of their multiple sovereignty to a national govern- ment which they created, which in its turn passed over to thirty-five states wliich it created the sovereignty it never possessed. This half-sovereign of delegated and limited powers delegates unlimited powers to its own creatures. In other words, we have thirteen fractions of original sovereignties which the original states possessed and thirty-five third-hand sovereignties which nothing and nobody ever possessed. This theory may pass muster under that theory of democracy holding which some one said — was it Talley- rand? (it sounds like him) — that he had vast respect for the dignity of the people, but very little for their iiilelligence. It sometimes simplifies matters for us to find out just what we want to find out. Certainly one of the things we must settle is w^hether the Constitution has any powers which the thirteen states did not give it, and whether the lliirty-five states have any powers the Constitution did not give them. If so, who gave these powers? Perhaps another question equally vital to any clear thinking on tliis subject is to decide ivhethcr the people of the nation have any powers which the Constitution does not give them. For the assertion of the principle that such powers as belong to the Constitution are delegated to the nation by the states I am able to find no authority. It can be found neither in the Constitution, nor in the records of the thirteen popular conventions which ordained the Con- stitution, nor in the supreme judicial interpretations of the Constitution for over one hundred years. Mk 2IO THE NEW rOLITICS This state right and strict construction theor\' lays itself across the pathway of American progress. It may be used, and is generally used by the vested interests and by invested privilege as a bulwark of immunity. It means that if, in the progress of civilization, the increase of wealth and population, new crises, situations, or prob- lems have arisen which have not been foreseen by our forefathers, and are not enumerated in the Constitu- tion, it may and must be used to retard the progress of the nation. Let no progress be made which has not been foreseen and provided for in the Constitution made in the eighteenth century. The twentieth century is shackled to the eighteenth. 7he whole thing resolves itself into a point of view. The choice is between the attitude of nationalist and indi- vidualist. The nationalist conceives the Constitution as a set of principles instead of a set of rules. CHAPTER III NATIONALITY AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS It is a far cry from the present conservation move- ment back to our crass eighteenth centu;/ atomism, wiien Madison, Monroe, and Jackson were vetoing bills to "promote the general welfare" and were splitting hairs over the proposition that it was constitutional to make post roads but not wagon roads. What use had the early par '.ularists, for example, for such a political institu- tion as the Smithsonian Institution, the Congressional Library, the Geological Survey, tiie Department of Agri- culture? Washington, in his eighth annual message, had asked what institutions could the public purse be devoted to with greater propriety than those for the promotion of agriculture. "Experience has already shown that they are very cheap instruments of immense national benefits." How different was Jefferson's attitude. Jefferson, in a letter to Stuart, in 1791, wrote clearly of the need of local self-government, that states were necessary that each might do for itself "what concerns itself directly." He spoke of subdivisions into counties, townships, wards, and farms, and added, "Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap we should soon want bread." As a matter of fact that which Jefferson had scorned has happened and the farmer is not only directed from Washington as to when to sow and when to reap, but an i^f 212 THIi XliVV POLITICS what, and Iiow, and as to a thousand other things as well which centralized national slate interference with the farmer and his methods and crops and products, has made scientists out of hayseeds — who constitute now a dignified profession instead of occupying a position of economic dernier ressorf. Could the timid spirits of a hundred years ago have dreamed of such a centralization of tlie jjowers of the nation, and of such an enlargen^ent of the areas of its jurisdiction, they would have been frightened out of their senses, and one can even imagine their bones turning over in their graves to-day. And yet the Government still lives and is likely to last some time longer. But tlie curious part of it is that the State Right party is still alive and the Individualists are crying "No" to every affirmative prograin proposed by the Constitutional party of the United States. When we remember how feeble was the national senti- ment, confined almost wholly to a few like Washington, Hamilton, Wilson, and Madison in the days before the Convention; and how, to get a Constitution at all, com- promises must be made with the Jacobin spirit of the age which was so intensely tlie spirit of eiglUeenth century individualism; and how even principle of nationalism was wrested, as it were, from the very large particular- ist majority, it dawns upon us why we are a people still saturated with ideals of anarchy. Indeed, the wonder is that so much has been gained. Through the initiative given the cause of a supreme and sove'-eign national go\ernment by the Washington administratic. the disintegrating and demoralizing forces INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 213 of particularism were held back long enough for national institutions to be precipitated, crystallized, and hardened. Jefferson's administration, and those of his democratic followers for a quarter century, could not undo the work of Washington and Hamilton. I iiave often imagined a reversal of the work of the two parties. I have tried o think of Jefferson as the tirst President of the United States. Eight years of this s])irit following the adoption of the Constitution would liave made union and democracy forever impossible on tliis continent. The Constitution would not have sur- vived as long as the Articles of Confederation, and these two Charters of the American Experiment would have found their way to some historic library in Europe be- longing to a nation sufficiently consolidated and suf- ficiently strong to have preyed upon the struggling and jealous and not too noble peoples of thirteen states. The l)redictions of Europe would have come true. Some of our early history is instructive and will bear restudy. In the light of what the Government is doing for the people to-day. we seem to be looking into tlie (lark ages when we trace the history of the strug- i^lc for internal improvements for over a half century of the reign of particularism. There is immeasurable patlios in the littleness of the democracy of individual- ism which obstructed and thwarted the national senti- ment, fostered the sullen and selfish particularism wiiicli l)roke all bounds in Jackson's slogan, "To the victor l)elong the spoils"; placed American political life frankly on the individualistic foundations of selfish aggrandize- ment, from which it is likely never to recover. ■14 1 HE NEW POLITICS Tlie successors vi the Federalists made an attempt to remedy the defects laid bare by tlie War of 1812, which revealed the criminal and insensate inade(iuacy of means of internal cuniniunicaiiun and transportatifm. Better roads and \\atcr\va_\s were seen tu be desi "able in peace and neces>ary in war. Callnntn joined Clay in advo- cating a nationalistic inicri)reialion of the Consti- tution rivaling that of Hamilton. But the ugly spirit of sectionalism was nowliere shown more clearly than in the defeat of Gallatin's scheme ( 1808 ) for a system of roads and canals from A'aine to Louisiana, involving a national expenditure of $J,ooo,ooo a year for ten years. This would facilitate commerce and immigration and con- tribute '"toward cementing tlie bonds of union." etc. But a majority did not want the bonds of union cemented, and this and another appeal in 1816 were defeated, notwithstanding the lessons learnerl in the war. What can Ije more "edifying" than the legislation for the Cum- berland Road? Witness Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan vetoing the simplest measures of Congress looking toward internal imjjrove- ment, "seeing," as Madison put it. "that such a power is not given l)y the Constitution." Monroe enumerates the specific things a nation may do because permitted by a Constitution that nation created, in a message in which foresight is condemned and hindsight is prohibited. This literalism of strict construction is too feeble for men of thought and action. The Constitution says you may build post roads. But it does not say you may build wagon roads. Therefore the presidents of the democ- racy of individualism for a half century blocked the prog- INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS ress of the nation. Do we not know — did not Madison, Monroe, Jackson know — tliat a wagon road is as much within the purpose of the Constitution as a post road? — that to have enumerated every item, everything a grow- in,!,' nation might do, would be to fill up a national library to ilie exclusion of better material? This puerile and un- siatesmanlike construction of the Constitution, utterly blind to all Marshall was doing to make that Constitu- tion the elastic instrument of a living people, found its logical result in the sterility of democratic legislation and in tiie final efifort of part icuk ism in the sixties to make a real nation forever impossible. As early as 1775, Washington had projected a scheme for inland navigation to Detroit which had not been ab- sent from his mind since, as a boy surveyor, he had traversed the wilds of Pennsylvania. It was not till he had retired to Mount Vernon after the var that, with Jefferson, he took up the matter which the war had driven from his active attention. He foresaw the future of the country as no otiier American saw it, and he saw, too, that such a plan would give security to the citizens, increase internal commerce, and cement the bonds of union between the Eastern states and Western territory which some other power might gain possession of by peaceful or warlike means. Washington's unerring judg- ment showed itself in his voluminous correspondence on this subject, as when he declared that he was looking so far ahead as to facilitate transportation so that a large American population might be already settled in the Mis- sissippi valley before there was "any stir about the navi- gation of the Mississippi." 2l6 THE NEW POLITICS But tliere are a few interesting oases in these arid areas. They may be found in the glaring inconsistencies of the party of strict construction. We soon find this party outdoing Hainihonian Federalism, ta.xing wliisky and stills, creating a national debt, framing a protective tariff, chartering a national bank, nearly four times as large as tliai of Hamilton which had met with their violent o])position. While the E.xecutive and Legislative branches of a strict constructionist government liad been stretching the Constitution to .suit party and i)ublic jnirposes. the Judiciary was doing the same thing, to Mr. Jefferson's dismay. The i-2xecutive (during Jefferson's administra- tion) was easily frightened by this policy when not inaugurated by the Executive itself. But .. came his turn to frig. 'ten the other two coordinated branches of government afterward. Mr. Madison arose in his wrath and vetoed the j)resumptions of the national legislative when it essayed to build a few new bridges, fill a few mud holes, and build a wagon road into the new empire being opened west of the Alleghanics. Madison, in his famous veto mesage of March 3, 1817. is sufficiently txi)licit as to his views on the powers of Congress being "specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution." Failing to find tliere tlie power proposed to be e.xerci.sed by the bill "for constructing roads and canals," "to give security to internal commerce," "and tc render more easy and less expensive the n--ans and provisions for the com- mon defense," he vetoed the bill. Monroe's papers are much more interesting because INTliRNAL I M FROVKM KXTS J17 iie goes into the subject in a way (and for a waj' ) that would have done justice to a Federalist in his theory of SI ivereignty. On May 4, 1822, Monroe vetoed "An act for the l)reservation and repair of the Cumberland road" "with ilcei" regret." His contention is beyond dispute that "a power to establish turnpikes, with gates and tolls, and lo enforce the collection of tolls by penalties, implies a ])'iwcr to adopt and execute a complete system of internal improvement," and would apply as far as to ofifer at least constitutional ground for Mr. Bryan's scheme for the nationalization of railroads. "A right to legislate for one of these purposes is a right to legislate for iitlicrs." "It is a complete right of jurisdiction and sov- ereignty for all the purposes of internal improvement." It is unquestionably true, as Monroe maintains, that, if even the right of tlie national government to build a culvert or dig a post hole can be maintained, tlie jurisdic- tion and sovereignty of the government is established for all purposes afifecting the general welfare. So far the nationalist agrees with Monroe. Perhaps one of our great difficulties has been the one which so confused Monroe and most of the earlier par- ticularists. In the paper which accompanied his veto message of May 4, 1822, he tells Congress that after "resisting the encroachments of the parent country" the power they tore from the crown "rested exclusively in the people." He speaks further of the "new ("thirteen) states, possessing and exercising complete sovereignty." Speaking of the principle of representation he declares that, "It retains the sovereignty in the people." Again :iS THi-: m:\v politics he speaks of the powers of slate legislatures and the piiwcrs of Congress. "'J'licy rested on the same basis, the /'(■('/'/t'." Then the Confederation liecanie obviously necessarj' and it was in operation eight years as a "com- pact," "all of wliose powers were adopted in the Con- stitution, witli important adilitions" (!ic neglects to mention the more imi)ortant subtractions), and argues that ' tvhere certain terms are transeferred from one in- strumeiu to tlie other and in the same terms, or terms descriptive of tlie same po\vors that it was intended that they should be construed in the same sense in the latter that they were in the former." He is trying to drag tlie content of the Confederation over into the Constitu- tion. After quoting the thirteen articles, and admitting ilicir utter incompetency (although they, like the Consti- tution, were to Itc perpetual), he states that the Consti- tution was formed by delegates and adopted by con- ventions of each .state, the credit of which (the enlarge- ment of tlie r,enera! Government at the expense of the powers of the states) is due "to the people of each state" — he better might have said to the people of all the states, "in nhcdiencc to whfise will and under whose control the stale governments acted." But. as a mailer of fact, not one of the "state govern- ments acted." In each one of thirteen cases a popular convention acted. Mad the slate governments acted there would never have been a Constitution like the one we have. Had they acted there would never have been a surrender of sovereignty. State governinents would never have consented to the lessening of their own nowers. and Monroe is riLrlit in ascribin;.'" the credit of IXTKUXAL IMPRO\EMKNTS 219 t!iis "ciilijjlitcncd patriotism" to the people of the states, v.ii ) came toj,'cthcr professedly not as the people of states, but as peoi)Ie wiio wanted a nation — not to con- sider matters of local importance, but of national con- cern. The state con\ enti(»ns which adopted tiie Constitu- tion were the local uprisings of a peop'e desirin}; a nation and a national government, meeting in state conventions l)a;utse one great popular convention would have involved iiardships of transportation greater than those ciuhired by the Sultan of Sulu on his recent visit to the Capital of his country. Monroe is sound in his contention that "the people, the higliest authority known to our systetn, from whom all our institutions spring and on whom they depend," formed "the Constitution." "Had the people of the sev- eral states thought proper to incorporate themselves into one community, under one government, they might have done it." Here he again confuses Confederation and Ojnstitution. He claims that powers transferred from one instrument to the other "should be construed in the same .sense" in the one as in the other. This cannot be maintained. Every article of the Confederation must be modified by the statement in Article I that it is a Confederacy, and in Article H that "each state retains its sovereignty," etc., "and every power, jurisdiction, and riLjht which is not by this Confederation expressly dele- j^atcd to the United States in Congress assembled"; and Article HI, "The said states enter into a league of friendship," etc. Nothing pertaining to political sovereignty or sanc- tion can mean the same under the limitations of such an 220 THK NI.W I'OLITICS ill-conccivod and l()f)scly cotistitnted siil)stitiitc for a fundainciital law, as it must nicaii under an instrument framed hy a people di-^;,'ustcd and afraid of anarchy and inspii'^d by the patriotism of nati'Miality, wlii> have met to abolish the louse-juinled and incompetent com- pact wliith is not even ade(|nate for a Iea;;ne of f.iend- ship; and to frame tlie sovereign instrument of a sov- ereij,'n i)eople and accouch a sovcreif,'n tiation. Tlius: "U'c. the people of the United States . . . do ordain and estabhsh this Constitution. " Nothinj; mo(Uficd by the Preamlilc of tlie Constitu- tion of the United States can mean the same as it would restricted by the first tliree articles of the Confederation. Monroe held to the Rousseau theory of a social con- tract, which was hardly questioned in democratic com- munities in those days — the theory that society was the result of a contract made by a people who never existed. It was easy, therefore, for him to c(Misider the Constitution as the same as the Confederation — a conijiact. On this rock future genera'' it ere 'o ?|)1't. It had not yet dawned upon the atje of revolutionary individualism, nor perhaps yet has the conception dawned upon the world, that the birth of a nation was no figure of si)eech, but that in a real deep sen.se sopiethiing organic had conic into being. Here lies tlie inipass.able gulf between eighteenth and twentieth century tliought. Tlie political anomaly of to-day is the survival of the old ideals and ideas and the failure of their belated devotees to justify them to modern thought; who con- strue the problems of an organism in the terms of mechanics. INTi:kN.\l. IMPROVF.MI'.NTS 2Jl Speaking of tlie i)arties Id the "i oiiipact," Monmc says ihe iH;()i)le "are the sole parties and may amend it at pleasure." Why can they not construe it at pleasure. It It is (lone by Marshall's rule— not unconstitution- ally? If it is a compact or a contract, or what not, and if the people are sovereign, why can they not say, 'We can amend this Constitution as we i)lease, and we can construe it as we like, ami we can dictate the methods ..f construction and amendment"? We the people! Who are we the people? We the living people or the dead people? Are wc forever chained to the corpse of the jiast or must we think and act for ourselves and for the iiiil)orn? That is a profound observation of Monroe: "There were two separate and inrlependent governments estab- lished over our Union, one for local purposes over each slate, by the people (jf the state, the other for national purposes by the people of the United States."' Monroe recognizes no areas of anarchy such as have been devel- oped by the complex conditions of modern national life. over which neither state nor i. at ion exercises supreine autliority. "The national government begms where the state government terminates," he says. He does not 3o THE i\I-:\V i'OLlTICS principle represented in the aristocratic party of the United Slates Senate, which represents the states and not the people, should have been a compromise in pro- pitiation of the party of the democracy of individualism. This undemocratic principle of state representation in place of popular representation was a fatal defect. It was fatal not only because it denied the fundamental principle of democracy, but because it did not contain tlie principles which were adequate to a national life. For instance, the Congress could make treaties and nego- tiate loans with foreign Powers, but always with a feel- ing that thirteen quarreling sovereignties, bound to- gether in a "league of friendship," might find themselves nullifying their action and repudiating their foreign obli- gations simply because they had come to pulling each others' ears in their equal wisdom and superior authority. The states were under no compulsion whatever to raise money voted by Congress, to perform the part stipulated by Congress, or to abide by the promises of the national legislature. Congress represented the states, but the states flagrantly flouted its plighted faith. Congress miglit promise to pay. but the states might refuse if it were the sweet will of thirteen jealous sovereignties. The Articles of Confederation were a plaything for children. They embodied the princijjles of the Declara- tion of Independence. The instrument was the cpiin- tessence of Jeffersonian transcendentalism and the vehicle of anarchy. The convention was not proposing amendments to con- federation, but abolition of the confederation. It offered an cntiidy new instrument for an entirely new govern- BACK TO THE PEOPLE 231 ment, which must go, and did go, to that source of political power which created every state; the power which had given them the right to enter the compact of confederation, which could abolish that confederation, and which could and did set up a revolutionary govern- ment. Thus the second American revolution was achieved. It was ordained that the Constitution siiould be the fundamental law of the people of such states as those whose people inight adopt it. This was recognition of state sovereignty only so long as such a state might refuse to assent to the Constitution. As a matter of fact, each state was, until such a time, practically a sovereign state, but when the people of that state voted for the fundamental law that status was changed on the ground that in this act the Constitution had the full and direct authority of the people. It was necessary to establish the principle that final authority rests with the people. If it ever became neces- sary for the nation to restrain or harmonize the states, under powers which the very theory of nationality demanded, it must be done on the established proposi- tion that the ai hority of all the people exceeds that of a thirteenth part thereof. There was no room for this proposition under a theory of a mere union of sovereign states. That union had been tried. It had failed to interpret the fundamental idea of democracy established by the Revolution because its remote and feeble powers depended wholly upon thirteen separate pleasures. There were no adequate sanctions. No measure could be e.xe- cuted but with the separate approval of each of the sf 23-! THE Ni:\V POLITICS states. Such a situation was monstrous, and to con- tinue it was folly. Tlien it was that the Washin^tonian I'ederalists came forward with the real democratic theory of tlie state, and it is a matter of surpassing interest to note how tlie Ilamiltonian i)hi!osoph saved the Jeffersonian in- stinct to keep i)eoi)Ie and government close together. The Constitution of the United States was a national protest against the anarchy into which the country was drifting. It was enacted to make one nation with a common good out of thirteen nations with uncommon grievances; to harmonize clasliing interests and "pro- mote the general welfare." Party lines diverged here and the issues were clean cut. One after another of the wise men saw the insuper- able difficulties in tlie immediate future, and began to pave the way for a constitutional convention. Webster wrote, in i7> i m A WORD ABOUT SOVERKIGNTY 247 principles (and it is the literal minded strict construc- tionist who fails to grasp them), that if sovereignty was delegated it was surrendered and by the people, not the states, and to a sovereign instrument; that the people, not the states, made the Constitution, and the Constitu- tion made the national government; that this instrument holds powers sufficient for all the needs and purposes of a national government ; and that anything less would defeat the aims of the framers of the Constitution and the founders of the nation, and would prove inadequate to the multiplying needs of a sovereign people. The Articles of Confederation formed a union of states. The Constitution of the Southern Confederacy made a union of states. But the National Consti- tution is a bond of union of the People of the United States. To my mind there is nothing Marshall ever said more fundamental, more vital, or more true than this : "The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will and lives by their own will. But this supreme and irresistible power to make or unmake resides only in the body of the people, not in any subdivision of them. The attempt of any of the parts to execute it is usurpation and ought to be repelled by those to zvhom the people have delegated the power of repelling it." What a different note from that of Buchanan, with the nation on the verge of civil war, who, in his message of December, i860, while denying the right of secession, declared that Congress had no right to coerce a state. President Francis A. Walker (The Making of the 248 THE NEW POLITICS Nation, p. 253) interprets Marshall's theory of the Con- stitution as an instrument under which the national government is not limited in its agencies or methods, and has "free choice among all means not expressly forbid- den in the Constitution, which are reasonable, expedient, and politic means to those ends." Marshall expanded "the frame of the government to its proper propor- tions." Hamilton's doctrine of implied powers is more familiar; that "if the power is necessary to the purpose of the Constitution it may be implied from powers expressed." The final establishment of this principle throufjh con- struction, one of the most important achievements of American jurisprudence, settles the question as to lati- tude of construction and as to the elasticity and not ri- gidity of that ultimate instrument, the Constitution of the United States. It established forever, or at least so long as the Constitution shall endure, the principle of develop- ment and the possibility of development in spite of that class of minds which would fetter a growing vital virile present to the corpse of an age a hundred years dead. Moreover, it established not only the fact that powers enough have been delegated to the Constitution, whether by the states or by the people, to confer on the Union all the powers of national sovereignty, but that this sovereignty lies in the will of the people— the whole people— not in thirteen or forty-eight peoples; and that of the whole people the ultimate oracle is the Consti- tution of the United States : that this Constitution is the instrument of one State, and not forty-eight states. A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 249 Marshall had .aid that the people can make Consti- tnt.ons or unmake them. The strict constructionist, who .nay object to doctrine so revolutionary. ,s referred to the fact that with an inconsistency characteristic of a party .vh.rh shouted that all men were created free and equal and tought the Civil War to uphold human slavery and state sovereignty, Mr. JeflFerson and his followers, advo- cated a Constitution elastic enough to be changed every nmeteen years; that the majority should make the Con- stitution "what they think will be best for themselves " and as it were in the same breath, pleaded for a strict- ness ,n construction, for a rigidity of Constitution which would make reform exceedingly difficult and progress all but impossible. It will be urged by the strict constructionist that pro- v'ision has been made for changes in the Constitution through amendment. Quite true. But an amendment to the Constitution is now almost an impossibility. Pro- vision has been made also for change through construc- tion— of legislature, executive, and judiciary. I fancy there is no one to-day to question the consti- tutionality of a vast number of legislative projects "to promote the general welfare," and which have no consti- tutional ground outside th^ fact that the entire nation has acquiesced in what we may call legislative, or judi- cuil, or executive amendments to the Constitution, which before the Civil War would have been passionately and almost unanimously opposed. It is impossibl.e to recon- cile the attitude of the strict constructionalists with the mcreasing body of laws enacted for the public better- ment. How are we to consider this increasing bodv of S*'tlV ■?i't 250 THE NEW POLITICS law finding its expression, if we take a classical example, in the whole recent conservation movement of the United States passed by the sovereign power of a sovereign nation, ratified by the executive, acquiesced in by the Supreme Court, applauded by the whole people, with no specific warrant in the Constitution of the United States, unless these acts are to be considered in lieu of amendments to the Constitution, as an expansion of that Constitution? Does not the state right theory trip on this snag? Suppose every legislative act to "promote the general welfare," for which there are not specific powers men- tioned in the Constitution, were wiped out by the Supreme Court? What would we have left? Not a nation, surely. I fear these state right delegationists have mixed their authorities. I do not find a body of doctrine in the Constitution justifying their claim. I do find their theories certified in the Articles of Confederation and in the Constitution of the late Confederate States. I quote from the Articles of Confederation of 1781 against which the Constitution of the United States was the protest of the people of the nation: Article II: Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this con- federation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled. I read the Preamble of the Confederate States of America, 1861 : We, the people of the Confederate States, each state acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form, etc. A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 251 But I read in the Preamble to the Federal Consti- tution : "WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States" (that is the way the Constitution begins and spells "WE. THE PEOPLE" in enormous old German letters) "in order to form a more perfect union"; (that is the first purpose mentioned before the establishment of justice or securing the blessings of liberty) "WE, THE PEOPLE ... do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America." The Montgomery Convention was found explicitly acknowledging the principle of state rights and dele- gated powers. The Confederacy was formed because the Federal Constitution did not so ordain. The South- ern leaders claimed to have been satisfied with the Federal Constitution, but for "too loose an interpreta- tion," though no kind of construction can find the prin- ciple of state rij, s (which of course means state sov- ereignty) in the Constitutior' of the United States. It is not altogether parenthetical to state here that the Constitution of the Confederacy is a consistent exposi- tion of the philosophy of individualism. For example, practically everything in the way of state action "to promote the general welfare" was prohibited. It ex- pressed clearly the democratic theory of the state. The state had no moral mission. The sphere of national self- government was very much restricted, all but annihilated. The principle of nationality was annihilated. It was because the South wanted to annihilate this principle that it tried to destroy the Union. Protective tariffs were prohibited, as were all internal improve- ments at the public expense. Grant the soundness of their political philosophy and you must justify secession. pi if* 252 THE NEW POLITICS Indeed, it is an interesting fact that democrats — those who are consistent individualists — liave always arrayed themselves against the ethical enlargement of the sphere of the state — "to promote the general welfare." The vast mass of constructive state-building to the credit of the constitutional party in the extension of the public con- trol over the common good, has been pronounced uncon- stitutional by every strict constructionist and held as pern '■ious, theoretically, by every democrat of individ- ualism, although advocated and voted for when it was good policy to do so. Jefferson stated the issue clearly: "Our tenet ever was, and, indeed, it is the only land- mark which now divides the Federalists from the Repub- licans, that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated." "Henceforth." says Schouler, after quoting the above, "our national parties were to fight one another upon the issue, not of constitutional change, but of constitutional construction, public opinion being the only recognized arbiter. From 1804 to 1865. a period of much contro- versy, culminating in Civil War. not a single consti- tutional amendment was proposed by the American Congress to the states for adoption; and the thirteenth amendment of tliis latter date registered and confirmed a decree which the sword had already executed without positive sanction." Is it not time to reexamine our opinions of the Con- stitution and this question of sovereignty from some other than a lawyer's standpoint? A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 253 Each generation must have its own point of view. Is it not time for the generation which was born since the Civil War to state its case ? There is a growing party who believe in national self- government and in state, county, or individual self- government as supplementary and not opposed thereto. We conceive of our fundamental law as having proceeded from the people. These "people" are not thirteen original states. These "people" are not merely the people of the thirteen original states. They are the people who enacted the Constitution before they died, and who construe the Constitution while we are living — we the people. Professor Hart has stated the case for the modern American who believes in American Nationality. "The correct view of American Government is that every form of government, national, state, or local, emanates from the same authority — namely, the people of the United States. The fundamental basis of American Govern- ment is the right of a people to organize and form governments for themselves" (Actual Government, p. 51). He might have added that the fundamental basis of American Government holds the right to construe according to the needs of the living rather than in defer- ence to the dead. Are the states nations? Is the National Government their agent? It has taken over a hundred years to answer this ques- tion, and the question is not yet answered if the present state right contentions be well grounded, and if there is an area over which neither state nor nation exercises 254 THE NEW POLITICS sovereign control. The nationalist maintains that the American nation is a sovereign nation. Sovereignty means supremacy. It involves a dominion subject to no otlier dominion. It has authority and force subsidiary to no other authority or force. The nation involves powers actually belonging separately to none of the forty-eight individual states. Lincoln once defined sovereignty adequately for all practical purposes. He says. "Would it not do to say that it is a political community without a political supe- rior?" He said further, "Tested by this no one state except Texas ever was a sovereignty." Assume sovereignty of the nation. Has it a political superior in the 'sovereign" state? Assuredly not. Has it even an equal in the "sovereign" state? No. Assume sovereignty of the state. Has it a superior? Assuredly it has. Is it even the equal of the nation in authority and power to enforce that authority? In- deed no. No state "sovereignty" measures up to that test. No state possesses this supreme power, A state can- not even carry the mails. It cannot coin money, impose tariff dues. It cannot grant patents or copyrights. It cannot maintain a navy, nor can it declare war or peace, nor enter into a treaty with a foreign power ; it cannot secede. Why? Simply and solely because it is not of itself a sovereign power. The legislature of a state cannot be said to exercise supreme legislation when the very citizens of that state owe first obedience to the laws made by another power, and when the codes of their lawmakers are null and void A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 255 if in conflict with the laws made by another power than that of their state or the people of their state. The courts of a state cannot be said to exercise supreme judicial power when their very magistrates are sworn to disregard the laws of their own state when they are in conflict with another law passed by another and higher legislature, and are subject to construction by another and higher tribunal. The very Constitution of a state is not sovereign, for it is only operative when in consonance with another Constitution of another and higher authority.* These are some of the powers without which the claim of sovereignty is a ridiculous if not an impudent asser- tion; powers which the people long ago stripped from the stales with the confederation and wove as one garment into the Constitution to cover one people of one nation. Sovereign power involves supreme authority and force. The supreme law involves the supreme sanction. There are no sovereign states, because no state possesses a sovereign law with a supreme sanction. This question was thought to have been left open by the compromises of the Constitution and certain states once alleged of them- selves sovereignty and seceded. It was a question then, at last, no longer of sovereign law or sovereign construc- tion of law, but of sovereign sanction. This question was passed up to the next highest of all tribunals— the arbi- trament of arms. The Civil War settled the question of state sovereignty. The Civil War was the ultimate amendment to the Constitution. It settled the question of sovereignty. ■ Andrew Jackaon. m 256 THE NEW POLITICS The Constitution of the United States is not merely the document so called. It is that instrument plus the construction in many volumes of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States plus the construction of the people of the United States on the fields of battle, where they decided that the nation is one nation, not a confederation of states, and that the whole is greater than any of its parts. Back of this whole question of Nationalism is the question of authority. Where lies sovereignty over the areas unforeseen and unprovided for in state or national institutions — as to the interstate? Where lies sovereignty over those areas of anarchy between the states ? The e.xtra-state as it were ? The question of sovereignty is not one of rights. It may be one of right, but ultimately it is a question of final authority. Final authority rests with the whole people of the nation whose ultimate instrument is the Constitution. This Constitution was the beginning not merely of union. That had been established by the Con- federation. The Constitution went further. It became the supreme law of a sovereign people. CHAPTER VI THE NATIONAL PARTY Side by side with the revolutionary ideas into which this nation was born another idea has been growing from the very beginning of our national existence. // is the national idea. The history of political parties in the United States dates from the moment when men began to draw the line between "Strong Government" men and "the Par- ticularists" ; those who advocated and those who opposed the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution once adopted, the party lines defined the position of those believing in a liberal construction which gave the National Government greater power, and those who opposed it. The "Particularists" of 1781 became tlie Anti-Federalists of 1787. The Anti-Federal- ists of 1787 became the Confederacy of i860. The Washingtonians and Hamiltonians of 1787 became a Nationalist party. Every day, for over a hundred years, the American people have been moving away from the crass individual- ism of the two revolutions, from particularism to Nation- alism, and in the direction of the democracy of altruism. Even the practical statecraft of our fathers saw that anarchy was no fitting foundation for a rational state, when individualism surrendered its purity reluctantly to government as a necessary evil. There is much said of rights in the Declaration of Independence — nothing of »S1 el , r' ■»"• ^ i i 5 «i^j ^58 THE NEW POLITICS duties. A centur>' and a quarter have shown its inade- quacy as a political philosophy. We compromised our rights and recognized our duties when we adopted the Constitution of the United States. If there is any one tiling which will characterize the last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nine- teenth centuries in history, it is perhaps the irresistible progress of the democracy of individualism. The next fifty years furnishes notably the fields where solidarity fights out its battles on nationalistic lines in United Germany, United Italy, and Great Britain; and in the United States when in the sixties we were kept from being broken in two— perhaps more. In England and America, however, the nineteenth century has been par- ticularly the scene of conflict between the democracy of individualism and the democracy of nationalism. It was not until after the Civil War in the United States that the idea became in any large and real sense the fundamental American idea, and even then it was not recognized — even now it is not sufficiently recognized. Nevertheless, the national idea has been transforming the American state. It has been informing and mold- ing our legislation and administration. It has been molding our history. It has been shaping the very conditions of American life. In spite of all the theories of state rights and their corollaries which were held ry the vast majority of the people (and are indeed to this day), as well as by the very inherent logical necessities of the case, the fact of national sovereignty has been growing from the day the Const>'^*ion was adopted until the present time. In one THE NATIONAL PARTY 259 way or unother, whenever American politics sees fit to revert to a principle, which is not often, it comes back somehow to this line of cleavage which during the whole history of the republic has divided clearly the Particular- ists from the Nationalists. There is, perhaps, no better illustration of what I mean than that found in the gradual encroachment, I may say ethical encroachment, of the sphere of state action over the area of personal liberty ; or in other words, over the area of anarchy. If the beginnings of the government were founded on principles as near anarchy as those upon which probably those of any other government has ever been founded, we must remember that the very age itself was one of revolution. The dividing line between the two real parties of the United States is that which separates nationalism from particularism. If our party platforms will not disclose this boundary, let there be a new national party which will. Let us have a party built on principles, not inter- ests. Whenever it has appeared that such an issue might be made there have been those ready to obscure the real issue and start the claque for economy or the tariflf or some other policy which is not fundamental, like Alcibiades, when he bought a beautiful dog and cut oflF its tail, "to give the Athenians something to talk about," he said, "so that they won't talk about the other things I want to do." So modern politicians and bosses divert the people to-day by confusing the issue. There can never be a free trade party in this country again which will be more than a negligible quantity, yet the day of legislating for the "infant industry" is done. # --ii 26o THE NHW POLITICS VVlien we no longer have to protect ourselves from Europe we must protect ourselves from Asia. Already a hundred millions more than half the human race, who can live on nothing a day and board themselves, have enteretl the lists as producers as well as consumers, and our much vaunted trade with the Orient is not only already doomed, but we have the most ominous problem of the twentieth cemury to solve, if we save white labor, and Western civilization, and the Christian white man's standard of living from utter annihilation. The tariff problem is on its way out of politics. Some day it will be in the hands of scientists and there will be stability in business, and there never will be stability in business until the tariff is out of politics and is in the hands of scientists and its main outlines at least are set- tled as national, not as party measures. The real issue to-day is and always has been the one between state rights and no duties on the one hand, and national rights and duties on the other. I mean state rights interpreted as state sovereignty. No one of any intellectual weight has ever assailed the principle of state rights interpreted as a matter of local rights. The nationalist denies state sovereignty. He denies the prin- ciple thai we harbor an area of anarchy between the states, or between the nation and the states where there is no Constitution and no law— an area of immunity from crime where with impunity the big can eat the little and cannot be caught and punished. The principle of local self-government is more sacred to the national- ist than to the particular ist, because he, and not the par- ticularism demands that there shall Ih> none of the affairs THE NATIONAL PARTY 261 nf men in our Republic where there shall be no self- government. There are those who l)elieve that this nation is simply the agent of forty-eight separate sovereignties called states. The nationalist believes that there is one national sovereignty for all national and interstate or extrastatc concerns. Rut he demands ♦hat the affairs of the state shall be run by the state; tha. municipal affairs shall be administered by the municipality ; that the affairs of the individual are the concern of the individual and that in this sphere each man can attend to his own business. The nationalist hokk .0 the dual principle, qua principle as well as qua expediency. He insists on local self- government. But he denies the validity of local self- government in those muhiplying affairs which pertain to our larger relations between sections far apart, and in those which pertain to ourselves as units of a great new bom organic world power. He denies the principle of national government piecemeal. In short, he claims that all rights and all duties— all affairs— which properly may be classified as national affairs, must fall under the aegis of the national fundamental law. It signifies nothing that powers are not specifically mentioned in the Consti- tution to cover issues and events which could not have been foreseen by the cherubim and seraphim a hundred years ago. The twentieth century must meet its own is.sues and state its own creed. Justice Wilson (nee said. "The general government is not an assemblage of states, but of individuals for certain political purposes" (vide Doc. Hist. Const. HI, 208-9, 250). What are those cer- tain political purposes? Let Wilson answer. "Whert- m 262 THE NEW POLITICS ever an object occurs, to the direction of which no particular State is competent, the management of it must of necessity belowj to the United States in Congress assembled" (quoted by lilliott ). This is a reversal of that contention that the states have jurisdiction over all objects not enumerated in the Constitution. "Whatever," says Elliott (Story of Con- stitution, p. 70). of Wilson's views, "in its nature and operation extended beyond the individual State ought to be comprehended within the Federal jurisdiction." The national party has enacted more rational and ethical legislation than any other political party in the history of the world, excepting, possibly, the reform party in New Zealand. Every ethical law, every act advancing human welfare which this party has written on the statute books of state or nation, without a single exception, has been away from individualism and toward the enlargement of the sphere of the state — toward the centralization and moralization of its powers. It has carried out the principle of solidarity and nationalism conceived by George Washington and Alexander Ham- ilton as an oflfset to the anarchical tendency of Jefferson — tendencies much needed in their day, but which in their day fulfilled their mission, and in the sixties more than fulfilled their mission. The untimely assassination of Hamihon gave the forces of individualism an impetus which resulted in the Civil War, and which twrenty years more of his constructive and organizing effort might have checked. When the struggle came and the disintegrating forces of our political institutions bad gathered them- Wi THE NATIONAL PARTY 263 selves, such an appeal was made to altruism as has sel- dom, if ever, been equaled in the political history of mankind. The national party was the embodiment of the ethical force and sentiment which organized itself to respond ; to hammer the shackles off three million slaves, and to prevent individualism from breaking the nation in two. The Constitution of the United States was first a pro- test against the policies of chance and the politics of drift on which the ill-formed nation was swiftly hasten- ing toward dissolution. There was nowhere a common end or aim, nowhere the recognition of a common life and a common good, nowhere a constructive and funda- mental idea. The Constitution was enacted to outline, not fulfill, the fundamental idea; to make one nation out of thirteen; to recognize the principle of the common good and to "promote the general welfare." It is a set of principles, not a set of rules. These are the traditions upon which the party of Nationalism was founded ; these the principles the party has been slowly and surely working out from the day the Constitution was ratified until the present time. These are the ideas it has stood for and these constitute its raison d'etre. If it has departed now and then from this principle it is because the plunderers of individualism have sought to turn this great instrument of altruistic power to serve their individual greed. This is the principle it opposes to the particularist theory of government, which is the policeman's theory — k, ' I 264 THE NEW POLITICS no more. The national party stands for an ethical democracy, which means the extension of the government ethically for the good of all tiie people. It believes, by instituting rational and ethical forms, that through tiiese and by means of these the whole people, acting together with intelligent aim, can better achieve the objects of their existence ( unless it be conceded that the aggrandizement of the clawman is the object of existence) than can the individual units of tlie multitude, in a mad and untram- meled scramble, not working together and working with- out aim or reason except as each one is propelled to the acquisition of materialistic possession, driven by the blind instinct of self-interest. The party of Nationalism has recognized the principle that, whatever might have been the outlook and purposes, and indeed the limitations of the "fatliers" in framing the Constitution, the people of each generation have had their own life and their own problems since that instru- ment was drawn up, and that it must be construed to meet the present needs of an expanding nation. Such has been the change in our world outlook that every step in the progress of nationality has been accompanied by cor- responding change in the fundamental law. The gen- eral necessity for such an adajjtation and grov/th has been fmely stated by Mazzini : "The supreme power in a state must not drag behind the stage of civilization that infonns it: it must rather take the lead in carrying it higher, and, by anticipating the social thought, bring the country up to its own level." American nationality has been defined not only by the Constitution but by the constitutional practice of nearly THF 'NATIONAL PARTY 26: a century and a q^. t. And constitutional practice, as accepted by all the , - pie of the nation, in whom all sov- ereign power lies, includes not only judicial but legisla- tive and executive construction — also construction by the sword. So far, nothing is clearer in tlie development of Ameri- can nationality than this, that a century of struggle — of a common national life — has clad the skeleton of 1789 with the flesh and blood of a living thing, and that the common life of those who were born to it, rather than of those to whom it was born, has breathed upon it the living breath of organic nationality. The question now is, whether future American history shall be written of Nationalism or socialism. Particular- ism is played out. Its last word is that the government of the United States has been moved from Capitol Hill to Wall Street. We have reached the climax of a political system based on interests instead of principles — the apothe- osis of tlie boss and the worship of the machine — where one man controls an eleventh of the national assets and the masses of the employed middle classes cannot afford the decencies of life. We are ready for a change. And the one thing which can save the country from socialism is Nationalism — a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. A new era is upon us outlined in its own new problems. They are many and they are serious. Some of them are ominous. The nationalist is the only man who intelli- gently can cope with them. In every great crisis in our national history the issue htS been between the national- 266 THE NEW POLITICS ist and the particularist, and the nationalist has always won and he was always right. He is right to-day. He will win to-day. Whatever may be the true and ultimate political phi- losophy upon which a future millennium may be based, the right-minded American statesman will work on lines parallel with the American idea; and that idea he will interpret roughly, and he cannot get away from it, in the general terms of tlie interpretation given it by either George Washington or Thomas Jeflferson. These two men head the two great American political parties ; the two American systems of political thought and every- thing fundamental which has been done, or thought, or said since their day has followed, consciously or uncon- sciously, the lines laid out more than by anyone else by the attitude of these two men. Jefferson, as does no one else, represents in philosophy, practice, spirit, and point of view the democracy of individualism. George Washington — the man — his whole moral and intellec- tual character — is the incarnation of the democracy of Nationalism. The line of cleavage between the national and par- ticularist parties bisects that separating Republicans and Democrats at right angles. There are nationalists North and South, East and West, Republican and Democratic and Independent, and there are Republicans everywhere who cannot think nationally. For example, in the ranks of the Republicans are the wretched self-seekers, who represent t!ie interests entrenched in a slougii of particularism and barricaded with state rights. Among the Democrats are many men THE NATIONAL PARTY 267 who are nationalists in the highest sense, though they are individuaHsts, also, in the highest sense. The recent Marshall redevivus, with all the literature of more than a decade, which calls national attention again to the forming and framing of the new nation by the construc- tion of a statesman jurist rather than the obstruction of the legal Pharisee, grew out of what has proved almost an epoch-making address, delivered by General John C. Black, President of the United States Civil Service Commission (then United States Attorney), be- fore the Illinois State Bar Association in the nineties, on "John Marshall." General Black, whose funeral sermon had been preached at home twice during the Civil War, when he had been shot, as was thought, to death, is one of those who have cemented with their own blood what Marshall taught, the sovereignty of the nation, and not the state, and who has always been a patriot and states- man before a politician. "The adoption of the Constitution," says General Black, "was itself only a single step toward the habilita- tion of the Republic. That Constitution had to be made effective. It had to be so interpreted and declared, its principles had to be so expounded that men would know that they were dealing, not with that Confederation which gasped and died on the threshold of the Conven- tion, but with a Nation. . . ." Then follows, in a number of carefully selected quo- tations from Marshall — who sat in eleven hundred cases through over a third of a centur>' — the outlines of a body of doctrine for Nationalism which could not in equal space be exceeded in American political literature. 2()8 THK NEW POLITICS Another is Governor Woodrow Wilson. In his chap- ter on State Rights (Cambridge Modern History, vol. 7, United States, p. 414) he says. "It was the West that was making a nation out of the old time federation of seaboard states. Webster was insisting upon the new uses and significance of the Constitution; Hayne was harking back to the old. . . . The national life had. in these later days, grown strong within it. . . . No Constitution can ever be treated as a mere law or document : it must always be also a vehicle of life. Its own phrases must become, as it were, living tissue. It must grow and strengthen and subtly change with the growth and strength and change of the jjolitical body whose life it defines, and must in all but its explicit and manda- tory provisions with regard to powers ami forms of action take its reading from the circumstances of the time." This broad, .safe, conservative Nationalism is that which the nation has been working out for itself, and we find its exjionents in all sections and in all parties. Since this is. after all, the fundamental (|uesiion and point of view, here ought the old parties to be reorganized. The national jiarty is unorganized and unnamed. Per- haps it is time for it tt) be named and organized. There is a fundamental line of cleavage here histori- cally and philosophically. In oui' ]! ilicies tliere may l>c a hundred. In our poli- tics .here niav be only this one. It is that wliicii sepa- rates by unbridgeable abysses the ground ideas of the two systems of thought — that of atomism and that of ofi/anic unitv. THIi NATIONAL PARTY 269 The Declaration of Independence leaves out the ele- nieut of reciprocity, outlines the philosophy of individual- ism, and is the fouinlation stone of the democracy of individualism. The Constitution, on the other hand, offers the founda- tion for a creed of the democracy of altruism. Enacted, as it were, for the e.xpress purpose of declaring ourselves one instead of thirteen nations, it uttered a new and sig- nificant note in the prevailing discords of anarchy when it declared its purposive mission "to promote the general welfare." If Gladstone's estimate is correct that thi.s was the nohlest document ever struck ofif at one time from the mind of man, it is also true that the Preamble contains one of tiie most benign and far-reaching ethical motives ever ascribed to a jwlitical document. Every one knows tlie onslaughts of the political ancestors of the American democracy on this precious instrument ; how JelYtTson said, after opposing it, it should be made over every iiine'.ceii years, and how Alexander Hamilton, in one of the ni')'! dramatic and brilliant struggles in the political annals of mankind, saved the Constitution at Pouglikeei)sic, l)!asted the last hope of individualism and the "particularists." and made anarchy forever impos- sible so long as t'.ie Cor, tituti'Mi lasts: and saved tliis nation to tlie fuiure in securing that instrument which was not only to be t!ie perpetual guarantee of our liber- ties, but tlie assertion of our duties. Then and there was the fundamental issue defined between t!ie two great i)Mlitical parties of the United States, and i'umi and there were tlie bnjad lines of future conllic* laid out 270 THE XICVV POLITICS The struggle of the twentietli century will be between the parties of State Rights and of One Xation — of Indi- vidualism and Nationalism; between the party of self- interest and the party of the general welfare ; between the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the philosophy of tliat Declaration of Interdependence — the Constitution of the United States. CHAPTER VII TO SUM IT UP Behind every tlieory of government is a theorj- of life. The theories of hfe which stand opposed to each other at the beginning of this ominous century are tlie prin- ciple of individualism and the principle of association. Individualism oflfers a theory of society, but it is a wolfish one. Socialism offers a theory of society, but it is an im- practical one. Opportunism has no theory of society, no theory of life. It is sometimes good — it is sometimes bad. It is always uncertain. What we want is an idea. It must be fundamental, social, historical, ethical. Such an idea must be the foun- dation of the true democracy, and it will be founded on the theory of the brotherhood, not the step-brotherhood, of mankind. It must be an expression of the corporate reason and ethic ; not the chaos of competing and unre- lated units. It must be an integral part of a whole theory of sound life and must not be "split in two with a hatchet." The atomist view of life, which conceives economics, politics, ethics, religion in isolated and unre- lated positions, bears about the same relation to modern intelligence as the older fonns of phrenology bear to modern psycholog\% which represents the human mind as a unit and not so many faculties marked by cranial protuberances like so many hills of potatoes. 271 272 THE NEW POLITICS While we look forward ultimately to something wider than Nationalism, racial federation can only come through and be based on sound ethical Nationalism as the latter is based on sound and moral personal character. Anything like cosmopolitanism is too remote for dis- cussion here. But what we ought to have and what we might have is an ethical democracy in which the tenderer sentiments of the human heart may not wither and die, where a man may be honest and fair and still do business, and where men will not mangle and crush their brethren to acquire their property without fair return, and where the acquisitive instinct lias not gone stark mad. To the true statesman the very idea of tlie separation of poli- tics and etliics mu.st be an insanity. The fact that the brute instinct of self-interest is still the mainspring of human society shall occur to him as a colossal sin against God and man. ICvermore. if we are human beings, we must return to tlie ethical problem, for iiuman values are ethical and one human being will not dare face another human being in the universe without regard to the ethical motive. The universe is constituted this way. Tlie fate of tlie Western Hemisphere — indeed of the world-e.xperiment of democracy — hangs here. Tlie faults of such democracy as we have known are the faults of the philosopliy of life behind it — viz.. individualism. The sinister elements dominating our institutions, and which give a foreboding asi)ect to our .sky. are the hell brood of individualism, reduced in every cas ■ to the motives of piracy prevailing everywhere in our business world. Anarchy still prevails in our midst outside the reach of law; because we have separated ethics from TO SUM IT UP 273 politics and economics — because we have separated morals from business and religion from life. There is no appeal from the verdict of history. In so far as motives of sociality have ur fiercest jxilitical struggles and one of the bloodiest wars of the world. Out of these struggles has slowly grown the conviction that the very life of any true democracy, and its fitness to survive, is bound up in the projMisition tiiat the whole people is fit to govern, can govern, and does govern itself. Once government was the bile noire of the .Xnierican populace. We are begin- ning to find our national peril in lawlessness. Once the jieople shouted for individual liberty. But having nar- rowly escaped tlie danger of becoming enslaveti through anarchy we are seeking more and more constitutional liberty. We have found out that certain things concern the whole American peojjle; indeed, that evcrytliing .Ameri- can concerns the wliole .American people. For these American concerns we are wanting strong government — national government. We want strong government be- cause that is the opposite of weak government. -\nd weak goxernment means a weak nation. And a weak nation means a weak people. .Xnd a weak people means weak i)eopIe. We contend for strength, adefpiacy, national sovereignty over national relations and interests. We demand a government f)f all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. This we oppose to atom- ism, anarchy, confusion, and sectional strife. "The Divine Right of Kings," said Disraeli, "may have TO SUM IT UP 375 Wn a pica for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is tlie keystone ui human progress." I iiave contrasted, in l)arest suggestion, the basic ideas of the democracy of Individualism and of the democracy of Nationalism. I have indicated by a few concrete instances of ethical legislation wherein the American state, for a hundred and twenty years, has been encroaching \x\K>n the anarchy of individualism, and too slowly enlarging the area of the common gocMJ. by establishing the sphere of rational ix)litics over brute instinct still predominant in our preda- tory regime. Otiier forces have made for anarchy per- haps as fast as we have gaineil headway, the unassimi- lated foreign element, and particularly the increasing power of lawless financialism, the enervations and degen- eracies of our young men and women, who have noth- ing to do but gratify their appetites and passions and study new means of wasting treasure created by exploited and unrequited toil. I have tried to .show that under- lying such policies as have been a credit to the Constitu- tional party, to tiie nation, and to modern civilization, there are certain principles wc have been working out. mostly in the dark, without intelligent plan or foresight largely— principles unrecognized, unstated, and unnamed, but which should be clearly stated, candidly discussed, and in good faith accepted or rejected as they have been seen to be valuable in practice. Fugitive acts, sporadic and opportunist legislation are too apt to result from demagogic appeal to tlie citizen who will sell his vote for his financial advantage, which almo.st all Americans MICROCOPY RKOIOTION TEST CHART ANSI cr.J ISO TEST CHART No 2 1.0 I.I m 11^ m III 2.0 III 1.8 1.25 III 1.4 I .6 ^ ^FPlIEQ IfVMGE Inc 2;6 THE NEW POLITICS holding the business theory of the state affirm of their molivcs, and affirm without private shame or pubHc re- buke. For the most part we are Repubhcans or Demo- crats because of our conception of our business interests; or one step furtlier. for the hope of office; or further still, in the direction of pure Hedonism in politics, we sell our votes for money. If there is one thing worse, however, than selling ourselves, it is buying others ; for the sake of our lawless aggrandizement, to acquire for a consideration, votes, legislatures, common councils, judges, and congressmen. How will the young American coming of age approach the franchise? Will he come with the sodden question in his heart, "Will my vote help my business?" "Shall I get office?" "How much can I get for my vote?" I can imagine another kind of politician who will say, "I believe in reason instead of brute instinct ; in law and order, not anarchy. I believe the American nation to be something far greater and more worthy than a 'business proposition.' I acknowl- edge an obligation for every privilege, a duty for every riglit. and bind myself to pay the future what I owe the past. I shall find a place for humane sentiment in busi- ness and for conscience in politics, on the theory that the categorical imperative rules the human constellations as completely as gravitation rules the stars." Here, again, emerges the fundamental question of the Politics of tlie Republic. Shall we govern more, or shall we govern less? The individualists do not seem to have grasped the difference between these questions; whether we shall be governed more or govern ourselves more. TO SUM IT UP 277 Many ; - . n also to think there is some difference in prin- ciple between local and national self-government. But this is comparatively harmless in comparison with those phases of the eighteenth century creed construing all government as an evil, and very little of it a necessary evil. The "Reds" of Paterson, the Black Hand of the East Side, and other gangs and organizations to whom we have extended our unintelligent hospitality all over this country, the Night Riders of the South, the bomb throw- ers of the West, the hoboes, and cutthroats, and rebaters, and stock gamblers; in short, all anarchists, above or below or outside the law ; all the law-breaking, law-defying brood of individualism hold fast to its amiable theories — that we must govern less and not more; that we must limit the sphere of law and order and not enlarge it, until the very quaking foundations of the Republic sound alarms for the increasing lawlessness of the nation. We have lost our respect for law and order as such, as a nation, and we are drifting back tov.ard the instincts and principles of Confederation and state rights. We are losing the constitutional liberties we have won in the license we are willing to accord the lawless. The national problem is — more national self-government or less national self-government! Which do we want more of? This raises a concrete question. Shall we contract or enlarge the sphere of the state? Shall we go backward or forward? Shall we govern less or govern more? Shall we move in the direction of egoism or altruism? Satisfy our individual rights or discharge our duties to the human race? Shall we repeal such ethical legislation 278 THE NEW POLITICS as we have won, or shall we enact more similar legisla- tion for the "general welfare"? Any consistent egoistic individualism must say that to fulfill our destiny we must return lo the purer "business theory of the state" — a policeman theory of the state — the state of primeval anarchy modified by a grudged protection of life and property — a state without reason or ethic — consequently without soul — and an environment where the human spirit will gorge on husks for swine. T!iis is a vital question. The existence of this govern- ment and the permanence of our institutions depend on how our people answer this question. Sliall we reduce ourselves to further individualism? Shall we provide no defense against external aggression, nor conduct foreign treaties, nor preserve internal peace and order? Shall we sublet the military and naval departments to the contractors who may also build the Panama Canal? Shall we take away the corner stone of family ties, duties, affections by failing to regulate the marriage contract? Shall we neglect our highways and extend no control over those who use them — or our bridges, ports or harbors, coast lights and surveys? Shall we drop the postal system and provide no uniform sys- tem of weights and measures — abolisli patent and copy- right laws? Shall we abolish quarantine, prohibit no nuisances, neglect public cleanliness, supervise no foods and medicines, abolish no adulterations, allow the impor- tation of contagious diseases, provide no maintenance for the poor, the idiotic, the insane, the helpless? Shall our laws no longer shield infants by avoiding their contracts or protect their personc or property — or married women, TO SUM IT UP ^79 or persons of unsound mind?' Shall we allow no regu- lation of the employment of women or children? Shall we return to laisscc fairc, hisses aller, laisscs passer — let-her-go and God help us — in other words, sliall we govern I'ss or govern more? That is the question. I venture to say tiiat no political party will ever see the light of day again in thii. country which consistently supports individualism, its children, or its grandchildren. The salvation of our nation is bound up in the Con- stitutional party's being true to its philosophical founda- tions and its historic achievements, and in the completion of the program of Nationalism, for the hills around us are an encampment of the hosts of anarchy and the horsemen thereof. The American people must choose between government ownership, the confusions of indi- vidualism, and government control — in other words, between socialism, anarchy, and Nationalism. The old enemy is still in the saddle — individualism — nothing more, nothing less. But individualism takes no account and entertains no estimate of humanity. The democracy of individualism conceives a multitude of human units, each with a multi- tude of militant rights, with no common aim. no soli- darity, devoid of the idea of fraternity — unrelated, com- peting political and economic units. Such a democracy had been the lot which had fallen to the United States except for the gradual introduction of the methods and spirit of Nationalism. Let it be conceded that we can work better together for tlie same thing than against each other for the same ' Byles. 280 THE NEW POLITICS thing. In the absence of 95,000,000 separate millen- niums in 95,000.000 individual hearts, XationaUsm assumes political form and function and on its negative side sets up the principle of Government Control, while in its positive aspects it appears in the social, rational, ethical theory of the state, including a Christian theory of legislation. The late Professor Goldwin Smith once said that we ought never to glorify revolutions, that "statesmanship is the art of preventing them." This is the negative side of our problem. When Sir William Harcourt, in the House of Com- mons, said, "We are all socialists now," he meant that all intelligent countries are erecting ethical and altruistic barriers to human greed ; have differentiated between the creation and acquisition of wealth ; have recognized that human evolution contains a principle higher than the reckless brute supremacy of the cunning and the strong; and that the unmistakable world movement is away from irresponsible conflict and toward rational association. If there is a question as to whether free institutions shall sur\-ive in this country, it has not arisen from the restraints legislation has laid upon the rebellious and greedy instincts of the "lord of himself in undisturbed delight," but in the sodden philosophy of the Revolution, whose tragedy has resulted at last in the American multi- billionaire. I have said we want a new Declaration of Independence of man as well as men ; of duties as well as rights; and it must declare the right of Xationalism to invade and restore and protect every sanctuary individ- ualism has violated. j TO SUM IT UP 281 i ^ sm Statesmanship just now is the art of preventing anarchy or socialism. Simitia similibus curantur. The ve extension of ethical legislation is the only power that ile can put the anarchists out of business; but if the country al, .ry we is to be saved from the disease of radical and revolu- tionary socialism it must be vaccinated. The hope of the survival of democratic institutions and civil liberty in the country is in the extension of the principle of lip association — of Nationalism — in the enactment of such de ethical legislation as shall smash the "divine rights" of "barons" and all "corners" on necessities and make it m- lat little worth the while of any one man to acquire ten billion dollars or perhaps later own all the earth and most tic of heaven. he lat One of the most splendid ethical generalizations of the human mind is that of the Scotsman whose forefathers he went from Scotland to Konigsberg ostensibly for a job, but really, doubtless, that their son might become the creator of modern philosophy and German Idealism. )n. Emmanuel Kant said, "That conduct is right which ns would work for good if it hecame universal." Politi- he nd cally, it is the task of Nationalism to uphold this principle. Can we imagine the hog philosophy of modern com- ed )n, mercialism alongside such a generalization? Can we imagine Napoleon, that insatiable maelstrom of Indi- ti- vidualism, operating on the ethical plane laid down by of Kant — or the child-murderers of Birmingham and Man- as chester; or modern American billionaireism? to Individualism will creep barefoot in the snow or on d- its knees, like the pious kings of old, to hear the gospel i i of Manchester preached at the altar of Juggernaut, for % 282 THE NEW POLITICS it is the last refuge of despairing plutocracy. WI10 wants a status quo-'' He whom Emerson described as having no argument but possession. Who calls loudest for free competition? He who can circumvent or exceed free competition, the rebater and throat-cutter. Who wants to keep productive industry in a state of war? The man with the strongest arm and tlie heaviest artil- lery. Who wants to bolster the civilization which asks no questions but "who arrives first at the goal"? He who has the largest liandicap and the longest legs. There is not a man in either party who ever offered a bribe or took one, who ever bought or sold his vote, who ever won an election by intimidation, who is not a consistent individualist and who is not a logical believer in "the business theory of the state." No one but a consistent individualist ever deserted his post on the picket line or turned his back in battle; ever betrayed his country for gold or his Master for silver. Finally, to state this question answers it. If it is a question of motive without consideration of whicli the etliical element is inconceivable, is human wel- fare best served by the egoistic or aUruistic motive? If it is a question of point of view, shall that be instinct or reason ? If the antithesis is between two tendencies, does the "harmonious development of the human race" lie in the direction of license or liberty, chaos or order, anarchy or law? in forty-eight separate sovereignties or in one strong national self-government? EPILOGUE Twenty years ago tlie late Professor Sumner was writing in the North American Review on "The Absurd Attempt to Make the World Over " Professor Sumner enjoyed a place with the very large majority of the Anglo-Saxon race where he could congratulate his fellow beings if not that the atoms of the universe were fortu- nate in that they happened to stumble across those two great accidents — the world and man; at least, having stumbled upon them, the path of progress was up that blind alley in which they could stumble some more. To set up a theory of navigation upon the abolition of rudders and the abrogation of astronomy was what those sons of Chaos, not Cosmos (as Carlyle might have called them)> would set out to do in carrying our eight- eenth century a priori theories to logical conclusions. It is a commentary upon our intelligence — and it is tragic enough too — that we have so persistently refused to apply human intelligence to our own political affairs; that we have trusted to a policy of drift and have believed in the principle that we can make more progress blind- fold than with our eyes open. Now, this is a curious, I may say an extraordinary, development of irrationalism developed almost to a race characteristic. That we have been satisfied, for example, 9999-100 per cent of the human race, to apply more science to the production of a litter of pigs than to the matter of our own posterity; that we still allow the degenerate, the 283 284 THE NEW POLITICS habitually criminal, the idiotic, insane, and incurable to run at large and propagate their kind; that we, in America, allow Wall Street to control and manipulate our finance to the extent that at any moment we may be plunged irresponsibly and without recourse into a state of financial panic — to be forever with our vast business interests at the mercy of a few financial pirates; to have no business stability and no possibility of busi- ness stability ; these and a thousand and one Anglo-Saxon peculiarities are emphasizing our characteristically demo- cratic respect for established facts, first as an absurdity and then as a crime. There are all around us pathetic illustrations of the invincible perversity of our unin- telligence. So far as natural wealth is concerned — I mean the kind it has taken geologic ages for the good God to prepare — no people ever entered into such an inheritance as ours. And no people has ever behaved so badly with it. What have we done with it ? We have been criminal wastrels. We have been complacent and unjust stewards. We have not only refused to take what belongs to us; we refused to keep what we had, and we have wasted what we had left. Result : The American financiers are rich and the American people are poor. We have been boasting that we are the richest nation on earth. What it means is that we have the richest multibillionaires "n earth. We have been boasting oi our inexhaustible resources, until there is only one inex- haustible resource left — the complacency of the Ameri- can people. EPILOGUE 285 This is what lies at the botoni of our laisscs faire, laissez passer poUtics — this tragic optimism — this unin- telUgent complacency of ours. It is based on a theory- of life which has given us our politics and which is dis- tinctly eighteenth century in origin, scope, and spirit. It sprang from the movement of an age which gave us our personal lil)erty and failed to teach us what to do with it. That is wiiy we do not know what to do with our national patrimony. The good Lord has made us joint trustees of the rich- est continent on earth and in our fat-witted optimism we have turned it over to the multibillionaire. We have given him the elemental resources of our own national prosperity, and now we must pay and we have little to pay with. We have not only been criminal, we have been unintelligent. While we have been stripping our children to clothe the billionaire idol, we have been chanting our optimistic lies at his feet, until our optimism is the most pessimistic thing I know. It would seem that a race of beings as old as ours, and as ripe in experience, before this, might have found out that the intelligent framing of our political institu- tions and the rational administration of our affairs are better than that fantastic and whimsical method called hisses faire. No one who has ever given serious thought to human affairs can have failed in some measure to blanch before the awful preventable waste of human resources and of human aspiration and life. Nothing in all the wearying annals of the race is sadder than this world-waste — this preventable waste — this waste of resource — waste 0? 38b THE NEW POLITICS life. The late Professor Ritchie once -^aid : "The history of progress is the record of the j,'ra' sound lessons as to whether the political doctrine of haphazard is better than that of scientific prevision and precision ; as to whether the "absurd attempt to make the world over" is as absurd as its abandonment to anarchy and rapine. The fact is. we have been making the world over. What has been done by the atomist in the scramble of helter-skelter, the blind, unreasoning, and, EPILOGUE 289 I may say, irrational strife, unguided and unchecked by rational constitutions and institutions, is not generally very much to the credit of the human race. But there have been those who have dreamed of making the world over and making it better. It is a dream as old as the aspirations of men; that this old earth of ours, hardly a spot of which has not been wet some time by blood or tears, shall some day become the home of a rational and happy race, when men will no longer slay to steal. Little by little the world itself, for what man has done to it, is becoming a better place to live in ; and because of this verj- foresight and reason and discipline of man, people havt oecome kinder; that is to say, good will has taken the place of enmit> , and cooperative efifort has supplanted the principle of strife, and civilized and intelligent and scientific government has to a degree supplanted that weird and fantastic old-world gospel of whimsicality and drift, and we are only beginning to dare to dream how much we can do for ourselves and posterity through reason and ethics embodied in our political institutions — through a Constitution framed and construed to "pro- mote the general welfare." Strange paradox! The scientist has become dreamer. The scientist has dared to dream of the rational order- ing of a hemisphere — a half world made over. Some time since, Professor Tyndall gave an epoch-making lecture on "The Scientific Use of the Imagination." Some one, doubtless, is about to write on the imaginative use of science— let us say applied science — for science like all other good angels must come down out of the clouds to bless the earth. 290 THE NEW POLITICS This matter of making the world over is a case in the direction at least of the desertion of laissc:: faire and the application of intelligence to human government. It is the resurrection of a patriotism which understands that there is a spirit in politics higher than a partisan spirit. The further we can get away from that con- temptible motive which rules American politics with scarcely shadow of turning— "my party, right or wrong" — and the further we can advance the principle that human affairs can and ought and must be ordered with scientil'ic foresight, and with naked justice for the com- mon good, the better basis we shall develop for a just and rational government. It involves reexamination of our politics and its policies — of our whole theory of life. Is this revolutionary? Perhaps it is. The introduction of rational patriotism into American politics would turn our world upside down at once. But perhaps it would be right side up at last. It cannot be denied that we need some fundamental change. W'e live in a sordid and spiritless age. Frankly, it is a di.sappointment. We are not justifying our inherit- ance, our opportunities or ourselves. We are produc- ing no great literature, nor art, nor philosophy. Our religion has lost its hold upon us. We are not producing great and noble men, like the creators and demigods of old. We later Americans have surpassed the world in nothing but in our speculators. We have found our aspira- tions in the skyscrapers. The register of our ideal is the cash register. This is our distinction. And we seem to be satisfied with it. This shall be our indistinction. EPILOGUE 291 So far the Western Hemisphere has produced no first- rate creative intellectual or spiritual genius. If it is destined some day to achieve something which can be placed alongside the great creations of the human mind, such as long ago did those "architects of cathedrals not made with hands," those "sculptors of the very substance of the soul," "those melodists who improvised the themes upon which subsequent centuries have written vari- ations," why should we not produce the architect who shall frame such plans and specifications of human asso- ciations as shall clear away every possible hindrance and raise every possible help to noble living and rational rela- tions among mankind ? That ethical democracy which (let us hope) is destined some day to create a congenial abode for mankind on this Western Hemisphere cannot be conceived apart from the life of that eternal and ever-blessed corner in the eastern Mediterranean where Greece and Palestine — East and West once found meeting — and where mind and spirit have so far reached their most perfect flower. Far to the North the Germans approached it a hundred years ago, then, becoming ".\mericanized." lap.sed into materialism and commercialism again. Why has the world failed of what Socrates and Jesus might have expected of it? Has it not been because the wan ghosts of inspiration have striven vainly in the whirl- ing maelstrom of self-interest? The immortal legacies of Greece and Palestine (which those would banish from the curricula of our youth who would live by greed alone) have been locked up in Chancery and are not available assets of the world to whom they 292 THE NEW POLITICS were bequeathed — these our choicest bequests of mind and lieart. We Americans have been content to import our litera- ture, buy our art, and do without philosophy. We have shot off on the perverse and irrational tangent of the miser's instinct. Our dollar-heaping instinct has gone mad. No honorable and worthy future lies in the land toward which we have turned our faces and are approach- ing with an automobile speed. Except in crass and boastful egoism we can hardly claim to be the flower of all ages if we have no great overwhelming, all-absorb- ing national aim and passion — if we are content, like a flock of sparrows, to flit aimlessly and twitter glibly, reck- ing nothing of the future, each picking his own seed, adding little to the instinct but that of the magpie. There was once a time when the world was young. As long before Jesus as Columbus lived before our day, a race of athletes dwelt by the blue JEgean, in the world's spingtime! Dawntime of the human mind— birthday of the human spirit! We still linger lovingly among the broken ru i ns of Pheidias. We still listen to the interrupted accents of Demosthenes and Pericles. Still ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, ageless voices, sound in our ears. Still reason speaks to the modem mind, as if a Prome- theus which Socrates, Plato, Aristotle first unchained. Still Homer, the unsurpassed, leads us with his hosts in the banquet rooms and pathways of the gods. And we are sitting here across thirty centuries, old and gray and witli shaking knees, shivering by the burnt embers on a hearth where there is no fire. The contemporary of Pericles could have met on the streets of Athens (not EPILOGUE 293 as large as our Omaha ) ^schylus, Sophocles. Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Hippocrates and Democritus, Anaxagoras and Ar<-tophanes, Pheidias and Socrates, and Pericles. Gladstone has somewhere said, "To pass from the study of Homer to the business of the world is to step out of a palace of enchantment into the cold gray light of a polar day." Step out of the street of Athens and across the courtyard of New York. Whom do you meet? You would meet captains of industry under the red flag and captains of finance flying a black one. These are our jewels. It is getting cold down here. There is no fire on our hearth. Is this Hesiod's Iron Age or his Golden Age, or is it the World's Old Age? The Yankee spirit may have evolved the flower of individualism, but it has not exhausted the fertilities of this Western Hemisphere. The modern city and Gehenna of Individualism may not be the last resource of humanity. No, the destiny of the Western Hemisphere lies in the direction of the extension and establishment of ethical Democracy — of the people and for the people — all the people; and away from the despotism of a financial syndicate of one per cent, by one per cent, and for one per cent. Just cause for hope lies in the fact that ninety- nine per cent of a great nation are stronger than one per cent in force and morale and ninety-nine per cent and God must win. The Democracy of the future will not be the democ- racy of Individualism. It will synthesize the Greek form. 294 THE NEW POLITICS and Cliristian content. A true and satisfying theory of the state must be expanded extensively toward sometliing hke the Greek ideal and intensively toward the Christian motive — and motive power. To state this synthesis of Greek statics and Christian dynamics will be the supreme task of the future American Thinker. This man will come to us as Socrates came to Athens. He may leave, too. as Socrates left Athens. He will find among us the descendants of the Sophist.s — that opportunist prod- uct of democracy and demagogy — literary and intellec- tual tradesmen or prostitutes, in the pay of the interests or the parties they represent for hire, men who whether they be legal gentlemen or not are still hired attorneys in fact, retained to "strangle the rights of the present with the fictions of the past." He will find them clever to a degree, shrewd, superficial, plausible, fluent, and unprincipled, proclaiming for a consideration subversive doctrines and beguiling platitudes, shunting every for- ward movement to the side track of a counter-irritant. To such he will come — but to their dupes as to a field waiting for the husbandman. A cool, sane thinker, a ripe historian, and a man of faith, he will glean from the past those principles the world has tried, and its best have lived by, and its worst have failed, not having lived by, and to them he will weld another contribution. ;!'e world well knows is its best and has not tried. Then the Americas will make a new beginning in the history of mankind. The Americas should be the arena of something new and incomparable and should produce from her unexhausted soil a new type of men and of man. Per- EPILOGUE 295 haps here will be worked out the new Universalism — the true Cosmopolitanism — for it is here the East meets the West. That was a beautiful and prophetic fancy of Alexander's which led him to marry a hundred Greek youth to a hundred Oriental maidens, but the true union of East and West will be at the nuptials of Greek mind and Oriental spirit — the Aryan form with the Semitic content — and will result in a new offspring of Hellenic Ideal and Christian motive. May these two streams meet in one on this Western Hemisphere of ours. Then may the future build by its banks. The attempt to make the world what it ought to be is not — to a few unfashionable people at least — as absurd as is the complacency of those optimaniacs who believe that "whatever is, is right," and who, therefore, worship the status quo. A few dreamy folk are beginning to feel that perhaps if the attempt to make the world over is absurd, it is wicked not at least to try and make it better than it is. If it is ever to be made over or even improved it will never be done by itself, but by the attempt of actual men and women through their rational fore- sight and will. As a matter of fact, man has been making the world over from the beginning of intelligence in men. We are what we are to-day better than what we were some thousands of years ago because intelligent beings have made us and our conditions so. We are what we are worse than what we were for lack of intelligence applied to our own affairs. The role of intelligence has not been thought out, has not been given a chance in our institu- tions. There seems to be a destiny for human intelli- 296 THE NEW POLITICS gence in American Politics. It is beginning the "attempt to make the world over." and the absurdity of not mak- ing the attempt is dawning upon us. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to his brother, "When >ou hear of a good war. go to it." Whoever to-day. endowed with that same naive and sweet militancy, finds himself bereft of other v..cupation might do well to remember that we still live in an age of wars and rumors of wars. If there must be war. and if man must straggle and test his limbs, let it be in the cause which when it wins shall record "that war shall be no more." There is good fight- ing ahead and on a higher plane than on most former fields of strife; fighting of such dignity as shall nerve e\-ery arm that would draw the sword— fighting that shall wax fiercer with every decade of this century, and for how much longer does not matter to you and me so far as fighting purposes are concerned after we have laid down our arms. Not in our lifetime, surely, has such a bugle blown ; nor has so shrill a note, and so peremptory, awakened men from sleep as now sounds the call in this morn of new battle for the hosts of reason to line up against the hordes of plunder and caprice. Across the battlefield and in the mist we may hear their jangled voices as the first fury spake to the enchained Pro- metheus.* We are the ministers of pain and fear, And disappointment and mistrust and hate, And clinging cries; and as lean dogs pa'sue Thrn' wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn. We track all things that weep and bleed and live, When the Great King betrays them to our will. > Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act i Scene i. EPILOGUE 297 Do we not recognize the challenge? Do we not know the certain note of tliose voices of the progeny of Indi- vidualism? And do we not hear in the background of a chorus of tragedy, older than the tragedy of the Greeks, the plaint of tiiose masses without footing on an unfriendly earth doomed to strive vainly as Sisyphus to keep those they love from famine and shame? Shall we pass by without championing this one unchanging cause — age-long and never won, but always winning — which thrusts itself anew upon every generation; while chivalry arises each time, like the fabled bird from its own ashes, to strive again for the weak against the strong? Let the nameless and self-seeking herd heap together their dollars and other people's. Let them glut and be drunken. Let them rot and be forgot. But in the world still wanders the spirit older than Pindar: "Foras- much as man must die, wherefore should we sit vainly in the dark through a didl and nameless age and without lot in noble deeds?" There is a cause which may yet enlist men of belief, and create a new chivalry and a new crusade. It is the cause of the tired, the throttled, the thwarted, the en- chained. Name it what you like, in whatever form or disguise it may appear to any age, the irresponsible power of one man over another man is the antediluvian dragon desecrating our sacred liberties. That irresponsible power is enslaving the world to-day. Here it is in our midst in this, our boasted and alleged American democ- racy, which is not a democracy as long as it is run on the principle of free and unlimited competition between hawks and turtle doves. 298 THE NEW POLITICS It is the twentieth century aspect of the immemorial instinct of prehensile man. The niclanclioly shore of the vast age behind us is strewn with the wrecks of nations that have gone to pieces on the promontories of Individualism, and others are floating like huge derelicts among the peoples of the present day. Greece could not survive Individualism. Rome could not survive Individualism. We cannot sur- vive Individualism. To refuse to accept the lessons of history is to pro- nounce judgment against our own sanity. History is a stern schoolmaster, but a good one, and to make over and over the same mistakes is to grind out our chance in a treadmill. It is with sorrow, I take it, that the German philosopher said, "Rulers, statesmen, and nations are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this— that people and the govern- ments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the present" ulegel). Greece and Rome ^lave played their parts in the great human drama, and we have read the pages which record their downfall. Our own history is not yet written, for it is not yet made, but the sober man can see familiar and sinister forces at work in our midst — the same self- indulgence in luxuries not the fruit of honest toil, the insane and inevitable degeneracies and corruptions, as when Jugurtha gained the Senate by bribery. Even Cicero attributed the prevailing corruption of the repub- epilogul: 299 lie to the passions of Individualism. He tells us how all l)nvate affairs were decided by tlie private authority of those citizens made eniinenl and ix)wcrful by their private wealth. Long before Cicero. Aristotle bitterly com- plained that if the Greeks could only work together Greece could rule the world. But tiiere came a day when the Greek historians were to be her tragedians, for in the Greek struggle between State Rights and Nationalism, Individuali.sni prevailed. Read the melancholy record of Thucydides. He wrote that in Sparta and Athens the parties not in power each connived with the enemy in the other state, when "the tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood," and "The seal of faith became not the divine law but partnership in crime." They conniveil with the enemy for party purposes, as some came fear- fully near doing in our late war— sprung with treachery upon us in the Philippines. "An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed," continued Thucydi- des, "each man looked to his own safety," and "revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness." It was the des- tiny of Greece solely because of Individualism gone mad, to look upon a promised land it was destined never to inherit. And this was simply because public spirit and patriotism were reduced to cinders by the "Greek fire" of egoism, from which neither the insight nor the out- look of her individual classicism could save it. We have no right to expect more of atomism than that we, too, shall go to pieces, soon or late, if we do not abandon the fundamental errors which underlie our life theories. It is not an absurd mission — this mission of the new Chivalry and the new Crusade. It is not an 300 rilK NKW POLITICS absurd faith— this faith that we can and will make the world a better place to live in. The young men of America to-day are seeking a new Creed. It will be one which was partially phrased in a happy sentence of Dr. August Forel : "Let us not abandon the race to the fatal- ism of Allah: let us create it ourselves." irnvr-JMai?!'