LEADERSHIP "-GRESS ie ewspaper Ages of Leif i:e ALVMNW BOOK FYND LEADERSHIP AND PROGRESS Leadership and Progress AND OTHER ESSAYS OF PROGRESS THE NEWSPAPER CONSCIENCE AGES OF LEISURE by ALFRED H. LLOYD t 1922 THE STRATFORD COMPANY, Publishers BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS Li Copyright, 1922 The STRATFORD CO., Publishers Boston, Masg. The Alpine PreBS, Boston, Mas*., U. S. A. To PBOGEESSIVE LEADERSHIP IN RECENT TIMES 518886 Preface WITH the two essays that comprise the first part of this book and that have given the book its title, the first deal- ing with the nature and genesis of progressive leadership and the second with recent oppor- tunities, I have ventured to associate two essays on closely related themes. Certainly no study of leadership and progress in these times can properly neglect either the problem of the modern newspaper, so indicative of the prevail- ing mentality, or the problem of leisure. On a people 's leisure depends so surely the success with which any opportunities are met. Of the two essays on Leadership and Progress the first has already been published in The InternationalJournalof Ethics, Vol. XXXII, No. 2. Also, the essay on The Newspaper Conscience was published in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, and that on the PREFACE Ages of Leisure in the same journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2. For permission to make use of these essays here I wish to thank the editors of the two journals. A. H. L. University of Michigan. September, 1922. Contents PART I : LEADERSHIP AND PROGRESS Page I The Nature of Progressive Leadership . 1 II Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership 53 PART II : Two ESSAYS OF PROGRESS III The Newspaper Conscience . . . 107 IV Ages of Leisure 134 PART I LEADERSHIP AND PROGRESS I. THE NATURE OF PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP I. PROBABLY no one will question that the subject of this first essay, The Nature of Progressive Leadership, is a very timely one. It is a subject, too, that might very pro- perly be discussed directly and concretely with reference to the recent and still very present call for progressive leadership in our own coun- try or the world over and to the important special and quite practical opportunities of leadership that the times are offering. That call has been an urgent one ; at least not less urgent, too, since than during the war. Moreover the last great political' campaign, not yet forgotten, somehow has only emphasized, what more or less abstractly most of us are cognizant of, that political machinery is not always adequate to the real needs or representa- tive of the real life of a people. The country's Leadership and Progress mood was what it was and outwardly the result at both of the two great conventions as well as with a certain peculiar justice at the final election was what it was, more reactionary than progressive, more formal and external, express- ing as it did the old routine and status quo, than real, neglecting as it certainly seemed to neglect the actual life and purposes which had come to expression and to some realization during the war. Doubtless some good purpose has been served in that result. Beneath the social and political surface, however, in an unusual meas- ure there has been a pressure of life not yet properly met. Thus the signs of these post bellum times, covering the strenuous months since November, 1918, can not be overlooked, however outward and official events would seem to have forgotten them; such signs, I mean, as are marked below and as doubtless will suggest more a cartoon of the times than a fair and accurate picture, but as nevertheless are sufficiently to the point to demand candid consideration. Consider the great reaction following the war, the general col- lapse, moral and economic and political, the The Nature of Progressive Leadership world over, only expressed in different ways and degrees in different places; the assertive, however blind, conservatism, revealing an old order of things very much and doubtless very wisely on its guard ; the new pacifism, very dif- ferent indeed from the ante bellum or inter bellum variety, yet hardly more creditable, dividing both political parties and preferring dividends and other normalities to courage in meeting great issues, isolation to unavoidable responsibility and the fool's paradise of the status quo generally to the progress and even to the real security of civilization; the fiddling partisanship, the honor for which one may not presume to award, more mongering in its cam- paigning than honest and patriotic; the ouija board mentality or the general spiritualism I know no better name for it of people and press, that has brought so much " automatic " thinking, leaving very few thinking altogether honestly and quite independently, and that has turned suspicions and charges and mere wishes into realities, released from subconsciousness commonly suppressed passions and impulses and set up for belief as real and for action as Leadership and Progress worthy what has been ideally or unideally largely a fictitious world, any mysterious noise being as if an inspired communication from it; and, as counterpart, possibly a fortunate counteragent, of that reactionary but futile con- servatism, an extravagant and equally abstract and impossible idealism, virtually a millennium- ism not confined to Russia and so much affected especially by those who have suffered most from the tyranny of the past or from the de- privation and general hunger of the present and at once so deceptive and so alluring, so like a mirage and yet so impelling to " direct action " and unpremeditated adventure. Consider all these marks of our times. Surely in them one reads an urgent call for leadership. The old order is not merely on trial. A new life is in- sisting on recognition and interpretation. As for specific opportunities of a progressive leadership at the present time these lie, among other things, in our new nationalism, so real and so active today, although so many still refuse to recognize it fully and squarely, and the accompanying new internationalism, which as league or association or union or confereree [4] The Nature of Progressive Leadership or understanding or whatever any of the various partisans would call it, must accord with the * nation's new life; in the new status of labor, VX already now real and active, which requires not destruction of the present industrial system but only escape from industrial Toryism and candid and sympathetic recognition of labor's participation in industry, a change that, it seems to me, is quite analogous to political sub- jects receiving certain equal rights and, as se- curity of these, the right to vote ; and in develop- ment of a saner public mentality, that so we may be free from the mongering partisanship of the past years, from propagandism and the "automatism," and get, among other benefits, a more responsible and reliable public press. t5] H. BUT, appropriate as such direct and con- crete discussion might be, I defer this for a later essay. My present purpose, although suggested by the conditions and oppor- tunities indicated above, is quite abstract discussion. In just what in general does real forward leadership consist? Whence, at any time, under any conditions and opportunities, comes a progressive leader? This timely ques- tion I would now answer quite abstractly; apart, then, from our nationally local affairs or from present affairs of the world at large; so far as possible, except for occasional illustration from present or past, without regard to actual conditions anywhere or anywhen. Such an undertaking has admitted dangers; but it has real advantages also. General history seems to show for any one of all the many departments of life that the greatest leaders, indeed all real leaders or even, as I venture to believe, all individuals so far [6] The Nature of Progressive Leadership as they ever lead instead of just follow, are in some sense "born, not made," not machine- I/ made. So are they in the noble company of the poets, of all geniuses. Genius is, of course, close to life and so "born." Even in the rare cases of apparent machine production or selec- tion, if any such cases there have been, the seeming result has hardly been due, whatever some may find, to the mere traditional, undis- turbed social, political and intellectual machin- ery. Eather has this machinery shown a more discreet than valorous response to some re- leased and overpowering vital demand. Doubt- less, in a life which is always more or less of an adventure, good fortune will sometimes play a part. Formally chosen leaders have some- times belied the conditions of their making. Still, in essential principle, which is what we now seek, great leadership of any sort is quite too vital and original or creative and is, while not "supernatural," at least quite too truly super-mechanical ever to be merely machine- made. A growing social life has abundant need of machinery of all kinds, political, economic, [7] Leadership and Progress intellectual and the rest; but it would cease to grow had it nothing else. What it is not to be machine-made, to be "born, not made," is not at all easy to say. You who now read may know or rather "feel" what it is. You would not be able to tell any one very glibly. So often used, the phrase is far from being transparent. In times past, in pre- evolution days, anything new and unusual had a very different accounting from that of today. Even today, for that matter, many people, fail- ing to have adjusted their ideas or values to the time, may still think of birth in general and in particular historically and socially of the birth of the great as nothing less than a super- natural event, a miracle. All of us have looked down wonderingly into the faces of "new arrivals" or "little strangers" from another world and the great leaders have been looked up to in much the same spirit. In that spirit with its awe before the miracle of birth, such people, or we ourselves, would say that an in- dividual born to lead, was not a creature of his time ; had no natural origin ; was ' ' ahead of his times," out of touch with them, in but not of The Nature of Progressive Leadership them in short, begotten not of the facts and conditions in actual and visible life, but of the Spirit; the Spirit of history, perhaps, or the great Spirit of an ideal civilization, provided this be so ideal as to be something independent of all natural causes. Today, however, on the whole a very different view prevails. Evolu- tion, even the newer evolution, which has per- haps more respect for wonders and creation, has dispensed with distinctly external and, in the orthodox sense, supernatural origins ; being, not at any point supernatural, but only super- mechanical. Today, while leaders and other specially vital agents are not made, while new birth in general is no affair of mere develop- ment-mechanics, known east of the Ehine by the way as EntwicJcelungsmechanik, perhaps not a bad synonym for Kultur, today a 'certain signifi- cant and effective cooperation of the vital super- mechanical forces and the merely mechanical, a certain timely and critical, always creative and in parvo or in multo epoch-making conjunc- tion of broad free life and the machinery of life, is candidly and commonly recognized. Attend- ing such conjunction, it is true, there are always [9] Leadership and Progress disturbances, disorders of many kinds, often much suffering and tragedy; but these can be only the cost, as determined by the time and the mood, of the new life. Birth can never be easy. The adventure of it is far too great. Today, then, the great visitors, even as the little ones, are candidly the results of important and nat- ural, however mysterious and however strenu- ous, gestation and delivery; and, as I would add, they are more wonderful and, at least when the pains and labor of the birth are over, more honored and loved, not less so, on that account. Not just formally made, not conventionally re- ceived and recognized, they are also not too suddenly born nor too hastily exalted. How wonderful is nature in her own right, what a surpassing miracle there is in all natural birth, many people have still to realize. The natural birth of leaders, as of infants, is spiritually more inspiring, more worth while, than the miracle that used to be or be supposed. Can I make still clearer what I would under- stand by " being born, not made?" History, even very commonplace history, should be illuminating. The best and most widely known [10] The Nature of Progressive Leadership great leaders in the past certainly were not born in any sense of being suddenly given to history as if from outside and of not being affected at all by existing conditions and forces. Moses, real leader of his people into a new country and a new life, was also definitely an Israelite of the Egyptian captivity. Socrates, an intellectual genius, was still a Greek, an Athenian, who con- stantly showed, sometimes too well, that he had been to school to the talented but opportunistic Sophists of the fifth century, B. C. Ahead of his times in some sense, he nevertheless met his times in kind, with weapons then in vogue. What his discredited contemporaries were, he was also; skeptic, individualist, utilitarian, in- tellectual gymnast, logomachist. Simply they were only talented and conventional; he, real prince of them all, was the true genius, still dependent on their manner. Christ, in spite of certain modern sects, as forgetful and sectarian as modern, who would make him Presbyterian or Unitarian or what not, was in reality, what- ever the depth of his experience and vision, a first century Jew of Bethlehem and Jerusalem ; and the genius of Christianity, born then, has Leadership and Progress grown with history, not existed and persisted fixedly as something apart from it. Again, the Caesars, from Julius to Constantine, were transition, pagan-Christian Eomans. Napoleon was distinctly French ; Lincoln was so superbly American; and so on. None of these leaders came to their several peoples and times or to their several departments of life, not one en- tered history, just at random and from outside, independently of conditions. Rather each came, as that most luminous phrase has it, "in the fullness of time." Each, it is true, was "born, not made"; yet for each one, in his own way and measure an epoch-maker, producing a new life not commensurable with the old life, there was an important and a by no means easy period of gestation during which the formal, organ- ized life, the machinery of life took an important part. [12] . III. THE fullness of time, so called, can be only the climax of the period of gestation and what this climax is, what conditions finally bring it about, may be shown in several ways. Thus, to begin with, in social and politi- cal life, as in life generally, there is at the critical time that special coming together, already referred to, of life and its machinery, vital interest and the formal and traditional visible organization. Any organization, mean- ing now any institutional fabric of an estab- lished social life, while in its origin marking some adaptation and articulation of life, can not fail, as it persists, to become too rigid and so to bring about a certain artificiality or duplic- ity, a certain separation of essential purpose or meaning and outer manner, of life and its dress. Life always gets both broader and deeper than its adopted outward expression and so gets double, appearing one thing when it is another. Sooner or later, then, that division [13] Leadership and Progress and the duplicity of it have to cease. The vital refuses to be so set aside, or hidden when not quite restrained, and it asserts itself in and through the formal; with the result that the classic, rigid organization gives way. What had been clothing and protecting life at least no longer hides it. Fluency, adaptability, instabil- ity, open inconsistency, even violence and treachery come to be very general in the life of customs and institutions. Long accustomed associations and divisions are broken up. Un- certainty appears in the old lines of class or party or race. Normal living becomes a vital issue and even common reason and its logic suffer discomfiture when not complete undoing. Do you doubt that such changes are natural to life and history I Your own personal experience and common historical record must be my wit- nesses. Also our own times are quite eloquent. The growth of thought, too, shows something quite analogous to the growth of the conduct of life. Under whatever constraints of form and content, of method and meaning, thinking after a time has ever to develop its contradic- tions, paradoxes, inconsistencies. Like life, it The Nature of Progressive Leadership gets quite too big or too deep and essential for any form of articulation and in the fullness of thought, as one might put it, any accepted man- ner or form has to break down and thought itself to become rather essential than outwardly and formally consistent. The inconsistency may give opportunity to much loose and irrespon- sible thinking, but also it may herald new think- ing and great discovery. Thus the appreciative student of the history of thought feels no sur- prise at finding great paradoxes, with much use of antitheses or of bold contradictions, among the Greeks in the fifth century, B. C., or in Christendom during the Napoleonic era and what followed, when in each instance both new thought and new life were coming to their birth. Consider, also, how at any time, when new life is due, among a people with the pass- ing of the old standards there is always much confusing of reform and treachery, perhaps of salvation and malef action as if these two could ever really look alike ! or of real leader- ship and violence, obstinacy, arbitrariness. In actual history, again, familiar to us all and per- taining to great epochal changes, new life has [is] Leadership and Progress been no respecter of Greek and Barbarian, Jew and Gentile, Roman and Peregrine, White and Black, narrow nationalist and foreigner. At such times, critical times, a period of gestation can be seen at its climax and new life to be near realization. But, helpful as is such an understanding of the fullness of time, of gestation and the life that is not merely made but also born, that is superior to form and institution, although com- ing from or through these, there is, secondly, a way of putting the case which seems to me even more helpful. The gestation and the fullness of time, which bring new life to birth, are when there has come to the life of custom and institu- tion, to what some would call the system, with a pressure no longer to be resisted the need of reading between the lines. It is true that such need is more or less pressing all the time. For long intervals, however, the meaning of life's pronounced and classic lines, of its out- ward system and routine, is and well may be pretty much taken for granted. Slight differ- ences and issues and uncertainties may appear ; but only with great crises, involving large, gen- [16] The Nature of Progressive Leadership eral and certain changes, very much, I submit, as in our own day, does the pressure become a real and general necessity, profound and irre- sistible. Very plainly the lines of life are destined to accumulate new meaning. New meaning, indeed, is even a purpose, not merely a destiny, of real life. In good time, too, the pangs and the strain of the new meaning acquired have to be felt. The very process, already described here, showing how custom and institution lose their rigor and rigidity, as well as their opaque- ness, even to the point of open inconsistency and abnormality and startling transparency, has afforded indisputable evidence of this. Also it should be remarked that every individual per- son, although a conforming member of society, is an active agent of the accumulation and at any time may break out, giving evidence of his different life and experience. In miniature any formal gathering of persons, spite of the uni- formities of dress and manner, of speech and interest, illustrates this. Always there will be some disclosures of differences of meaning for the accepted common routine. Some restlessness [17] Leadership and Progress and some abnormality are as inevitable as desirable, possibly also as ominous in their time as they may be opportune. Much of the restless- ness may be ascribed to mere nervousness, to a fatigue that has weakened control or to the more casual peculiarities of person for which society always makes allowance, even conceding some merit to them; but even this restlessness is a symptom of something more import- ant and often it springs, not from mere nervous- ness or fatigue or personal peculiarity, but from a nobler and more positive disquietude due to some one's new and significant vision and pur- pose. There is a conventional intercourse among people gathered together with its many superficial outbreaks of individual experiences or adaptations and there is a quickening and creative intercourse with more important out- breaks; but in either we can see, ever present and developing, inner meaning for life's lines. The miniature case only illustrates a truth of all human association. The outbreaks may commonly be only sporadic, but, the conditions of outbreak being the heritage of all and all having their places and parts in one and the [18] The Nature of Progressive Leadership same life, the time must come when a general release will be required, and, as was said, the demand be made that the general new meaning accumulated for the lines of life be read out and made articulate. I am inclined to wonder if this inner life now under discussion and as to its presence and importance questioned, I am sure, by no one, be not in reality a factor, a neglected factor, of the subconscious of which we are hearing so much in these days of psycho-analysis and anthropological revelation generally. Is it not, indeed, a symptom of the times and their crises that we are enjoying is that the right word? - so much exposure 1 Yet, as I hasten to add, I wonder also if popularly and even by many of the experts who have told us about it, the sub- conscious have not been here being the neglect - conceived quite too narrowly. Name though it seems to be for instinct or primitive nature, for suppressed desires and hidden and mys- terious complexes, for long forgotten or even never consciously noticed experiences, for what when disclosed appears abnormal and irra- tional, I wonder if it should not be understood [19] Leadership and Progress in a larger way or, again, if instinct and primi- tive nature and the various hidden complexes and mysteries of life should not be seen as not necessarily bases of at once abnormal and degenerate conditions but sometimes of coming and positively progressive new life. Suppres- sion of course does breed and sooner or later must induce exposure of a so-called abnormal life; but this abnormal life seems to me of ambiguous significance. Often it may mean only so much breaking down, so much lost con- trol and consequent unpleasant exposure; but sometimes conceivably it may mean real vision and promise of something new and worthy. Conditions, again, inducing a state of automat- ism in an individual will disclose the subcon- scious, as we are being made familiar with it; but man's creative and constructive will ought to be, to say the least, concerned with the sub- conscious also and with its accumulated com- plexes quite as much and quite as properly as his degenerate moods of relaxation, reaction and automatism. Ordinary professional psycho- analysis, then, may be only so much concern over pathological cases; but I have to think [20] The Nature of Progressive Leadership that there is a natural and even deliberate searching or intimate analysis incident to all living under the suppression or say now under the control and direction of law and order. Out of such control, I mean, must come some real new vision. Civilization and its restraints are often referred to as causes of abnormal condi- tions, mental and moral, and doubtless they are ; but also they do make for new life and fuller and better understanding as well. Super-con- servative people, it may be suspected, will be prone to regard the sub-conscious wherever ex- posed, as abnormal or " supernatural " and as significant only either physically or spiritu- alistically; but, once more, it may often have other more positive values. It may be poten- tial with what is more civilized, mentally and morally sounder, than the conscious and normal life of the time. Psycho-analysis, then, need not be merely diagnostic and therapeutic and the sex, which with special interest and emphasis it reveals, or more generally the life-urge or the elan vital, however original or primitive, we may surely believe is as spiritual as physical, as capable [21] Leadership and Progress of sublimating complexes as of degenerate com- plexes, as truly an earnest of progress as an evidence of degeneration. Also reading between the lines of life now appears to be a psycho- analytical undertaking; but it is not necessarily only diagnostic of trouble and therapeutic in its purpose. On the other hand, if the critical time, the fullness of time, when a clear reading be- tween the lines is demanded, be a time of much mental and moral disease and exposure, this is not to be wondered at. An abnormal time must always have its growing pains, its grow- ing troubles and its sacrifices. Change breeds disease, death itself, as well as progress and new life. Applied to familiar affairs in our own time what we have been finding about the accumula- tion and growing pressure of new meaning for the lines of life and the eventually critical need of having this meaning openly read accords fully with statements made recently by Viscount Bryce among many others and with what any one of us knows well. Truly and irretrievably our country, not to say the world as a whole, is in a time potential with certain changes. [22] The Nature of Progressive Leadership Some see serious reversion and degeneracy, for there is so much exposed that offends; some, progress ; there is so much hope and ideal pos- sibility. Inwardly and outwardly, offensively too and attractively, our life is now really differ- ent and the changes which are to come just here possibly lying the real crisis of the time can be in the main only that the accompanying consciousness and the assisting machinery of life may effect an adjustment of conscious pur- pose and organization to the new and, however unnoticed or still inarticulate, already active life that is ours. Simply we have come to the climax of a period of gestation, involving a most varied and expanding experience. Exten- sive travel, far-reaching commercial exploita- tion, hard and most searching struggles of capital and labor, years of the meltingpot and its attempted but still very inadequate although very instructive efforts at Americanization, his- torical study, history being now world-history and no longer for any group just national or racial history or even just occidental history or just special history of any sort, most extensive scientific study and invention and last, but [23] Leadership and Progress hardly the least, the Great War giving brutal concreteness to our new world and its actual new life, all these have put into the tradi- tional lines of life such a pressure of new mean- ing that no one can wonder at the present unrest and confusion, at the sordid revelation and the great ideals in the changing, irresistibly new life of the day. Morally, mentally, eco- nomically, politically, is it indeed disease or progress that we are confronting? Whichever it be, we are, as to either, finding out our sub- conscious life. IV. NOR witness again the brutal evidence of the Great War or especially many events since has the new life or mean- ing, now forcing itself on our attention, been by any means only an inner thing. In saying that the fullness of time or the climax in the process of gestation was when need came to life to read between the lines, I was but using a metaphor that of course could not go on all fours. Thus in general the critical time, the new life, as in fact so much already said here has implied, must at least symptomatically be al- ready at large and positively in the open, hav- ing its abundant witnesses in all the agencies of protest and opposition to the old order and all the abnormalities, degenerate or progressive. Such typical isms as anarchism, protestant in- dividualism, skepticism, materialism, spiritual- ism, abstract idealism, natural to any crisis, are all signs if not always direct and active agents of it and, obstinate and concrete factors of life 05] Leadership and Progress as they all are, they show not merely a new inner life but also a new environment. Accord- ingly the problem of the new time is no mere academic reading between old lines, to be ac- complished in the cloisters or even in the legis- lative chambers of some isolated existence, but is an adequate and responsible and open recog- nition of the new facts and relations, an effec- tive adaptation to the new environment that lies, so to speak, l i out there. ' ' In other words, again to speak directly of our own times, while it is still true that we already have a new life implicit in our old ways and pressing for clear articulation, we have also, as really an intimate incident of this and as a distinct challenge not to be denied, a new social and political, moral and economic environment. Reading between old lines, then, is only half of the need. Naming new things, formulating behavior with refer- ence to a new world, the life of which is now to be lived and served, is the other half. This new strange world, now so definitely and con- cretely a challenge, this new and still un- christened life, until recent times so beyond ken, must be given its appropriate name, its [26] The Nature of Progressive Leadership honest and adequate accounting, from the vo- cabulary, from the social and economic and political ideas at command. Moreover, if you will but think a moment, you will appreciate that nothing more effectively than the naming of something outside and strange can insure that needed full inner reading of life's old lines. Nothing so well brings out of life what is really in it as the need of meeting something quite outside and new. With something strange to account for, one can no longer just pore over old formulae for their merely consistent im- plications. The continued use of the old language in the new world calls for something much deeper. Thanks to the Book of Genesis and Mark Twain, with possibly a little help from outside, we have a sort of myth or fable, which, as it is fully appreciated, will seem quite apt here and also will touch our theme with a pleasant humor. Old names or formulae even for wholly new things, very fortunately I am sure, are quite unavoidable, and are often as humorous as startling, whatever else may be said of them and their value. Humor, you know, is one of Leadership and Progress the acolytes of truth. But to the fable : Adam and Eve, as every one has learned by this time, once set out on a tour of the Garden for the special purpose of naming the various creatures in it. The task, difficult as it must have been, simply had to be undertaken. Practically everything was loose and strange in those days. Novelty was the rule. For a while the couple got on without serious difficulty; but before one specimen, Adam, the mere man, was more than ordinarilyiat a loss, hesitant and skeptical, quite unable to get the right name. The right name simply was not to be found in his pocket dic- tionary, if one may speak so figuratively. But Eve relied on her intuition or genius and this, most fortunately synonymous with one of Adam 's ribs, was equal to the emergency. 4 'Call it a galli-wasp," she exclaimed confi- dently; "That's what it is." "Really," protested Adam, "Why should we? How do you know it's that! We have never used that word that way before." "You dear old normal fool," retorted the man's rib, "Call it, I say, a galli-wasp. It's [28] The Nature of Progressive Leadership new and strange, I admit ; but it just does look like one." And galli-wasp it has been ever since. Won- derful discovery, that made by Eve ! Far and keen her recognition! The new and newly named never can be anything but the old reborn. Only, as the fable proves, it takes genius, far- seeing leadership, so to name what is distinctly new. Moreover, perhaps only parenthetically, with regard to the fable, some may take it very ser- iously and find no accident in the fact that it was the woman in that historic naming who led the man home, giving him the familiar name for the strange creature. Certainly women are quite as progressive as men ; they are really not more conservative, spite of a certain reputation to the contrary; but they are more easily home- sick, domestic, intuitive, awake to the new as the real deeper meaning of the old; and so, at least by the fable, in times of crisis and transi- tion, when great leadership is called for, history should somehow provide specially for the im- portant service of their intuition or domestic influence. Almost I wonder if it has not. Some Leadership and Progress one might very well make a study of history from this point of view. How far in other historic cases of the naming of new things out of an old vocabulary, of restoring new life to old lines or reading the old lines for their developed new meaning, has the influence of woman been a significant factor? If only to humor such speculation, one might infer, not only that every man who would really lead must have his Eve, but also that woman's part in the coming of new life can not be supposed to be merely and narrowly biological. That fable, if as a fable it really may be taken seriously, is obviously meant to be much more than a possible tribute to Eve and her persuasion generally. It is, too, more than just a humorous account of the great and important truth that new things in life and history must always be seen or met with old forms and so, as they are really new and outwardly obtrusive, must challenge intuition rather than mere reason, the common spirit of mere reason always being too conservative and legalistic. Only intuition can use the old without slavery to its letter and with realism and concreteness. At [30] The Nature of Progressive Leadership least in the context of the present study of leadership and progress the fable suggests, besides those other things, perhaps as only a special inference from the important truth about the old for the new, that a progress, which calls at once for the inner reading of old ways and for the traditional accounting of strange things, as actual as strange, must always show a certain genuine domesticity. What Eve really did, as has been suggested, was to lead Adam home or to make him at home in the presence of something real and strange and progress without such domesticity, with- out a return, not to the mere roof, but to the great spirit of home, is only prodigality. There is real truth and so real salvation of thought or life only in the awakening that the new strange thing after all really is like some old familiar thing. Riotous living, upheaval, vio- lence may seek progress, but can not constitute it. In personal life the return home has been as important as adventure and in history, as many an historian has appreciated, restoration has served progress quite as much as revolu- tion; provided, of course, the restoration has Leadership and Progress been something more than mere counter- revolution or mere reaction, provided it has been restoration with some real feeling for the new. So even reactionary movements may hold a great truth; but a truth which their supporters are often the last to appreciate and confess. Frantic returns home or runs to cover really are sometimes very laughable; serving, as they may, the very progress they would avoid. [32] V. TO PAUSE here for a summing up, we have found four important conditions of the birth of new life among a people: (1) the peculiar intimacy of traditional ways with life itself, with life's original instinct or urge, as shown by general confusion, fluency, inconsistency, abnormality and often startling exposure or transparency; (2) the critical or climactic pressure of the accumulated meaning of the lines of life with a consequent demand, as the time is full, that this meaning may be read out; (3) the obtrusive presence and challenge of a new and strange environment which de- mands accounting, not by mere calculation and formal reason, but intuitively, and (4) the hom- ing or " conservative " instinct sure to assert itself and, however confused and in its blind- ness given, as so often it is, to mere reaction, sure also to come to understanding of itself and its real importance and, while Mark Twain and the people generally laugh, to espouse the [33] Leadership and Progress progressive policies of its time. These being the conditions of new life and its birth, it remains for us in this study of leadership and progress to discover the place and importance of the individual. The great individual, I submit, while of course manifesting characters that must be present, 'however latent, in all individ- uals and that, being at least latent in all, make the leadership itself possible, is one who is actively superior to mere consistency and con- formity as well as to the abuse or ridicule that such independence may invite, who with a reason which is subordinated to insight can catch inner and vital meanings, who without loss of the faith that has been his and his times ' has the courage of new things and who, able to go forward without betrayal of his origin, and always mindful of his home, can make articulate and familiarly intelligible the needed new possi- bilities and ideals of his fellows. Of such character, I say, is the great individ- ual. Yet, while such would seem to portray the great individual and his leadership and while we can see in him as so characterized a reflection of those four discovered chief condi- [34] The Nature of Progressive Leadership tions of new life, the person so described may seem more a fiction than a fact, more ideal than human and actual. Certainly for an accurate and cautious historian such a person would be hard to find in the flesh or rather in the records. Only considerable glossing would make any one of any time able to pass the test. Not that history does not report leaders to us, but there is a difference between accurate history and a would-be appreciative history that often takes the will for the deed or fact. Moreover, as an interesting though hardly conclusive question, at any time has any individual in the opinion of his contemporaries generally quite met or even notably approximated our definition? Perhaps leadership is after all only an ideal, a noble fiction. Perhaps leadership never is real or accomplished contemporaneously but is rather a sort of after-thought or after- discovery, a great leader being rather the selec- tion, almost the creation, of later times than the recognized or demonstrated prophet and hero of his own. Great leaders, it may then be, in some sense never really are, but are either leaders that are sometime to come to deliver [35] Leadership and Progress their people or that once upon a time walked among men. Such leaders, of course, only an appreciative, generous history could discover. If a leader has to be in any sense " ahead of his times" and, also more than others, in any sense loyal to the past, how can the accurate historians be any more successful in finding him than his own contemporaries'? I suspect that great individual leadership, like a common, general individualism, truly is a good deal of an abstraction, being more think- able than findable; in other words, having a wider reach and deeper root than the merely findable things of space and time. Political philosophers have often compromised their own best ideas and purposes by failure to appreciate this. Rousseau's universal individualism, his absolute democracy, for example, was really only a great dream to be interpreted, not some- thing to be taken literally as report either of an actual past, an early Golden Age, or of a future social and political Heaven. In actual, con- temporary life real leadership can not be wholly identified with any discoverable person nor is there ever, was there ever or will there ever be [36] The Nature of Progressive Leadership a condition of general unmixed individualism, pure and simple and unqualified, with its so oft proclaimed liberty and fraternity and equality for all and its bondage and service for none. But the unfindable is not necessarily unreal. "Objective" history is not the only true history. From the abstractions of political philoso- phers to pass to so concrete a thing as the famil- iar, almost too familiar, party conventions, will seem a bit sudden and not without some shock; but of life, as in this matter of individuals it is actually found or findable, we have in the convention an excellent although perhaps al- most too sharply focussed illustration. Thus, to begin with, it really takes at least two con- ventions, either being for the other in near prospect or near memory, to make one. Naturally each always has the country in some measure, but it has the other in special measure in mind. Secondly, at either, there is a mobile, more or less kaleidoscopic confusion of factions and persons as well as of policies con- servative and progressive. The recognized leaders, however proclaimed and however as- sertively independent or however patriotic for [37] Leadership and Progress the old or the new, are always pretty much in the hands of their numbered if only the num- ber may become a majority! and organized friends. Except for all sorts of generally hid- den minor groups and personal rivalries and petty leaderships, at least ninety-five per cent of all present are, taken in the large, docile sheep rather than bell-wethers. No one, it is true, can be set down as wholly and absolutely either. So in actual and practical life are the two forces, the social and the personal, organization and individuality, closely interlocked. But, thirdly, here being where the country has some chance, there are always as undercurrent, felt and in some measure necessarily responded to, in the consciousness of all, in the sensitive life of both conventions, the general life and interest and need of the time. Sometimes, too, the ideas and character and purpose of some insistent and unforgetable individual, perhaps supported, perhaps opposed, which making very little dif- ference, may constitute a real power behind all the manipulation and machinery, all the deliber- ation and partisanship. Then, as for the out- come, I need say no more than that the chances [38] The Nature of Progressive Leadership seem to be quite against the first choice of any considerable faction in either convention being selected. Whichever party wins, too, in the final general election, the subsequent events are likely to show the outward victory superficial, heed being finally given to the real life and wish of the country. Fortunately any party is more responsible, less in mere opposition, when in power than at the convention, although quite humanly and humorously it will get at such a result, when possible, through indirection and disguise, by a back-door rather than at the front. In England, for example, the victorious conserva- tives have had a way, almost a habit, by all sorts of sinuous routes, although sometimes also boldly and openly, of appropriating the pur- poses and policies of those whom they have opposed; while the liberals, come into power, have always lost some of their liberalism, and what has been thus true in England well illus- trates so-called practical politics the world over. Whether pessimist or optimist can get most satisfaction out of that fact I shall not try to say. Enough that, whatever the machinery, the [39] Leadership and Progress deeper forces of life do seem to prevail and that there appears to be ample justification for the common and often great difference between his- tory's later appreciation of events and forces and men of any time and the contemporary party-ridden judgements and accounts. Also, in the whole story we can see how abstract and intangible is great leadership or individualism in general. Social organization and personal individuality never do exist apart. Outwardly at any time there are always many independent leaders, so-called with varying fractions of truth, and among them there may be preparing for the posthumous recognition of generous his- tory a real and great leadership. Outwardly, again, there are always parties and factions, even great races and powerful nations, with their constraints and uniformities and their sheep-like personnels and, while more or less pressing in the personality of every sheep among them there will be some active in- dividuality, in a small fraction or a large con- tributing its influence for a different life, there will always be the sheep and the sheep-folds, as well as all the articulate ways of life which [40] The Nature of Progressive Leadership these imply and without which, supplying as they do the necessary lines, the mediums, the methods and the language, of association and communication and exchange, leadership itself would not be possible. The political convention, then, illustrates very well the tangle of person and faction, of new life and formal organization, which is natural to all human association. It shows forces of progress active, yet often suppressed or hidden, and it shows personal leadership. The real and great leader, however, may even be, of all those present or involved, the least noticed at the time, having little, if any, open endorsement. In any selection of leaders, as in other mat- ters, I may be reminded here that it is the vot- ing majority of the people that decides or rules. This is true or rather, like most things involving human affairs, only in some part true. It is not the whole truth. At least there is a certain in- congruity between an electoral majority rule and real leadership. Eeal leadership, in the first place, as we should keep in mind, is not naturally a matter of outward, formal and Leadership and Progress merely contemporary selection; and, in the sec- ond place, only suggesting perhaps both the peculiar utility and the limitation of an elector- al democracy, formal majorities by the nature of the case, by dint of the manner of their mobilization, tend either to reaction or to revo- lution. In both reaction and revolution they have positive value; but they do not in them- selves directly promote or foster constructive progress. Progress needs both such democracy and aristocracy, mass-play and real leadership. History probably would show the forces of the two, of communally associated action and of aristocracy, including even personal loneliness, nearly if not quite equal in their importance. VI. VERY little has been said so far, except by implication, when the great leader was defined in that fourfold characterization, of the individual in general, of the size and character of the human person. May I under- take measurement and appraisal now! How small any one of us is, counting only as one in millions, living a moment or two in eternity; how petty, too, and ignorant and prone to be selfish and mean. But also how great is any one, always the possible leader of one's group and possible member of any group, there being no groups that are inviolable. Nothing, in short, can be smaller or meaner, nothing greater or nobler, than a human person. Perhaps the very possibility of smallness and mere selfish- ness is what gives significance to the greatness and the nobility, when these are realized. Josiah Eoyce, I remember, in the very possibil- ity of evil found conviction of God. Lacking the courage to fail, as so often said, no one can [43] Leadership and Progress ever accomplish anything deeply worth while. But suffice it now that, midst all his danger of smallness, the person can be great. On just what is this possibility based? Many have thought of individuals as only the diminutive parts of the massive, over- whelming whole, or, again, as atoms indepen- dent and unrelated, each quite shut up within its separate and more component than com- posed self, and if at all social, social only for selfish reasons or under external compulsion from either earth or Heaven. There has been, too, much popular acceptance of individualism as naturally even anti-social, aggressively op- posed to cooperative living of any kind. But the atom, we are learning, is really in itself, however diminutive, big with the character and the forces of the whole solar system and the human individual, however small, if really alive, holds in himself all the elements and interests and agencies that belong to the whole fabric of society. Perhaps I ought not to tell any of my readers how great he is at least theoretically, in native possibility! Perhaps, on the other hand, it is fortunate that the cosmic genius in [44] The Nature of Progressive Leadership any one of us is sometimes a bit hampered by the formalities of civilization! But, at least latent, in every individual there is the cosmic unity. It is surely the very genius of individuality to be social and not just conventionally so. The genuinely social factors of individuality may be variously indicated and will doubtless seem significant in varying degrees. Thus, very im- portant indeed, although not likely at once to be generally appreciated, is the fundamental fact that every act of an individual, which shows him, as it were, breaking away from his conventional and uniformed associates, is an act of some special adaptation and all such adaptations are, not indeed conventionally, but essentially social, while many of them may be ideally and progressively so. Some one has said that adaptiveness beyond mere convention is the very essence of real culture. Of course, to recall what was said of the possibility of doing wrong, of failing, the individual always may live specially and unconventionally by one of two ways, one known as the selfish way, by which he becomes, or tends to degenerate into, [45] Leadership and Progress a mere sordid creature of physical, sensuous nature, the other the nobly personal way, cer- tainly not less individualistic, by which he moves forward into greater breadth and depth of life; but it is worth observing that by either route the individual comes into the life of the whole; becoming by the former, the way of mere uncontrolled instinct, a helpless creature of nature; by the latter, the way of conscious and well-purposed will, what in the language of religion would be called a participant in the creative life of God. There is simply no such thing as an individual, however unconventional, be he instinct-impelled or will-guided, who can live, as an atom, to himself alone. The very genius of individuality is wholeness, degenerate or progressive. Besides the essentially social, however un- conventional, character of the special adapta- tions of the individual, there is to be remarked for our present purpose the very different qual- ity of the life of the individual as an individual from that of the group. Breadth and narrow- ness, vitality and artificiality, facility or versa- [46] The Nature of Progressive Leadership tility and rigidity, hospitality and exclusive- ness, humanity and institutionalism are some of the contrasts. "Personally I would do any- thing, but, as you know, business is business" or "I am an officer of administration and gov- ernment." Personally and humanly soldiers exchange real courtesies across battle-lines ; but as soldiers their exchanges are quite different. Was it not Eousseau who said, once more with a philosopher's violence of abstraction, that if there were only persons in the world, only free, unorganized individuals, there would be no battle-lines of any kind? Parties, factions, nations fight, not persons; not free, fraternal and equal persons. Again, it quite belongs to the size and charac- ter of individuality that it puts emphasis on feeling rather than on reason; if selfish, on the feelings of sense, if nobly personal, on those of insight, of faith and the spirit. Reason and its formulae belong primarily to the group and the institution; it is the faculty of law and order; but, taken abstractly, the individual, for good or for ill, is, not properly illegal or [47] Leadership and Progress disorderly, but super-legal, the law being for him, not he just for it. The individual, too, may dream. He is naturally loyal to general prin- ciples, to the great free spirits of things rather than to any literal and formal pronouncements about them. He welcomes adventure, pursuing the impossible or rather T a much better word the incommensurable. For his goal and the great adventure of it he has often been willing to die. He is, you see, in that case by nature a visionary, an adventurer, an impractical doc- trinaire. Indeed I am quite sure there can be no real, genuine individuality without some of the inspiration of the impractical. In history the impractical adventurers, the great doctrin- aires, although never formally chosen, have come to command their millions, while the prac- tical men have served rather than commanded only thousands. The doctrinaires have inaug- urated new epochs; the others, so much more "practical," have merely maintained old ones. So few of us realize the profound appeal of gen- eral ideas, of so called abstract generalities. Yet at critical times they always get wide vogue [48] The Nature of Progressive Leadership and they have great power. Love, Justice, Liberty, Humanity, Equality may sound dull, but theirs is a significant dullness. They are the life, too, of the individual, making him big and active with the whole of life, and they may give him all men as his followers. Space quite forbids that I should go on as 1 would. Still, may I add, before concluding, that in genuine individuality, belonging to its size and character, to its expansiveness, must always be three especially human gifts of truth ; memory, imagination and humor. Memory only names once more what before I called the homing-instinct so important to effective pro- gress. Without imagination the individual must simply betray his own birthright of free- dom and adventure, of open-mindedness and, if I may use the word, open-willedness. But humor is a peculiarly human and personal gift of truth especially when one can laugh at one- self as well as at others and perhaps above all when one can bear that others should laugh at one also. These three gifts of truth, I say, are special virtues of the person and marks of his [49] Leadership and Progress 'size and peculiar genius, enabling him to be the reader of inner meanings and namer of new things which a progressive leader must always be. In conclusion, if you have understood my measurement and appraisal of personal individ- uality, you will see how in all individuality lives something that is quite superior to the distinc- tions of place or time, of class or institution. Even races and whole eras are smaller than the individual. They divide life; he is a unity of it. They confine it, he frees it and makes it grow. And in time of crises, with the gestation that we have seen, as the preparing new life appears, some individual, leading the rest, is sure to be able to interpret or should we rather say? after his death is found to have interpreted that life to itself. Eeal leadership does have to wait on time. In its own day, just because it is leadership, real and progressive, courageous and adventurous, impractical and insistent, it has to be in question and obscured, often denied and abused. The greater leader- ship be in its day, the more it will be made clear [50] The Nature of Progressive Leadership or proved outwardly, as in so many historic cases, afterwards. No real leader is ever with- out honor save in his own time. Even an ordi- nary person, it is to be hoped, possesses enough individuality in size and quality to make his success in some measure depend on the future. To live and succeed only for the day is hardly to live at all. In such living is no effective personality. Would you have an illustration of great leadership! I take as recent a case as is safe. How great was Lincoln; how far-seeing; how above the mere law; how open in mind and will; how human; how gifted with humor, imagina- tion and sense of home; and how insistent. Abused for his insistence; having enemies north as well as south, at home as well as abroad, he not so much was for his time as became for all time a great leader. Now not this country, but also England and not the North but also the South celebrate him. His leadership, seeing deeply, progressive, assertive but, in spite of attacks and charges, not autocratic, was real and is now proved. Leadership and Progress Writes of him, or of all leadership, a great English poet and playwright: "When the high heart we magnify, And the sure vision celebrate, And worship greatness, passing by, Ourselves are great." [52] II. RECENT OPPORTUNITIES OF PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP IN THE foregoing essay, although a demand for progressive leadership in actual condi- tions of the time has been dwelt upon at some length and although some illustrative use of recent affairs and events has been made, primarily and with distinct purpose an abstract interest has been maintained. Thus the attempt has been only to show what quite in general progressive leadership is; how, typically, great leaders are i ' born, not made, ' * not just formally made or chosen; and, especially, just what de- pendence any important leadership must have on the actual social and political machinery of its time, on the formal and quite articulate ways and traditions, on the visible institutions. But in this second essay the object is directly and practically to consider certain actual opportun- ities of progressive leadership in the familiar [53] Leadership and Progress affairs of recent times. Not merely have these affairs created a demand for leadership; also, quite positively and very presently, they have been alive and active with the possibility of it. Indeed who really lives today must have felt its presence ; even at turning of any corner, if I may speak with so much realism, must have expected to confront the leader himself. Here, then, I would be more than the abstract inquirer. I would actually enter the world of affairs. But, doing this, I propose to be cau- tious, lest I be reminded of those angels as to entrances said to be more hesitant than some. I propose to be, so far as may be, only largely and generally worldly wise and practical. To begin with, as a sign of my discretion, it is not my expectation that any one person can now be found or even necessarily ever will be found to cover the whole field of the present opportunity of leadership. My hero-worship, actual or hypothetical, goes not so far as that. Some individual, it is true, may appear now or later as of special importance for serving some predominant interest or even for serving iix [54] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership some measure several such interests; but in general for our own time, as for any time, leadership simply can be no one person's com- plete monopoly; in principle it must be a divi- ded labor. Eeal progress comes not without personal leadership; but, while some may be more conspicuous than others, one often with respect to some special and absorbing interest more conspicuous than any other, there will be a number of leaders. Furthermore, I have no thought here of call- ing by name one or even, as might be fairly safe, several of the possible leaders of the time. Nominations might be only disturbing, quite defeating the present purpose by reviving all sorts of confusing controversy. Too much diff- erence of opinion still exists. The day's leaders, or great leader, may be said to be still in the making. Contemporary judgements of men are always too personal, too much under a spell of one kind or another, to be at all conclusive and today, among other things mentioned in the previous essay, a ouija board mentality may still be affecting many of us in our estimates [55] Leadership and Progress of persons as well as in our estimates of other things.* Contemporary judgements of persons, I say, are not reliable. Probable they are the least reliable of all human judgements, very much as personal dialogue, whatever its zest and drama- tic interest, has its serious limitations as a way to clear, sane, objective and scientific thinking. Did not the prosy, impersonal Aristotle think more clearly than Plato, writer of historical dia- logues, and Plato himself than Socrates, whose dialogues were so many actual personal en- counters ? The very importance of persons and personality is actually blinding, especially when to the personality, assertive and competitive, there must be added all the extravagance and bias and partisan animus of tensely critical times. Progressive leadership, then, is no complete monopoly for any one and also here not even several nominations are to be made. At least so far as this essay goes all candidates for * In possible conviction of myself, for an amusing example, not very long ago there came to my unthinking, doubtless a bit biased, automatic consciousness, very much as in a dream, the strange title, if title it was, of what would certainly be a curious, however un- trustworthy, volume: "Hated Men in History: Much, More, Most: Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge." [56] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership recognition must wait on time and its fairer decisions. Attention here is to be, not on per- sons, but on opportunities, on certain large con- temporary conditions and affairs which for some time have been constituting a distinct challenge, intellectual and moral, to creative and so pro- gressive achievement. [57] II. THE first of the challenging conditions, to which I would call attention, is very fundamental, being the peculiar general mentality of recent times; very conspicuous several years ago and still in distinct evidence; abnormal, as at large the times have been ab- normal; and, like so much if not all abnormality, having in it possibilities most adventurously poised between opportunity and danger, good and evil, progress and reversion or even positive degeneracy. In them is most serious menace; but also real hope. And what has been the mentality of the time? It has certainly included the ouija board and with double meaning the spirit thereof. But, to speak more comprehensively and to explain a state of mind by reference to certain conditions of the time, there has been on the one hand throughout our life sharp re- action, boastfully practical, too consciously normal, insistently conservative. On the other, [58] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership as possible balance or counterpart, there has been impractical vision of new life. Almost at times have we been asked to forget the past and its history altogether and to attend in thought, however abstract, and act, however violent, to a future as sudden as ' ' new. ' ' The reaction and this vision, furthermore, really only two factors of a single situation, have each brought its own special abnormality and so have been signs, the former quite as emphatically as the latter, that the old and normal order is passing. Thus the former has been very generally attended with reversionary or decadent releases of emotion and idea, its very insistent conservatism and suppression seeming to breed such lawlessness and primitive violence of mind and will; while the latter, possessed of an unnatural, over- reaching optimism and idealism, has invited unreal vision and impractical revolution. The reactionary movements have brought, not only specifically the conspicuous increase in Spiritualism, but also generally a very wide- spread spiritualistic habit of mind as a way of meeting changes. Such movements by their very assertion, often distressed and frantic, of [59] Leadership and Progress the old order and their consequent artificial sup- pression of actual new life must, I submit, al- ways be attended with outbreaks of the sub- conscious which lack control or sanity and which can amount only to * ' automatic ' ' and unreasoned judgements about anything or any- body at all at variance with things as they have been. Has distinct novelty or difference come? Is there loss, real or threatened? Things and people as they were are no more? Then, by way of response to the strangeness, as if to some mysterious disturbance, the startled reaction- aries refer what is really only released from within themselves to the new thing that has obtruded. A bereaved, deeply moved mother may thus get a message out of her own sub- consciousness from her son killed across the seas. Some loyal and earnest patriot, facing certain changes in the life of his country, which involve of course both painful losses and shock- ing novelties, may desperately and passionately quote to the letter the remembered sayings of some long dead father of his country and in these think to have sound and sacred wisdom for, and actual contact with, the new conditions. [60] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership The reactionaries, too, who so very earnestly quote to the letter the past wisdom of the long dead, the subconscious ideas of the time, are also given to being primitive and loose in their passions, impulses and emotions as well as ir- responsible, or unadapted, in their ideas and judgements. So does conservatism, meeting certain changes, seek suppression, but bring release, albeit in an indirect and unwholesome way; taking ' ' communications " from the past, even the idle chattering of departed spirits, as wisdom for the present and at the same time abundantly exposing reversionary desires and ideas. Do not, deliberately or thoughtlessly, mis- understand me. Surely I have, as all must have, warm appreciation and respect for such earnest patriots and honest politicians as have been quoting the great George Washington or the wise James Monroe, just as also with count- less others I have more than mere appreciation, a gentle affection, for the bereaved parents who hoarding a cherished past have met their grief with communications from their dead sons; but parental love or patriotic loyalty may often be [61] Leadership and Progress genuine and admirable without being wise or rational in interpreting changes that must be met. Bather may those deeply devoted to their children or to their country and suffering from their losses easily misinterpret the new things. Of those who recognize the unguarded credulity that so often affects people in critical times and consciously play upon it for their own gain, personal or partisan, nothing needs to be said except of course that they add greatly to the trouble and danger of it all. Furthermore, there is something in spiritual- ism; not indeed the spiritualism, but something. "Something in it" is of course an honest, and easy as honest, way of meeting anything: but it is safe and fair. Spiritualism and in general the spiritualistic habit of mind can be only parodies, or distortions, of something in life that is real and vital. Protesting against them, branding them as abnormal is very far from denial of meaning for the word spirit or spiritual. Change and loss may always induce them; but they do not exhaust the meaning, they can only very superficially and artificially represent [62] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership the meaning of the mystery that change and loss must always imply and impress. In these times, then, of new things and of the very conservative reaction against them the people's mentality has often been ' ' spirit^- istic" and, as was suggested, the unscrupulous and selfish or partisan have even exploited this condition of mind, so greatly strengthening what hardly lacked momentum of its own. In short, spiritualism with all its accomplishments well meant or ill, has been a much more general state of life and mind than the religious or quasi- religious cult of Doyle and Lodge* and others who have been hearing from departed relatives or from William James or Sir Isaac Newton. As here and now considered it comprises a very com- mon attitude evident in the newspapers and journals very widely, in the deliberations of political bodies, not excepting the House or even the Senate or any political party, in pri- vate conversations, and indeed wherever life and its affairs are matters of discussion and judgement., A genuine and too assertive con- servatism, so conservative as to release passion * Of course Sir Oliver. [63] Leadership and Progress and violence of mind and will, seems to have had no choice but to revive the past at once too affectionately and too well; too literally; too primitively. But, as was said, reaction with the abnormal mentality it brings is not all. Widespread as this has been, it is only one half, if one may ven- ture to speak so accurately. With it, as if to conteract or to complement which to say is fairly in doubt there is the vision of new life that was mentioned above and that sees the future so clearly that it induces not so much a groping as a grasping forward and a state of mind abnormal for being so much more vision- ary than intelligent. A reactionary conserva- tism without such an accompanying idealism, impractical even to violence, during any period of transition would be unnatural as it is un- thinkable. Certainly, apart from the general truth, our own time specifically has shown how inseparable the two, the conservatism and the idealism, are. Sharp reactionaries and ultra- progressives have been in evidence; and the latter have been making their own contribution to the extravagant and abnormal mentality of [64] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership the time as well as to the adventure of mixed danger and opportunity which abnormality in- variably offers. As to which of the two groups departs farther from what is traditional and normal this is very difficult to say. Philosophically, if not mathe- matically, their distances are probably about equal. In different ways they both unsettle and offend the normal and so, marvellous to relate, actually work together, partners in fact if not in intent, to effect distinct change. If the reactionaries, as has been shown, revive the past, releasing the vital and primitive even while holily and mysteriously they parrot dead and suppressive formulae, the radical progres- sives achieve the future too recklessly, in their haste slavishly and blindly adopting methods and violently confiscating accumulated re- sources of all sorts from the very life they would wholly reform or supplant. How often has a revolution proved only a repetition, except for the inexperience and inefficiency and changes in personnel, of what it has overthrown and then, mixing humor with tragedy, has [65] Leadership and Progress invited because so thoroughly justifying counter-revolution. All of which is to say, now putting in a simple sum the foregoing analysis of abnormal and transitional times and regarding alike the conditions of overt life and the attending states of mind, that the two movements, reaction and visionary revolution, as naturally contemporary as abnormal, both contain, in their accepted and appropriate constitution, factors of law and order and factors of lawlessness, of the tra- ditional status quo and of actual change or growth. They are virtual partners, then, in that they are both occupied with conserving the past and with effecting change or doing violence. The difference or rivalry between them springs, as the actual life discloses, not from factors out of which they compose life, these proving to be the same, but from their sharp disagreement as to which factor, law or lawlessness, is put forward as end and which is employed merely as means. Moreover it must be just such disagreement, distinguishing be- tween two common and essential factors of life on the end-and-means basis, that makes either [66] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership reaction with its use of violence in support of law or revolution with its use of law and the formal organization in acts of violence in- effective, at best successful only outwardly and temporarily, self -deceiving and self-defeating; for of two things that life needs neither can be only means or only end. I find myself actually wondering if this time-honored distinction be- tween end and means, as a way, conscious or unconscious, of distributing intimate factors of life, has not been to blame for many errors of action and fallacies of thought in human his- tory. Beyond any peradventures it has again and again at least seriously distorted both thought and life. But, as to the matter in hand, it does seem clear that for their better mentality or for their more direct service in the overt activities life reaction and revolution, each in itself so distorted for being only half of the truth, each to the other opposed and yet also complement- ary, neither in itself adequate to complete liv- ing, need to establish, or to have established for them, a real liaison. Only the two together, not as in their usual partisan encounters but in [67] Leadership and Progress conscious cooperation, can make at once effective and progressive life possible. Only with their real reconciliation and cooperation can there be even an approach to a solution of the great problem of adjustment to which their very an- tagonism with the abnormalities of it and the distorted end-and-means distribution of life's great factors bears dramatic witness. So, I say again, a real liaison is needed. A liaison, however, is possible only through the comprehensive and vital unity of personal individuality; not necessarily of any particular individual, although usually some one will take the lead conspicuously, but of personal individ- uality at large. Characteristically, it should be remembered, the individual person has an open- ness of mind and will, a breadth of nature, a depth of insight or intuition, an imagination and humor, that make him always potentially a solvent for all the differences that disrupt human life and human society. Only person- ality, as it comes to large and important expres- sion in one or in a few or to less degrees in men generally, can lead the times out of the captivity of parties and partisanship, reactionary [68] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership or revolutionary, under which they suffer. Eeaction and revolution alike are socially mas- sive or corporate, the work of the conventional herd or the empassioned mob; adjustment and positive progress are personal. The herd has its servile creatures, occupants of office; the mob its demagogues, always office-seekers; but these are neither real leaders nor whole per- sons; and the time's great challenge is to the whole person, through whom and only through whom our abnormal life and mentality, reac- tionary or revolutionary, spiritualistic or visionary, automatic and degenerate or violent and futuristic, can be corrected. Only through the whole person can either the spiritualism be replaced by an active and effective spirituality or the futurism by an intelligent and soberly articulate idealism. The past surely is not something dead to be heeded literally and re- vived mysteriously and irrationally; the future is not a life at once so sudden and novel and so perfect as to warrant the suicide, or hari kari, of the present with use of its own instruments against itself; past and future are inseparable for real life, for the progress that is real; and [69] Leadership and Progress only the person, who is the only vital unit of real life, can both retain the past and attain the future. The day's call may or may not be a call for some great leadership. It is, in any case, a call for some general release of person- ality open-minded and open-willed. Only with such release can a sane mentality be restored. Only so, making for spirituality without spirit- ualism and idealistic adventure without revo- lution, can a new life find expression and media- tion in the old ways. in. TURNING now from the time's state of mind, abnormal and at least potential with important adventure and progres- sive leadership, to things that are perhaps more ponderable, to actual and positive affairs, I shall hardly be contradicted and may even be only tiresome, if I remark that our two great prac- tical problems today, thanks to obtrusive changes that have taken place, are (1) the prob- lem of industry and especially of labor and (2) the problem, let me not say, as so many would, of nationality or internationalism, but of nationality and internationalism. With reference to both of these problems the people at large, not to say also many who have seemed critically reflective, have certainly been too much under the spell which shoulcl be recognized here as always inviting reaction or revolution of the familiar either-or point of view. Either labor or capital, impossibly both! [71] Leadership and Progress Either nationalism or internationalism, not under any circumstances both! In each of these issues, as they have sharpened, each side has been disposed to view the other as something, not to be adjusted and made responsible and mediate, but to be suppressed or quite elim- inated and to regard itself as somehow intrinsic and final, unqualifiedly an end in itself, the "all in all. " Illustrating very well this either-or attitude there is in the case of the political issue the very common view of internationalism even aggressive internationalists entertaining it- as significantly only disarmament or mere paci- ficism and of this as requiring, not merely the passing of militarism, but also the ending of any real nationalism. Forget country and culti- vate the international mind! Nationalism, on its side, must be aggressively one hundred per cent, brooking no alliances, admitting no out- side obligations, being real only if indepen- dent and quite self -maintaining and duly jealous. In the industrial issue, in like manner, the call is for stopping either the selfishness and violence of labor or the selfishness and the us- Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership ually more legal or at least more legalistic - violence of capital. Why must men think so one-sidedly, so ab- stractly? Such either-or-ism can lead nowhere; its essential fallacy is quite obvious; its effect can be only continued trouble; it can bring no settlement of the issues. Would there be, could there be, any success even for prohibition, if the reform were not positively and construc- tively motivated? Even as conditions are, the Eighteenth Amendment, taking away certain socially dangerous drinking " rights, " has led to an outbreak of special selfishness and lawless- ness. My point, a familiar one, is that flat affirmation or flat suppression or mutual exclu- sion can solve no problem. Where there is a real problem, the very conditions giving it rise call for something different. If the two issues of our day be real issues, they must indicate or demand, not the complete passing of anything nor the unqualified justification of anything, but a condition of transition and readjustment of everything and so the coming of new things all along the line; specifically, a new nationalism, a new internationalism, for both labor and [73] Leadership and Progress capital a new industrialism. Mere " peace," com- ing to a nation with disarmament and cessation of military conflict, could hardly be regarded as alone and in itself necessarily a real gain. It could not meet the whole need. The victory of it would be empty, leaving only the always abhorred and properly dangerous vacuum. In- dustrially, too, just the passing of strikes or of capitalistic Toryism would bring us no substan- tial advantage. Is any problem ever solved by mere cleaning of the house? No house-cleaning ever was only to get rid of something. Or by shutting everything in? The very impulse for such isolation shows an interest in something real outside. The either-or attitude, then, must not be ours, as we take up the two issues. We shall have further illustrations of it in each case. "We do well, however, to appreciate at once that in gen- eral labor and capital, nationality and inter- nationalism are the real problems which we are to consider. As to other problems of the times, there are many others of course; these others, too, are urgent; problems of social life, of a [74] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership different education, of public health, of leisure, of a more enlightened morality; but with our present purpose it suffices to consider the two apparently most in the public consciousness. [75] IV. IN INDUSTRY laborers have long been feel- ing their actual part and so their right to candid and formal recognition as having actual part in the productive industrial life of the country and even of the world. I say even of the world, since it has often seemed as if there were more sense of the world as a whole, of common humanity if not, as some would have it, of the international life, among laborers than in any other group. Still, be this as it may, while the events of the war did not create the feeling of participation, they undoubtedly did help to define it and so to strengthen it greatly, bringing it to a climax of conviction. To begin with, whether volunteering or drafted, the lab- orers served in the war. More than this, the in- dustries, in which they had been employed or often continued to be employed, were speeded up for the very vital purposes of the war. Large profits were realized, to say nothing of the mili- tary success that came in good time; and while [76] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership the profit and high wages were perhaps only secondary or even external factors, as tempor- ary as extraordinary, they have had a consid- erable share in exalting the position and developing the consciousness of labor. Add, too, the world- wide character of the war as well as of modern industrialism and commerce and one can easily appreciate the present urgency of the labor problem. This problem is, again, the pressure of a now clearly conscious parti- cipation in industrial production, conscious as never before and now demanding both moral and legal recognition; and, giving it weight and insistence, there is the conviction of world- size and world-importance. Also there is the fact that, as never before, in its conduct and its productivity industry in general is becoming manifestly a public affair, not just here and there but generally and at large a ' * public util- ity. " Here, once more, the war did much to punctuate the fact. Too much may easily be made of the situation as I have now presented it. Too much has already been made of it, especially by labor in its either-or moods. Should labor ever read [77] Leadership and Progress what I have here written, it would welcome my statement, unduly exaggerate its meaning, infer anticapitalism and jump to the conclusion that I foresaw labor eventually in full control of industry. Such saltation would be very absurd. All that I foresee as the outcome, what- ever extravagances may intervene, is a truly positive and candid industrial democracy, which would have to be very far indeed from a full control by labor. Why must any new steps in democracy involve so much delusion and tra- gedy? Has political democracy in its outcome brought undirected and generally unchecked and arbitrary popular government? The demand for a candid industrial democ- racy is, I may assume, now clear. Who has not had some sense of it? Not the fact or warrant of it, then, but the best way of satisfying it, of meeting it wisely and effectively, is the prob- lem confronting us. Help to a solution, as just now hinted, might come and, so far as analogies may help, ought to come from the past. Several centuries ago in the history of Christendom there was demand, also prompted by actual and inescapable conditions, which had developed or [78] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership been achieved with the course of history, for a political democracy. Thus in those earlier days political subjects, who in spirit when not liter- ally, when not in actual service, were only so many soldiers, the mere creatures of a higher directing power, came finally, as result of their own hard achievement and creative service, to a realization in fact and a conviction in con- sciousness of their part and importance in the then public life and thereupon they insisted on certain rights consistent with such accom- plished participation and its achievements. To all intents and purposes did they not declare that kings and potentates should no longer be thought of as the favored and commissioned of God but that all men were politically compe- tent, free and equal? Indeed had not those soldier-subjects, merely by their measure of success in doing what their recognized rulers had willed, proved the competence and equality? Sooner or later, if only there be achievement, any soldier may aspire to command; any subject may feel his own royalty. Came, then, the great distribution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, if [79] Leadership and Progress one may give it even round dates, when all men, "by God created equal, " got the formerly ex- clusive as well as divine rights of kings and potentates, the rights of earthly life, personal liberty and happiness or safety in possession of home and property. Whereupon democracy took a great step forward. Of course many have called those eighteenth century political rights "natural rights; " but so-called they might be easily misunderstood. Often they have been misunderstood. However "natural," they certainly could not be " rights " until they had been won or achieved and also, as very im- portant to remember, because commonly over- looked, they must, being more than lofty abstractions, have a definite meaning deter- mined by the actual conditions, local and temporal, of their winning. Indeed I have to think of that distribution, so intimately related to the history of our own country, as only signalling or registering in the progress of Christendom man's physical and largely only superficial and residential conquest of the earth. Prior to the eighteenth century man had hardly belonged on earth; rather he [80] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership was really only a stranger and a much troubled sojourner here, belonging and eventually pass- ing yonder. If here he enjoyed any sanctioned communal life, the equality of it was spiritual, not in any way earthly and concrete. Then man enjoyed, as common and equal rights, probably quite "natural" to the times but wholly nega- tive as to life on earth, the right to die, perhaps as martyrs died, to be ascetic even to deliberate self-mortification and in hope and faith to await safety and happiness in the Home Here- after. But that time passed and, thanks to con- quests and explorations and discoveries east and west, geographical and intellectual, thanks to hard experience and adaptation and real en- lightenment, man found the earth to be, what he had succeeded in making it, his natural home, and so he claimed and got those "nat- ural" rights of life on earth. Did I not repre- sent them as the rights of earthly life, of personal or bodily liberty, of safety and happi- ness in possession of property and an earthly home? So in the history of Christendom did man come into the possession of the earth super- [81] Leadership and Progress ficially, residentially. That his success was the achievement of militarism and monarchy and of the political, intellectual and spiritual accom- paniments of these will, I think, be recognized. The instrument and the accomplishment were in such perfect accord. But, the earth possessed, life and residence and property reasonably se- cure, and the won rights distributed, man natur- ally came to a new interest in his earth. Indeed his demand for the political democracy of those rights was no mere protest against militarism and its purposes, but was positively in response to the new interest. Possessed, the earth was next to be, not explored, but exploited. After conquest should come improvement, intensive development. Gradually but surely militarism gave way to industrialism. And now, at least since the war, man feels and, as has been pointed out," is openly claiming his right to something more than just common natural possession and residence. Has he not actually and manifestly achieved more? Enough, at least, to justify a claim? Have not that new interest and the life prompted by it and actually made possible by the political [82] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership democracy at last borne results and brought him to a time of another general distribution? Man would simply have his " natural rights" brought up to date. During the later process of achievement, as during the earlier, there had to be some leadership of person or class; as before, there had to be subjection and sometimes tyranny and abuse; but, necessary and often costly as these are to achievement, they must always in the fulness of time have outcome in a distributing and levelling democracy. So, with industrialism's accomplishments, either the old rights, those acquired in the eighteenth century and now very generally en- joyed, must take on a new wealth of meaning, getting a recognized content more consistent with the new life and its peculiar successes, or there must be adopted a wholly new bill of rights. Industrialism in its turn has won its victories, victories of transformation, of inven- tion and manufacture or artif acture, of develop- ment or creative residence and the fighters, all the mobilized workers, have now to be paid; yet not with mere wages or bonuses; rather with the reward, at once more lasting and more vital [83] Leadership and Progress and substantial, of larger rights and more im- importance. Again, a new distribution is due and an industrial democracy is called for. Only now, as before, democracy and its distributed rights are, not abstractions, but matters of the given context. The workers, in other words, must not expect the time to reward them beyond its means. Industrial democracy may not mean " ergotocracy ! " Abstractions may sometimes motivate action, but at court or in the market- place they must always be brought within what is reasonable or subjected to discount. Nor should the workers expect position or goods or property or advantages in any such concrete form for their rights. Such expectation, offer- ing only one more illustration of a common fal- lacy in history and inducing mere revolution and confiscation, would lead to more trouble than progress. Rights are far more valuable than "tips" or booty. If a new bill of rights were to be adopted, what would the new rights be f To reply at all is difficult. To reply wisely is much more so. I have suggested in my final essay, Ages of Leisure, that a fourth right might now be added, [84] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership trusting to its progressive influence on the others: Thus: Life, Liberty, Security and Leisure. But, if one must hold to the tradition of three, the new rights or the new values of the old rights might be set down as Work, "Welfare and Worth; work, say, for a living wage and with a raised standard of living at that; welfare with implication of some leisure, at once the great gift of machinery and the opportunity as well as the demand for education, and worth in the sense of conscious and candidly recognized participation and self-importance in the coun- try's or the world's industry and production. Still, the naming of the new rights left to others more competent than I, what in general the day's enlargement of the old rights ought to be must be fairly clear. Men generally would and should now have that same feeling toward industry, the feeling of the life of it as their own, every one being one of the vital units from which the effectiveness proceeds, that formerly they got towards government when, all being at last recognized as politically free and equal, they were given the ballot. May I digress a moment for certain reflections [85] Leadership and Progress on the difficulties of language 1 In what I have said above of political democracy, political lib- erty and equality, as generally whenever the term political has been used in these times by myself or by others, I have wondered about the term itself. Is it not getting new meaning in its turn? Has not my use of it been too con- servative? Under the passing order of things the formally organized public life of this people or that has been what it has been and has given definite meaning to the term; but, to say no more, militarism has been giving way to indus- trialism and in consequence a distinct change in public interests and activities has either been effected or is imminent. Accordingly the term, political, may soon have to move forward. The contrast between political and industrial de- mocracy may recount an interesting history, but obscure a fact. Certainly with industrial- ism more and more a general public utility, the industrial and the political can not much longer be kept apart. . So long, indeed, as they count as two, intrigue rather than candor and direct cooperation must characterize their relation. Too long industry has been a lobbyist and here, [86] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership while still holding to the traditional usage of the words, industrial and political, we will at least have in mind that language, as in so many other cases of the sort, is not to be taken too seriously. To return to our new bill of rights, work and welfare and worth, as they were interpreted, are rights that very well mark the new spirit of life and bring to all the ' 'freedom of the modern city." By what concrete measures, analogous to the grant of the right to vote and to the various incidents of the enjoyment of this right, the new distribution might be best realized I am not prepared to say. Cooperation, profit-sharing, labor-representation among di- rectors, protective labor legislation, public health measures, state-medicine, welfare asso- ciations and social service have all been efforts, direct and indirect, at solution of the prob- lem and may be said, all of them, to be influences for industrial democracy; but for the most part they have been palliative measures rather than candid and adequate solutions. Hardly have they really changed the status of labor or in any important degree increased the responsi- [87] Leadership and Progress bility of capital industrially. It may be ques- tioned if any such purposes were seriously in- volved in any of them or if they have really escaped the partisan or either-or point of view. A friend, who has thought much on labor prob- lems, at least to more purpose and with more courage has suggested, among many other things of interest, that the laborers in any in- dustry should have a right to stock in that industry at a reasonable price determined by the business, not by the gambling of a pro- fessionally manipulated stock-market, and that such right should be secured to him, if neces- sary, even by some application of the principle of eminent domain. Again, as I have read, yet can not recall where, under some application of the same principle the state acting as trustee for the people might secure and hold in any industry, especially where the industry clearly is a public utility, an amount of stock represent- ing some considerable part of the unearned increases, although of course allowance should probably be made for special return to enter- prise and initiative. These suggestions may be quite impractical; some may find them [88] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership fantastic; but they have the merit of really granting something and they may be taken as indicating the sort of thing that is called for, There can be no progress, no solution, without real concessions. The concessions, moreover, very obviously must be from both sides in any issue. Whoever accepts privilege must face responsibility. Who- ever yields power must get better service. Eights always carry equivalent duties and also may be really justified and enjoyed only where there is due intelligence. These commonplaces aside, labor on its side must check extravagant demands. In the earlier time, when all finally felt their royalty and got equality with kings, by no means all were put in the high places. The ballot brought only common opportunity, often more theoretical than practical, not com- mon status. Furthermore, as the analogy of the earlier time should check the wilder hopes of labor, so also should it have its lesson for capital. Members of the heretofore industrially privileged, directing and stockholding and dividend-receiving or coupon-cutting class, who have been given to resenting labor's claims, [89] Leadership and Progress may see themselves clearly reflected in the kings and the court, in the Tories and their sort, who as the politically privileged class resented the rise of political democracy but could not pre- vent and in the end at least after a few gener- ations learned to accept and even applaud it. As formally and instrumentally a society of political differences continued to operate or function even after that earlier distribution of rights, so today with the later distribution there must still be differences, industrial diff- erences. In any time, under any scheme of social life, only the very few may occupy the high places and for actual life there must always be high places and the leadership of them. It is not aristocracy that hurts, but irrespon- sibility. Democracy, in actual life, always opposes an irresponsible, traditionally privi- leged, arbitrary and outgrown aristocracy and at the same time enables, when it does not con- sciously foster, one that is responsible and, for being under a higher system of values, also pro- gressive. Again, typically in the change which any democratic movement effects, the existing social distinctions and institutions are not [90] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership destroyed but simply put to general public use, being made standard and generally available methods or instruments instead of the fixed and closed institutes they had come to be. Arbitrary kings and their councils and nobles passed; presidents and cabinets and parliaments took their places; while, coincidently, a subject people became an electorate and industry and development gained in interest over conquest and residence. Concluding this section of my essay, I hardly need to say, as if in refrain, that the conditions and tendencies which have been pointed out reveal decidedly active opportunities for a pro- gressive leadership. Moreover, while persons can not always be counted on to realize and justify their birthright of freedom, too often proving mere creatures of tradition and the "closed institute," only personality can ever lead. Only persons can escape the either-or mentality which has been obstructing industrial progress. [91] V. THE " political " issue of the national and the international remains to be consid- ered. As urgent today, this is really no distinct issue. It is only a specially interesting phase of the call for progress in democracy, for an industrial democracy, with which the mili- taristic nationalism, so long in vogue and cul- tivated in spirit when not in letter, when not overtly, does not and can not accord. It is, again, undoubtedly an incident of the coming of new meaning for the term political, since with the change in conscious and active public interest, with the passing of militarism and the new instrumentation of life through automatic machinery, a new nationalism must be supplant- ing the old. Militarism was materially checked with the distribution of those natural rights in the eighteenth century, but now it would seem about to be discredited altogether. To perpet- uate it now would be to betray the new democ- racy and the new politics. [92] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership Now the passing and the coming eras have been characterized here as eras respectively of conquest and residence and of exploitation and development, the residence having proved "creative." Is it not a noteworthy sign of the times that geography, as a science, is showing changes as if in sympathy? The science of geography is also no longer the militaristic, ter- ritorial thing it once was, depending largely on maps and dealing as it did primarily just with places and boundaries, mountains and rivers and seas, areas, populations and the like. As I recall the "jogrofy" of my youth I could almost accuse it of being intended propaganda for militarism. But today, unless I be very much mistaken, the qualities of the earth rather than its quantities, the life-values rather than the mere boundaries and dimensions, inten- sion rather than extension, are of primary inter- est to geographers. We hear, for example, of regional geography, of anthropo-geography, of economic geography, as different from mere surface geography as intensive agriculture from old-fashioned farming, and in this new [93] Leadership and Progress geography he who runs certainly may read the new public life and the new nationalism. But what if not just this new nationalism has been the real meaning and purpose of the persistent demand in recent times for better understanding among the nations? True, as was said above, many have refused to see any- thing so positive in that demand. They have insisted on seeing only the internationalism and here being the trouble on seeing this as only a sort of general political universalism, possible only with virtual loss of anything like a vigorous and genuine nationalism. But, in spite of such either-or thinking, there has already come about, in the form of a union or league or association, a democracy of nations and with or without formal benefit of this union, yet always carrying out purposes essentially in sympathy with its purposes, there have been various international conferences and treaties ; and all this without even the threatened dis- appearance or submergence of any of the par- ticipating nations. Unless it be that the only possible nation of vigor and genuine patriotism is the nation that is jealous and full-armed, the [94] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership union and the conferences surely must repre- sent something more than a momentary reaction against war. Internationalism, if meaning and seeking only flat peace, disarmament or limita- tion of armament, would surely breed war rather than outgrow it. Union, league, federa- tion, association or conference, call it even Verein, since no name, whatever it be or in whatever language, could worry me, can be no mere manoeuvre of a dull and futile pacifism or a stupid political universalism. A real, self- assertive full-blooded and antimilitaristic nationalism, quite outdoing the nationalism of the past, must be seeking expression and, according as we heed this internationalism of the time, we may look, not for less, but for better, meaning among other things more sportsmanlike competition among the nations. In the relations of individuals the development of rules of rivalry, involving removal of unsportsman like ways, such as hidden daggers, quick triggers, kicking and cheating, all of which have their international analogues, has not taken from the great game of life in any of its phases any of its real interest and vigor; [95] Leadership and Progress rather has the game always been made more worth while. In much of the thinking about the present internationalism there have been two fallacies that may well be pointed out, one as to the real meaning of i i Self-determination, ' ' so much discussed toward the war's close and during the making of peace, and the other as to the novelty of internationalism. Self-determination, proclaimed as every nation's right and actually involving protest against some form of determination from out- side, is just one more of those cries that in their rise refer to peculiar conditions of their time but come to be taken, sometimes even by their original advocates, yet more often by their opponents, as wholly general, as unqualified and absolute. A sweeping, unqualified generaliza- tion is so easily discredited and generalization itself is popularly so much easier than discrim- ination. It will be remembered that democracy and equality and in particular the natural rights of life and liberty and happiness were just such cries, easily abstracted from their inciting con- text and made very troublesome generalities. [96] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership Self-determination, interpreted in the light of its origin, should be taken as specifically a nation's or people's right against military con- trol from outside and so, if enjoyed equally by all, as basis for an international democracy. The internationalists, then, may well advocate it for its assurance of equality among the nations independently of their size and military strength ; but they may not honestly and wisely, relevantly and historically, take it more abstractly, as if it were to cover all possible conditions and relations. To stop international interferences in a certain respect, making all equal in regard to that, is still to permit rivalries and possible superiorities and determination ab extra. It is, however, also to raise the qual- ity of the rivalry, making the game, as we were saying, a better game and raising the character of the nationalism, the best nation under the new system of values or the new rules still being free to lead. But, perhaps more serious than the fallacy of abstract self-determination, is that of inter- nationalism as historically a novelty. In Amer- ica, I suspect, this fallacy has had special vogue, [97] Leadership and Progress although we may claim no monopoly of it. It has too well served the purposes of our par- tisans who, honestly or only politically, have been bent on treating nationalism and any genuine internationalism as things hopelessly incongruous. And how they have talked ! Inter- nationalism, they say, is an impossible futurism. Now or hereafter, as in the past, no nation can ever suffer its entanglements. Man may not put together whom God has placed asunder. Patriotic one can not be and internationally minded at the same time. The internationalist ! What but a man without a country, despicable and to some country treacherous! Or, on the other side, what is the loyal and earnest, per- haps over earnest, lover of his country but a blatant jingo; perhaps a hundred per cent American, but not even three per cent human; narrow in mind, petty and primitive in feeling and purpose ! But, the partisanship of all this aside and due respect allowed to all who have thought as they have seemed to think honestly, however superficially, the facts in the case jus- tify no such feelings or views. Internationalism is no dream. It is no nov- [98] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership elty. History is as familiar with it as with any- thing in the whole field of politics. History has shown that there is no essential incongruity between nationalism and internationalism. Has there, in point of historic fact, ever been either one of the two without the other ? True, between one for one era and the other for a later era there may, nay, must appear incongruity. Yet why except of course for party reasons be misled by this? Is important thinking to be based on anachronisms! I remember a fellow who had broken two marriage engagements and hesitated to enter a third, because, as he said in his great worrying, he was "forever out- growing the girl," getting quite ahead of her time. She was, poor creature, ever becoming his dear but no longer dear anachronism ! But not so in history the relations of international- ism and nationalism. These have developed together; arm in arm, if you must have it so. What do I mean when I say or imply, that internationalism, far from being a novelty of our time, is a commonplace of history? I mean more than my present space permits me to say. I mean at least this: The nations we know [99] Leadership and Progress today, the nations of Christendom or, even more broadly, of the civilized modern world, have had a common origin besides having in some real sense a common destiny. The phrase "the nations of Christendom" or "the civilized nations" is not an empty, meaningless phrase, holding no content of real life and conscious unity. Indeed our internationalism is as old as our nationalism, as old as Rome and Christ- endom. That it had a precarious youth is as true as natural. So, however, did its insepar- able companion and perennial contemporary, nationalism; the two, midst many vicissitudes, growing stronger and stronger side by side, even shoulder to shoulder, through conflicts and rivalries, balances of power, understandings, alliances, Monroeisms, conventions and confer- ences and leagues ; and the result is now what we see, no suddenly new thing, but a vigorous growth out of the past. The step forward today can be only to continue a life, at once national and international, vigorously the former, quite practicably the latter, which began, not to go farther back, with the Roman Empire and the Christian Church, and which [100] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership would today only come more fully to its own. Strange is it not? that the one great nation, our own, which has not yet joined the new union, the United Nations of the World, is in its composition, in its actual life, domestic or foreign, and in its essential feeling the most international nation of all, the United States of America. Adam, not Eve, must have chosen to call the union a "League." Eve would once more have seen what the new creature looked like and have had even the party-ridden United States stampeding to join the United Nations ! A daily paper, * which must be right, has called us "the most peaceful, benevolent and least covetous of the civilized peoples of the world. ' ' Can it be possible that we have not entered the League, being what we already are, being in character, although not in name, a member of it! Simply we have not felt a pressing need. With whatever magnanimity, we have felt we could bide our time. Or, just because we are as a people what we are, because of the facts of our life and our history, have we actually let ourselves be intrigued into staying out? In * "The New York Times:" Editorial, February 1, 1921. [101] Leadership and Progress any view a more humorous and tragic ! - situation would be hard to imagine. When, after a period of benevolent isolation, we finally entered the war, who could possibly have fore- seen a renewal of our benevolence ? Who could have expected us to be post-bellum as well as ante-bellum pacifists! Honest Americans, 1 am sure, must be between tears and laughter over it all. By our life and character in, on paper we are out. Not needing to enter, for our wealth and independence we are the one nation to which all others must look. Great, then, must be the glory that we enjoy by our continued and so very enviable isolation. What would we? Are we, of all the nations, to take the role of an imperial super-state ? Are we preferring such isolation to the great oppor- tunity of the real hegemony, modern in its spirit and timely in its method, that being one nation of the United Nations would bring us! I find this inconceivable. I have too much faith in facts and in inevitable destiny. I have to believe the rumor from Washington, the spirit of it if not the letter, that our honorable Secretary of State has said that of course, the necessary polit- [102] Recent Opportunities of Progressive Leadership ical manoeuvring over, the United States would be where they really belong. Doubtless he never did speak just so, but he easily might have. At least his own policies have been eloquent. Finally, in my simple and very general reflec- tions on two of the great problems of the time, as well as on a certain mentality, abnormal and adventurous, which has been much in evidence, I have simply been trying to represent the changes, now pressing upon us, as active oppor- tunities of progress and so as making possible a productive creative leadership, national or, as must be in last analysis personal. Again and again in what I have written in this second essay or in the first the challenge, if challenge there have been, has been, not to the youth or the yeomanry or the nobility of the country, al- though each of these must be implicated, but to the personality, open-minded and open-willed, as this lives in every citizen and as in some one here or in some one there it may expand into great leadership. The past has given us great leaders. The present must hold them. The future will discover them. In the past, unfortunately, violent revolu- [103] Leadership and Progress tions have often been necessary just to make any real evolution possible ; but these, as we all know, have caused great delay and have been in other ways costly. Time has not been their only expense. But, today, leadership will be great as it is evolutional, not violently revolu- tional. Factions, not vital and enlightened per- sons, breed destructive and retarding violence. With our better understanding of things, with our knowledge and experience from history, with our evolutional biology and psychology and sociology, with the sophistication and adapt- ability which these should have given, we have to hope at least for some reduction in the temporal and in the material and spiritual cost of progress. [104] PART II TWO ESSAYS OF PROGRESS III. THE NEWSPAPER CONSCIENCE A STUDY IN HALF-TRUTHS IN THE pleasant age of once-upon-a-time among certain intellectuals of an interesting people there lived .a man who combined with considerable powers of mind a disposition to be a bit cynical. He wrote on large subjects and once, writing on "Nature," meaning the world of things in general that move and grow, that are in all their different ways so many objects to our senses, he added as a secondary title, * ' The Non-existent, ' ' and, if indeed he was genuine, thought to prove his case. Protagoras' spirit, whatever it was, grim humor, cynicism, or possibly even near convic- tion, I fear is not dead. Some, I know, to my large title, "The Newspaper Conscience, ' ' would insist that once more that secondary title, ' ' The Non-existent, ' ' should be added, being so eminently appropriate. Among such skeptics or cynics or humorists I may possibly belong - [107] Two Essays of Progress at least in some of my moods. Certainly, to be quite candid, the topic which was suggested to me probably would not have come into my imagination spontaneously, for conscience is not exactly the obtrusive fact of present-day journalism. Still, let us not decide the question too hastily. If for no other reason, just to have a subject to write about, I submit that conscience after all, personally or journalistically, is a matter of definition. Existent or non-existent, a newspaper conscience must depend on one's definition. Definition, indeed, has the omnipo- tence of deity, since anything can be defined out of or into existence. If you are not re- assured, wait. I mean, please wait. Above all, don't take anything I would say until I have really finished saying it. Remember, too, even with some intimation of a possible definition, that conscience, if active and significant, must not be confused with mere conventional morality or the habits of mind or heart which, with what- ever lapses, tend to maintain such morality. Unfortunately for the success of my search after a newspaper conscience, or after a reveal- ing or creating definition, the times are far from [108] The Newspaper Conscience auspicious. Newspaperdom, like every other department of life, has been greatly unsettled. If the war left anything of character and respon- sibility to the newspaper or to anything else, the recent campaign has taken that. Said a public speaker in so many words not long ago, voic- ing, I suspect, too accurately the feeling of many the country over: "The idealism first aroused by the war has gone, its disappearance only proving the charge, brought against us by our enemies, of pharisaism. Apparently nothing is now left of our spiritual awakening but the ouija board." This was extravagant, of course, a general ouija board mentality, too well \ reflected in our newspapers, in their " stories " or in many of their editorials, will have to be ' reckoned with before I have finished, and has \ indeed been discussed at some length in the^-i essays preceding this. For the moment, in evidence of present conditions simply put to yourselves this question : Today, when news- paper circulations are enormous, when the newspaper-reading habit, that pleasantly rustling, often coffee-or-tobacco redolent, [109] Two Essays of Progress breakfast-table or comfortable-chair, or Sun- day-morning habit, is almost universal, every stratum of life as well as almost every mood of human nature having its specially provided columns or pages, the photogravures, the comic supplements, the " movies," the cartoons, the always critical and never ending serial, the reporter's "stories," the murders adjoining the Washington news, the ex parte editorials, and all the rest; today, when business and leisure, political parties and society are all in their sev- eral ways dependent on the press, today, does the press occupy a position of real respect? It is accepted. It is quietly, almost insidiously, influential; but is it trusted! Is it suspected of high purpose, of honesty and independence, of devotion to truth and justice, of anything suggesting moral aggression or adventure I We have to answer, not indeed sweepingly and categorically, since there are exceptions, but on the whole negatively. Certainly it is not a Vic- torian enterprise. Such respected or at least morally and intellectually respectable papers as there are in the whole country can probably [no] The Newspaper Conscience be counted on one hand. Even should one need one 's full quota of digits, manual and pedal, the case would still be disturbing. Some of the papers, too, commonly classed as respectable have been or still are under serious charges, being said to be under one or another com- promising control and let me speak cautiously -not being quite clearly not so. Our papers we must have, so to speak, with our coffee ; but, much as I hate to suggest it, apparently "there's a reason " why we should at least decaffeinate the coffee if not openly take to postum and to The Christian Science Monitor! It is truly a curious situation in which we now are. We must have and we do take what on the whole we can not and do not accept with much if any real satisfaction or any honest confidence. It is a situation that makes one wonder which is greater, our danger or the newspapers 's neglected opportunity. I have to recall, not an equivalent, but an at least analogous, situation of some centuries ago. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the church [in] Two Essays of Progress was a great need ; never in its whole history so great a need, so much in popular demand, so widely accepted; but also at the same time it was a great scandal, never in its whole history so great a scandal, immoral from its head down. The Machiavellism of the time the great Florentine himself lived from 1469 to 1527- was only a sort of temporal or secular echo of the then noisome church. Now our modern press is not in general so bad as to need to be associated very closely with the church of the days of Pope Sixtus IV and the Borgias, Alex- ander VI, and Machiavelli ; but, as then with the church, so now with the press we do find set vis- a-vis great danger, already realized in many offenses and disasters, and great opportunity, not yet realized as it should be. Of the oppor- tunity I must speak in due time. As to the danger and the offense I would certainly not exag- gerate these. I am not one to swallow anything whole. Sinclair's The Brass Check, for exam- ple, which we do not hear much of through the newspapers, I have read and I have to take very moderately; the author himself too well exem- [112] The Newspaper Conscience plifies the newspaper atmosphere, opposing like with like ; * but, large allowances being made, there still remains a case that can not be met by mere denial or by, what is always suspicious, conspicuous neglect. Rose Macaulay's Potter- ism, rich with satire on present life generally, as well as on the press, shows the same case, albeit at a different angle. The great Potter, eventually made "Lord Pinkerton," is head of the "Pinkerton Press. " Eesentment and satire aside, however, the lack of general posi- tive respect respect touched with enthusiasm - for the press can not be smoke without some fire. Fortunately, when a needed thing needs reform, reform is certain, however slowly it may sometimes come ; when a needed thing, like the church, like the press, shows defects, its very importance saves it; its faults, too, are * See review of The Brass Check from The New Statesman (London, October 23, 1920), reprinted in The Living Age (Boston, November 4, 1920). Says the reviewer, after reciting Sinclair's charges of a black-list for all opponents of Big Business, of an incurable habit of perverting words and actions of speakers and public men, of domina- tion by the great financial and industrial interests: "Certainly it is true that in no other country has the press developed so satanic an ingenuity of perversion, so extraordinary a facility in presenting a man as a fool or an undesirable [sometimes an offensive autocrat?], in making him say or imply what never entered his mind." Two contributory reasons are mentioned: The American view that stenography is a drawback to good reporting, and the assumption that a straight report of a meeting or interview is not news, not a story, in the American sense. Two Essays of Progress even likely to prove possible virtues ; also there will be actual exceptions, so to speak, to lead the way; but just now, however one-sidedly, our attention is on the press's defects.* I have no intention of making out the whole case of the public against the newspaper. I shall mention, only for the purpose of the pres- ent discussion, a few of the counts, of my half- truths, which, however fractional, need to be faced. Thus there is, for the first, the aj.ver^ tising. I might say the morally uncensored, un- "expuTgated advertising; but not there lies the point I would stress, although there lies a real point. I have in mind the not uncommon virtual control of the advertising or the advertisers over the news and editorial departments. Even our college paper, The Michigan Daily, it is rumored, not very long ago had some difficulty with its advertisers because of its interest in a patriotic wear-your-old-clothes campaign among the students! Other papers, not much farther off, could possibly confess that some- times the reporter or the editor did know what * For a very recent criticism of the newspaper, that is neither ill- tempered nor otherwise immoderate, see an article: Journalism, Ethics and Common Sense, by Victor S. Yarros, in the International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XXXli, No. 4, pp. 410-19. t4] The Newspaper Conscience the advertiser wanted. I happen to know in the case of a prominent, widely known eastern daily, of definite protests and threats from im- portant business interests against reports and editorials about certain labor agitations. But elaboration of the case on this score is needless, and what I have chiefly in mind is a virtual rather than an open and conscious control by the advertising. The fact that the papers seek large circulations to tempt the advertisers and that the advertisers naturally expect their inter- ests to be conserved is a commonplace of mod- ern journalism, easily read between the pages of any typical daily paper. I turn to a second count. Not only do the advertisers check the news or at critical points influence the policy, so prostituting the public press to private or at least to conservative and stand-pat commercial purposes, but also for obvious reasons the peculiar mentality of adver- tising with its lure and its stimulation spreads inevitably to the news and even to the editorial pages. A paper can not be a great advertising medium on some pages and avoid, for something mentally better, a circulation-increasing Two Essays of Progress pruriency and sensationalism on other pages. In the fullness of its time a paper in all its sections tends to become mentally and morally homoge- neous. Its reporters, superior to stenography and accuracy in general, will not report facts but make "stories." Its editors will write briefs, not critical editorials. There is, thirdly, the peculiar conservatism of the press. This undoubtedly attaches also to the commercial and financial interests. Busi- ness can not brook change. Let the issue between progress and standingpat be clearly drawn and the odds, I think, are strong that the press will follow the latter. Changes doubtless must come to a certain degree, within certain bounds, and within these bounds differences may be openly and safely expressed; but the wheels of indus- try and business and of the established order generally must not be stopped. The newspaper, then, in its lines and between them will be essenj tially conservative. Progress can come only through the people, through the independent crowd, or through a leader, ideally, of course, through both, and a conservative press may blind the people with organized propaganda, [ii6J The Newspaper Conscience the now accepted name for social and political advertising or salesmanship, and may obstruct or destroy leadership. That latterly we have been living, thanks to the tremendous circula- tions of our newspapers, in an atmosphere of prurient advertising and pointed propaganda, we all know very well. But the conservatism of the general press, says somebody, is a most fortunate thing. I agree that a certain conservatism is most fortunate. I would not for a moment prefer and substitute the so-called "radical press. " The trouble with the press's conservatism is that so often it is falsely motivated and that, as motivated, it involves the press in a sort of double living. Conserva- tive for its own reasons as to the wheels of industry, conservative in not ever being politi- cally or industrially seriously radical or revo- lutionary, it quite spoils whatever virtue there may be in this by exploiting the lower and violent sides of human nature, by commercial- izing in its own news-mongering way murder, sex, crime misfortune. Its "human stories " Two Essays of Progress are seldom any credit or for that matter any fair evidence of human nature. Let it under- take to idealize human nature and it is more extravagant and melodramatic than accurate. Simply, the newspaper's conservatism and its peculiar venal sensationalism go together and in the latter lies such an eventual undoing of the former as might give pause even to the reddest of the reds. Here, too, I may mention the familiar mis- representing when not actually lying headline. Writing headlines is surely a fine art, the specific art of making facts in general exciting and of making specially interesting facts serve some partisan purpose. In the latter respect many a paper has played double, reporting on the whole accurately in the text but duly color- ing the headlines. Thus, during the late cam- paign a certain speaker, known to be for the League of Nations, said that, the League not supported and so failing, the next war would be soon and would be more terrible than the recent Great War. For this news in a certain anti-League paper the heading was in sub- stance as follows : Well-known Pro-League Ora- [118] The Newspaper Conscience tor Predicts Another Great War Soon! To anything but most casual reading the para- graphs below quite belied the heading. So, however, at least in the headlines, was an argu- ment for the League turned into one against it, and the partisan readers could be trusted not to read with any care, if at all, below the head- lines. Another illustration : Not long ago I sent a communication to a paper of different political views from my own. The letter was an experi- ment. It called attention to a certain public man's opportunism and inconsistencies, quoting his speeches at different times. I wondered if the paper would publish the letter and face the exposure. It did publish the letter, but with saving headlines, and I have to add, with edi- torial omissions of essential sentences, so that a shifting and truth-careless politician was made to seem a patriot ! I was, of course, help- less. The paper had a right, at least a legal right, so long as newspapers are not common carriers or public servants, not to publish at all, but it had no right either to its headlines or to the editorial changes. The two cases now given only tell a very familiar story. The head- Two Essays of Progress line is a great weapon and unbiased important news is the exception, not the rule. In headlines propaganda has its storm troops. Besides the commercialism of the press, the mongering mentality, and the general con- servatism, involving duplicity and, when also aggressively partisan, a certain habit of "fabri- cation," there is to be considered, fourthly, among my half-truths, the defense, the only specious defense, often given for publicity, especially in instances where privacy has been invaded. The public, the claim is, has a right to know; publicity is society's great safeguard; and, under this claim, the newspaper presumes upon its right to pry. But the claim, I say, although the public often meets the prier half- way, is specious. It is specious on two counts : (1) The press too often publishes what it does publish inaccurately, shoddily, sensationally, impertinently. (2) It often suppresses what the public has a right to know. It is not, for exam- ple, over-anxious, having made mistakes of mis- representation or of injustice, to give the same publicity, if any publicity, to corrections. But, still more seriously, often it will not advocate [120] The Newspaper Conscience reforms of real public need, such as those for purer milk or for purer i 'movies, "if as some- time happens dairy companies or theaters call for the soft pedal. Such selective sensa- tionalism, I submit, is not an honest and safe- guarding publicity. Related to this defense of publicity, or implied in it, is the notion that a newspaper must give the public what it wants. This also has a specious value, unless the newspaper is to be only the publiq's creature. But under it what do the papers do? They, proceed to catch the public more or less off its guard, either at its partisan blindness, irresponsibility, and selfish interest or at its general state of leisure and relaxation when control is lacking and mind and morals alike are lax. If under these cir- cumstances the public were getting what it really wanted, the newspaper would really be respected for its mentality and its morality, as today it certainly is not or is only exceptionally. The press, of course, is a great power. It is so recognized. The quick and effective publicity that it provides is a very great force and is so appreciated. But, again, there is no genuine, [121] Two Essays of Progress warm respect. The public somehow is not get- ting what it really wants. Exciting exposure is not appropriate and useful candor. What men will take in conditions of relaxation is not what they most want. Nor am I now speaking only for doctrinaires, idealists, college professors, highbrows generally. Were it not altogether too likely that many a reporter would avidly seize upon the remark as almost, if not quite, one of the chief messages of my present dis- cussion and give it special emphasis, a headline or bold-faced caption, I would go on and say that intellectual and cultural and moral pro- fessors have sometimes affected lowbrow, relax- ing, and even somewhat vulgar movies or vaude- villes and read first, not last, the corresponding features of the newspapers; but, for safety, I refrain, really remarking only that the general public, however lowbrow and uncultured, would not seek what on casual opportunity, the day's work done, it would read and be diverted by. A fifth difficulty with the newspaper, discour- aging to anyone looking for a newspaper conscience, is its control by the crowd mind. Con- science, somehow, whatever else any definition [122] The Newspaper Conscience of it may require, needs a responsible, indi- vidual person. Newspapers, however, as a rule are not now edited by individuals in any condi- tion of independence and personal responsibil- ity. In varying ways and degrees the positions of editors are like that of a young friend of mine in the recent campaign, ardently thinking on one side and successfully editing his paper on the other. Add to this factor in the work of newspaper editing today the general conserva- tism, political or commercial, and the supple- mental, aggressive partisanship, and what I mean by the control of the crowd mind must be clear. Editor or reporter in his mental states and movements is made very largely the crea- ture of ideas, judgements, purposes, that are more atmospheric than personally his own, the suggestions of the organization in which he finds himself rather than the results of his own candid experience and independent thinking. Do but reflect, too, on the mass of syndicated matter, and on the large supply of prepared and generously circulated propaganda coming from all well-ordered and organized depart- ments of life that have learned to take care of [123] Two Essays of Progress the publicity end. The wonder is if the modern editor has to do anything but think administra- tively, that is, of, for, and by others. For my meaning it is not necessary that all editors be in the extreme plight of my young friend already mentioned. It suffices that all the condi- tions are calculated to develop for newspapers automatic thinking instead of independent thinking. Moreover, now to recall an earlier allusion, if partisanship ever come, as in recent years, to run high, if reactionary forces and an alarmed conservatism become very assertive, the mentality of the press, as of the reading public, will even fall to the level of the ouija board and things like it. I mean that a mental automatism with its release of the morbid and sensational subconscious and its reactions to the atmospheric, its proneness to unreason and strong passions, and above all to suspecting or even, as the phrase goes, to actually "seeing things, " will become general. The press of recent times, I submit, has " communicated " a great deal to a too ready public. "Automatic writing" has not remained the special privilege of a few select spirits. The Newspaper Conscience But, as the last count, there is what is possibly only a corollary of much that has already been said. I mean the newspaper 's bias for the nor- mal and aversion to the individual. Already I have had occasion to say that progress can come only through the people and a leader, and that a naturally conservative press, catching the people off guard, by an organized propa- ganda may blind the people and obstruct real leadership. The press's natural reaction to individuality is hostility. Not even conceding individuality to its own staff, why should it countenance this in others 1 Why not even resent it in others f Certain it is that the press has shown a special disposition even to persecute individu- ality, exploiting it sensationally, humorously, derisively, and using it as a foil for exalting the normal and conventional and common- place. I wonder if here is not one of the worst dangers of the newspaper today. The success- ful, socialized individual, great for his accumu- lation, conventionally large and proportionally prominent, gets attention and acclaim ; but indi- viduality by quality and originality, by courage and adventure, individuality of the sort that, Two Essays of Progress being vital rather than just formally prominent, is quick with possible leadership, commonly gets neglect or, if attention, then ridiculous exposure. Of course democracy has its eccentrics, its cranks, and fools, as kings and their courts used to, and to give the fools and their follies pub- licity is entertaining and often may be useful; but also democracy can ill afford to take very large chances of treating its real individuals as fools or worse than fools, even as real male- factors, to be exposed to the laughter and abuse of the common, paying crowd. The paying crowd, I suppose, is democracy's court. All of which seems to be suggesting that the press is, or is taking large chances of being, falsely democratic, exalting the accumulating individual, the merely big exponent of what all, loyal to the prevailing order, generally are, but disparaging when not actually persecuting the individual of courage and actual leadership who may, of course, literally or figuratively, in the obvious, narrow sense or more generally, depress the market. The sure end of such false democracy is tyranny. A democracy that does not foster real leadership and the aristocracy [126] The Newspaper Conscience of it is only riding to its own undoing. It is rather a strange condition of affairs that the press today should cry so loud, in the interest of democracy, for its own freedom. Is it really willing to be free? Is it quite ready to serve a real instead of a formal and only apparent democracy! In summary, the case of the people against the press, as I have tried to work it out, now has these chief counts : commercialism, the men- tality of salesmanship, a virtual and falsely motivated conservatism, a biased and selective publicity, control by the crowd mind with strong tendencies toward ' ' automatism " and its occult 1 ' communications, ' V and a too ready contempt for active individuality and real or possible leadership. That these six counts cross each other more or less does not matter. They may all reduce to one, a conservative commercialism. Certainly I have no reverence for the number six. But, six or one, they do not make clear the existence of a newspaper conscience. On the contrary, as here presented, they must have suggested the non-existence. Still, we have not yet got our definition. [127] Two Essays of Progress With a prudence, born fortunately of most honest conviction, I have called this discourse a " study in half -truths. " Studies in whole truths belong in the field of mathematics or pure science. Vital human affairs can not be dis- cussed in any but half-truths. Perhaps you have not realized this before; many do fail to realize it; but in any discussion of intimately human affairs one has no choice but to write or talk pro or con and to be only partially right on either side. Nothing human can be wholly bad or wholly good. Money, law, self, sex, adventure are all examples of this. Always in each one are closely met, are set vis-a-vis, the good and the bad. Each, however dangerous or vicious, has actively possible worth. In sex are met the brothel and the home ; in adventure and its uncertainties, the gambler and the martyr. The newspaper, intimately a human affair, in its various characters is no exception to the rule. Those six counts against it, as now to be admitted, are only so many half-truths; only so many charges, in other words, that might be the counts of the defense. Do I say " might be"? I am ready to predict that the [128] The Newspaper Conscience counsel for the press will reply to me, if find- ing reply necessary, by urging ideal possibilities in every fault I have thought to expose. The press, we shall be reminded, ought to be con- servative. It ought to be, if not commercial, at least practical, pragmatic. It ought to pub- lish and even boldly expose life and human nature. Is not publicity, like confession, good for real life ? The press, again, ought to reflect, even at some risk of a certain automatism, the general mind, not every editor's or reporter's or any chance individual's ideas. In the press, then, as in those other affairs of human life, are met at least potentially unideal and ideal, corrupt or corrupting and beneficent expres- sions of the things of which we have found the newspaper to be made. Evidently, as an interesting conclusion, the various dangers and faults of modern journal- ism are not things to be dealt with just surgi- cally. They themselves offer actual resources or opportunities to be realized. They are forces that should not be allowed. to have their way but should rather be made mediate and service- able to the life of society, serving what an active [129] Two Essays of Progress and progressing social life, not what a relaxed or inert life, wants. In certain industries and businesses, for example, a narrow commercial spirit has become enlightened and has given place to a more profitable but also philanthropic pragmatism, and the time must come when the generally narrow, conservative commercialism of the newspaper will realize that in news, in editorials, or in advertising, a sober honesty in the long run makes more money, insures more social and political stability, and mediates fuller life. Partisanship, again, will find that fair play and the sportsmanship of it are the most successful politics, giving up, for being both mean and unwise, what has been called political sabotage. Publicity will become, not morbidly sensational and mongering, not biased and dis- honest, but objective, sane, balanced, purposed to society's good, not to society's mere excite- ment and harm, not to idle entertainment of the curious or itching, nor yet to mere exposure or ridicule or abuse of anybody, above all not to the exploitation of crime and violence gener- ally for the sake of circulation. Some legisla- tion, possibly, would help to bring such desirable [130] The Newspaper Conscience changes, but, while legislation, say by declaring the newspaper a common carrier or a public utility or some combination of these, might hasten such changes, it could not really inaugu- rate them. Any effective legislation would only be a sign that the press itself was beginning to find itself, to come more ideally than hereto- fore into its own. The press has been something of a prodigal. It has run wild mentally and morally. Like so much in our American life, it has grown very rapidly to enormous proportions and amazing power and it is still uncontrolled by any clear appreciation of itself. It has yet fully to realize its true place and work and its faults and dan- gers are the result. It is still more a creature of the times than an informed purpose. So to speak, its mind and its heart have not kept pace with its body. Nevertheless its condition can not last. I am of opinion that important changes are not far off. Eef orm came, it may be remem- bered, to the sixteenth-century church that was at once so bad and so necessary. Luther, I like to remember, was a contemporary of Machiavelli. Two Essays of Progress A newspaper conscience? I had almost for- gotten my quarry. I submit that if forgetting I had forestalled them the newspaper men should rise jealously to defend the press against my charges, reminding me that at most I was telling only half-truths, they would be giving conclusive evidence of an actual newspaper conscience. I should feel that I could trust the press in their hands. In justifying it they would have to idealize it. They would have to discover with some clearness possible worth and service even in the present faults; admitting my charges, however only semitrue, but translating the very offenses into possible and desirable vir- tues. Moreover, probably every newspaper in the country can show many, oft repeated good works, advocacy of important reforms, gener- ous assistance in "drives," charities, public benefits of all sorts; and these and other "good works," although possibly more "in the day's work" than vigorously, progressively conscien- tious, do afford a basis for confidence in the press and its future. Conscience I should define \ as intelligence about self and the life in which j one finds one 's self with an accompanying sense 1 [132] The Newspaper Conscience of obligation to realize recognized desirable pos- sibilities. With some papers, their number probably growing steadily, already actively and conscientiously awake, with press clubs and their many conferences, with the higher educa- tion of journalists, making journalism one of the new learned professions, I think we need have little fear for a vigorous newspaper con- science becoming general instead of exceptional. Conscientious journalism can be only en- lightened journalism touched with obligation and determination and so turning very serious faults into real virtues. IV. AGES OF LEISURE IN THESE days when economists and edu- cators and the humanly and socially inter- ested generally in their several and different ways are putting emphasis on technical skill, on professional and occupational efficiency, when work and its productivity are being put forward as the important problems of the hour, when the country is restless over every sign of un- employment and the common wish seems to be to see every wheel turning and everybody busy, in these days it is well to reflect that at least of equal importance with the great problem of work there is, pressing for a reckoning and obtrusively obvious to those who will open their eyes or do not insist on closing them, the prob- lem of leisure. True, some are already feeling keenly the importance of this problem, among them the two authors* of the recent articles in * Arthur C. Pound and Ernest Lloyd. The articles appeared under Mr. Pound's name, but Mr. Pound has explained the double author- ship in The Atlantic for December, 1921. He has also published the articles in a book. The Iron Man of Industry: Boston, 1922. Mr. Lloyd will soon publish a book : The Wages System. [134] Ages of Leisure The Atlantic Monthly on the Iron Man; but the general public, including many who read and think, is still in need of being aroused. Its eyes may be opening; but, in spite of the great lessons of the war, it can hardly be said to be really awake and alert. Is real efficiency to be judged only by visible or ponderable results? Is life only instrumentation and manufacture! Is education only an affair of methods and tests and professional self-consciousness? Is Eco- nomics, theoretical or practical, only for main- tenance of a status quo and large expansion or accumulation in kind? Above all, if the signs or promises of new leisure and more leisure are all that they appear, is nothing to be done? Is the opportunity to be lost? Unfortunately leisure is not always, perhaps not commonly, thought of in positive terms. Far too often it is regarded only as cessation from work. Thus it is not just " impractical' ' but also idle and futile; it "butters no bread" and even affords no spiritual pabulum; it means only rest, careless diversion, often slum- ber. As to making any direct and positive L'35] Two Essays of Progress contribution to life and growth it is too often not valued in this way. Yet leisure, insignificant though it may seem to many except as an opportunity for rest and recuperation in "practical" living, in the eon- ventional life that would simply maintain or at most, if seeking change, would only expand its normal self, is in actual fact of most vital importance. It is quite indispensable to a life that has any quality of adventure and requires imagination, invention and real growth. What, do you ask, may be its part in a life of this sort ? Leisure 's contribution to an adventurous and growing life the only life worth while can probably be seen best by consideration of what, as I would submit, are the three great ages of leisure in human evolution. A pity it is to use so cumbersome a phrase of so light a theme. Leisure, however, carries no light bur- den and in evidence I would now ask attention to each of the three ages, or eras, in order. Moreover, while leisure is always a factor of value, actual or possible, for the individual and while its value to the individual can not be separated from its value racially and histori- [136] Ages of Leisure cally, my present interest is the broader one; in ages or eras, not hours or days, of leisure; and, because each age of leisure will be found to have its own peculiar instrumentation, its special machinery of production and mainten- ance, my interest is also in life 's different forms of instrumentation. To understand leisure it is always necessary to know what enables or supports it. Evolutionists from Anaximander of the sixth century before Christ to John Fiske twenty-five centuries later have dwelt now and again and with more or less knowledge and appreciation on the importance of a prolonged infancy in the human race. To his long infancy and the leis- ure of it man has been said to owe his superior- ity to the other animals. This statement of course hardly affords a complete explanation of man's position; but, however incomplete and made from whatever confusing slant, it is weighty with truth. Also, although referring primarily only to the human infant's long per- iod of suckling and physical dependence, it may be so extended as to apply to the whole of youth, [137] Two Essays of Progress certainly to the period before sexual maturity and even to the still longer period before the close of what is ordinarily considered prepara- tion and education for real life. Racially and individually the value of this prolonged time of mental and physical leisure, with its oppor- tunity for the play not always as playful as it appears of childhood and youth, for strength- ening the sentiments and associations of the home, for the preparatory education, whether of the more formal and deliberate sort or of the sort, not less important, that is informal and natural, would be very hard to overstate. In time of such leisure man has not merely rested from his labors ; also he has acquired experience and vision, ideas and ideals. In the youth of particular individuals obviously there is hardly any labor to rest from, but racially youth does afford opportunity for recuperation and always, mark now of its more positive value, it brings the experience that prompts enterprise and in- vention. The leisure of man 's youth, made pos- sible of course by the family as an institution, by the school and by domestic and social cus- toms and laws of all sorts, is the great source Ages of Leisure of his idealism, inviting growth, inspiring change in kind or quality. All of which, now that I have written it down, seems so simple that it can hardly have needed to be said. In the contributions of leisured youth to life and growth we merely have one of those truths that all can recognize and that many have liked to dwell upon. In fact sometimes we discourse together about the weather and could not really get along without the weather in our conversation. Sometimes, our mood more serious, we sound deeper com- monplaces of life and consider, as here and now, the leisure and idealism of youth and, although too often our thought may be of the carelessness of youth, we are agreed that without youth and its leisure > life would have little interest. Are we ourselves mature and old! We would be- come young again. Of youth, too, of prolonged infancy, as of other ages, it is well to remember that, whatever its value in the past, when man first began to outstrip other animals, it consti- tutes now a heritage enjoyed in important measure and more or less productively em- ployed by every human being that is born. Two Essays of Progress But, pleasant as it always is to discourse about the leisure of youth and its value for human evolution, in what I have set out to say in this essay my primary interest is not in youth, past or present, as an age of leisure. Two other ages of leisure, also when understood and appreciated positive in their value, are interest- ing me much more. Both of these will be found to have many of the marks of youth, freshness, adventure, vision; but the specific leisure of human infancy and youth has been mentioned here and first discussed only for definition or illustration of leisure itself as something more than cessation from work. So I turn to a second age of leisure, which although quite different in the underlying con- ditions will show the same general character or function in history. Thus man has owed much to the leisure that has come to him through slavery in one or another of its forms. Ancient civilizations in particular, perhaps most not- ably that of the Greeks, who proved themselves in remarkable degree equal to their opportunity, seem to have owed their culture, their art and science and philosophy, to their slaves. Slaves [140] Ages of Leisure belonged to the Greek family almost if not quite as naturally as parents and children. Even Aristotle found it difficult to think of the unity of the family without inclusion of the slaves. For that matter some householders or at least some house-wives still extant might be sus- pected of being orthodox Aristotelians in this respect. Apart from domestic life, too, depen- dence for leisure and its opportunities on a servile class is by no means a matter merely of antiquity. To speak broadly, in home life and in public economy, in time of peace and in time of war, from ancient times even down to the present day there has been some dependence on human beings in some condition of service, on slaves or on a well-defined and virtually in- stitutional serving class or, war coming, on an army. Such service has brought important leisure and the leisure, while not the direct source or cause of culture, has provided the opportunity, both making a public for it and providing many of its active and leading exponents. Well do I remember the shock I had when hearing years ago from one of my teachers Two Essays of Progress that slavery, which I had been taught to hate with a hate still colored by stories and issues of the Civil War, had made pos- sible the Greek free citizenship and so, as the Greeks seized the opportunity, the bril- liant Greek civic life and the Greek cul- ture long regarded and even now regarded among the greatest gifts of history to civiliza- tion. How could such flowers have sprung from and been in any sense dependent upon so offen- sive a thing as human slavery! At the same time, if my memory be not at fault, I learned that the Greek word for scholarship was in its origin associated with or even identical with a word meaning leisure. Our English word, as a matter of fact, comes from the Greek