THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OHHERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIECT fcA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA ( f THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY BY LYMAN ABBOTT HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY <3tbe Jtttttrjrtbe pre^ Cambridge 1910 COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY LYMAN ABBOTT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November iqzo CONTENTS I. THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 1 II. THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY ... 14 III. THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY ... 28 IV. THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY . . 44 V. THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION .... 69 VI. THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL . . 71 VII. PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY ... 93 VIII. POLITICAL SOCIALISM ..... 109 IX. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY ..... 132 X. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT . 156 XI. WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 177 XII. THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 198 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY EVERY age is a transition age. But in some eras the transition is more rapid and more noticeable than in others. As sometimes in a year the girl develops into womanhood, as sometimes in a week the skeleton plant bursts into leafage and perhaps into bloom, so a nation, which has been growing silently, suddenly puts forth the evi- dence of its growth, and both surprises and per- plexes itself by the transformation. Such is the phenomenon now taking place in America. It is as though a new-created world were springing up, and we were taking part in the process of crea- tion. Nothing is as it has been. Science, litera- ture, education, art, politics, religion, all are being new-born. There is a new astronomy, a new biology, a new chemistry ; there are new methods of architecture, lighting, locomotion, manufacturing; new types of fiction, drama, poetry, philosophy; new methods of teaching and an immense increase in the number of sub- 2 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY jects taught ; a new alignment of political parties and new policies as yet not even named save as they bear the names of some representative ex- pounder, as Cleveland or Bryan Democracy, or Koosevelt or Taft Republicanism ; and a new theology which has not only shortened and sim- plified all creeds but has sometimes threatened to destroy them altogether. These changes are not incidental; they are radical. Schumann, in " Warum ? " musically in- terprets the questioning spirit of the age which puts an interrogation point after every affirma- tion of the past, however long it may have been accepted. In industry the right of laborers to organize is denied by capitalists, and the right of capitalists to organize is denied by laborers. On the one hand property is so concentrated in a few hands for administration purposes as to fill thoughtful men with a not wholly unreasonable dread of what plutocracy may grow to, and on the other hand a class of Socialists appear to deny all right, if not of private property, at least of private property industrially employed. In politics there are both a New Jefferson ianism and a New Federalism. Neither the Democracy of Cleveland nor that of Bryan is a copy of Thomas Jefferson's Democracy ; neither the Fed- eralism of Roosevelt nor that of Cannon and Al- THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 3 drich is a copy of the Federalism of Alexander Hamilton. No Church is immune from the New Theology, not even the Roman Catholic Church, as the Pope himself by his syllabus on Modernism has attested. And the New Theology questions the basis of authority, and questions it so effect- ually that neither the Bible nor the Church speaks to even the churchman with the authority with which they spoke to the churchmen of a century ago. What does all this mean ? To what does it all tend ? What will it do with us ? Per- haps more important is the question, What can we do with it? Two democracies were born in America about a century and a half apart : one in the early half of the seventeenth century, and the other in the latter half of the eighteenth century; one of Hebrew, the other of Latin, ancestry. They mar- ried. The democracy of this twentieth century is their child. It inherits characteristics from both its parents. They are not only diverse; they are inconsistent. The child is perplexed by its contradictory inheritance. He does not under- stand himself. If we are to understand him, we must understand his ancestors. Ten or twelve centuries before Christ there grew up in the Near East a new form of social organization which we may call the Hebrew Com- 4 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY monwealth. All the neighboring governments were absolute despotisms all power being con- centrated in the hands of a single autocrat. In the Hebrew Commonwealth government was for the first time organized in three departments a legislative, an executive, and a judicial. In all the neighboring governments the power of the autocrat was unlimited. In the Hebrew Common- wealth the king was a constitutional monarch whose powers were somewhat carefully limited. In the Hebrew Commonwealth no hereditary caste or class was permitted ; there was the State Church, but the priesthood were forbidden to become land- owners, and were made dependent for their sup- port on the voluntary offerings of the people ; methods of worship were carefully defined, but attendance on worship was not compulsory; pri- vate ownership in land was allowed, but only for a limited tenure ; labor was honorable and idle- ness a disgrace ; slavery, though not prohibited, was hedged about with such conditions that in the course of a few centuries it disappeared; woman's position, if not absolutely equal to that of man, was one of unexampled honor in that age; provision was made for the education of all the children by home instruction, aided by itinerant school-teachers, out of which later grew the first popular school system in the then known world. THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 5 And this whole system was founded on a religion which had in its creed but two articles : that God is a righteous Father who has made man in his own image, between whom and man, therefore, the comradeship of father and son is possible ; that he requires of his children righteousness and requires nothing else, and therefore the way to his favor is not by sacrifices and offerings but by doing justly, loving mercy, and walking reverently in fellowship with him. How far this ideal was ever actually realized in the history of Israel is doubted by scholars. It is certainly incorporated in their sacred books. With Christianity these sacred books, translated into the Latin tongue, bound together, and bearing the title of " The Books " (now generally, by a trans- literation of the Greek, "The Bible"), passed over into the nominally converted Roman Empire. Alfred the Great, the first great king and leader of the English people, translated portions of these books into the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and incor- porated certain of their fundamental ideals into the English Constitution. Gradually the political and religious principles of these books made their way, against much opposition and more indiffer- ence, into the life of the English people. Inspired by them, Simon de Montfort led the movement which brought representatives of the common 6 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY people into the National Council, and created out of it a House of Commons. Imitating the ex- ample of the itinerant Levites, the "preaching friars" carried the simple precepts of these books to the homes and imbedded them in the hearts of the people. These principles made of Wyclif a social reformer before socialism, a democrat be- fore democracy, and a Protestant before Protest- antism. Tyndale carried on the work which Wyclif began, and created a public opinion which made possible Henry VIII's separation of the English Church from Italian control. At length, in the beginning of the seventeenth cen- tury, the long campaign between the autocratic principles which the English people had inherited from the Rome of the Caesars, culminating in the despotism of Charles I, and the democratic prin- ciples which they had inherited from the Hebrew Commonwealth culminating in the principles of the Puritans, issued in the overthrow of the Stuart oligarchy, and incidentally in the immigration to New England of Puritan and Pilgrim. These brought with them the purpose to found on these shores a new republic patterned after the Hebrew theocracy, embodying its social and religious prin- ciples, and inspired by its spirit. The earliest democracy in America was a Puritan child with a Hebrew ancestry. THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 7 The other democracy had a very different line- age, and inherited from its ancestry different prin- ciples and a different spirit. Imperial Rome was an absolute despotism, with labor enslaved, popular education unknown, marriage a commercial partnership, religion wholly dissociated from morality a ceremo- nialism framed to appease the wrath of angry gods or win the favor of corruptible gods. The Bourbon dynasties of Italy and Spain and France had inherited this imperialism, modified and ame- liorated by a Roman Christianity. But Roman Christianity had done nothing to ameliorate the despotism of the government in France, nor much to promote the education of the people ; though under its influence slavery had given place to feudalism as an industrial system, and marriage had become, in the estimate of Christian believers, an indissoluble sacrament. But in the latter half of the eighteenth century the influence of the Christian Church with the common people in France was greatly weakened, especially in the great cities. The Renaissance had brought with it a revival of paganism; persecution had de- stroyed the adherents of the reformed religion ; the mocking laughter of Voltaire had done more to shake the faith of the people in the Church of Rome than all the arguments of Calvin ; the vices 8 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY of the higher clergy and their identification with the oppressive oligarchy had done more than Vol- taire. The Church retained the appearance but not the reality of power when it lost its hold on the conscience of France. It could neither inspire the ruling classes with a spirit of reform nor re- strain the passions of the mob when hunger drove them to desperation. The aristocracy was over- thrown, but the people had no other conception of government than government by force, and no other conception of liberty than the substitution of an unchecked rule by many for an unchecked rule by the few. " As nature," says Rousseau, "gives to every man absolute power over the mem- bers of his body, the social pact gives the social body absolute power over all its members." l The despotism of an unrestrained mob proved to be as despotic as that of an unrestrained oligarchy, and France soon sought relief from the Reign of Terror in a new imperialism. Meanwhile the theories of the French political reformers had crossed the Channel into England, where Jacobinism proved a temporary and un- popular exotic. They simultaneously crossed the sea to America, where, mingled with and modi- 1 Quoted by H. A. Taine in his French Revolution, vol. iii, p. 54. Taine gives a graphic picture of the length to which this despot- ism of the majority was carried under Jacobin rule. THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 9 fied by the Anglo-Saxon sturdy love of individ- ual independence, they gave birth to a new type of democracy. The fundamental theory of Rous- seau, that government is founded on a social com- pact and that the authority of government is derived from and dependent on the will of the people assenting to it, found expression in the statement of the Declaration of Independence that just government rests on the consent of the governed. But the Anglo-Saxon love of indepen- dence also found expression in the statement that man possesses certain inalienable rights, as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which no pact by him or on his behalf can take from him. To protect the individual in these in- alienable rights should be the end, so said the advocates of the new democracy, and the sole end, of government. " The Constitution of Ala- bama," says Mr. Lecky, "expresses admirably the best spirit of American statesmanship when it states that ' the sole and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the en- joyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression.' ' Thus the new American democracy differed from the original Jacobin democracy of France 1 W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, vol. i, p. 118. 10 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY as the English monarchy had differed from the French monarchy. In France the democracy pos- sessed absolute power; in America that power was limited by definite checks. Absolute mon- archy was succeeded by absolute democracy in France ; the constitutional monarchy of the English was followed by a constitutional demo- cracy in America. At the close of the eighteenth and the begin- ning of the nineteenth century this naturalized and modified French democracy had in America hosts of enthusiastic and devoted disciples. How many, how influential, and how enthusiastic they were is indicated by the fact that in Yale College there were two Thomas Paine societies, and many of the students substituted for their Christian names the names of some chosen and idealized French encyclopedists. The philosophy of this Latin or French democracy as modified by its migration to America may be summarized for my purpose in a paragraph, as I have endeavored to summarize that of the Hebrew or Puritan de- mocracy. The state of nature is the ideal state ; let us get back to it. In a state of nature every man is free to live his own life, direct his own energies, carve out his own destiny. Every impediment upon this freedom is an injury to humanity. All THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 11 government is such an impediment. A little government is absolutely necessary to protect the weak from the strong, but government is a nec- essary evil, and the less we have of it the better. Humanity has simply consented to it in order to protect itself. It should constrain only to free from constraint. On this consent of the governed government is founded. This is the basis of all authority. The ultimate appeal is to the people ; for the voice of the people is the voice of God that is, if there is a God. Whether there be one or not, it is not material to inquire ; for the voice of the people is final. A just government is a government carried on in accordance with the will of the majority; an unjust government is one carried on not in accordance with that will Thus at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury there were two democracies in America: one having its birthplace and home in New Eng- land, though gradually extending its influence beyond the boundaries of New England; the other having its birthplace and home in Vir- ginia, and much more rapidly extending its in- fluence beyond the boundaries of Virginia. One was founded on faith in God, the other was un- theistic if not atheistic. To one, the basis of all authority is the will of God ; to the other, the 12 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY will of the majority. To one, law is the will of God, the expression of that will is in the Ten Commandments, and human laws are just only when they are in harmony with that will ; to the other, law is the expression of the will of the ma- jority, and any government is just which is founded on and is the expression of that will, and no other government is or can be just. One desired to limit the suffrage to those who were obedient to the will of God, though they found it difficult to provide a satisfactory test; the other believed in universal and unqualified suf- frage. One honored labor whether it was man- ual or intellectual, and condemned idleness whether of poverty or wealth. The other soon learned to engraft upon its free States a system of slavery not materially different from that of pagan Rome. One borrowed from Hebraism the synagogue school, transformed it into a public school supported by the State ; the other left education to be carried on by the family as a private enterprise, aided by the private school, by the Church, and by occasional charity. One was social, the other individual. One tended toward cooperation, combination, organization; the other toward competition. One looked forward toward realizing the kingdom of God on the earth, the other sought to return to the state of nature. THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 13 The motto of one was the law of Christ : One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are breth- ren. The motto of the other was the law of the forest: Struggle for existence, survival of the fittest. Out of these two democracies, one the child of French and Roman ancestry, the other the child of Puritan and Hebrew ancestry, the American dem- ocracy of the twentieth century was born. In the child the contradictory characteristics of its ances- tors are struggling, each modifying the other. By the principles furnished by these two democracies the individual and the social the twentieth- century democracy is guided in opposite direc- tions. By the impulses which they furnish it is urged now upon the one path, now upon the other. CHAPTER II THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY IN which of these directions, the fraternal or the individual, has America been tending for the last hundred and thirty years ? In which of these directions should thoughtful Americans endeavor to guide the country? In which direction America has been tending is tolerably clear to all observers, whether they approve or disapprove the tendency. The immediate occasion of the Civil War was the question between the sections, whether slav- ery was a beneficent form of industrial organiza- tion and should be protected throughout the Na- tion, or an unjust and injurious form of industrial organization and should be confined within its then existing limits in the expectation of its ultimate ab- olition. The proximate cause of the Civil War was two contrasted opinions respecting the interpreta- tion of a written Constitution upon two questions on which that Constitution was absolutely silent : Had a State a right to secede? If it attempted to secede, had the Federal Government a right to compel it to remain in the Union ? But underly- ing both questions was the still more f undamen- THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 15 tal issue between the Hebraic or Puritan concep- tion of government and the Latin or French con- ception of government. The doctrine that all government is founded/ on a compact, when applied to the United States^ naturally led to the affirmation that the Nation 1 ! was a confederation of independent and sovereignf States. The doctrine that all government rests' on the consent of the governed, when applied to such a supposed confederation, naturally led to the conclusion that if the consent of any one or more of these sovereign States was withdrawn, the government over them ceased to be a just govern- ment, and the right either of repudiation or of revolution followed. To Calhoun and his politi- cal associates this meant nullification, or the right of a sovereign State in the exercise of its sover- eignty to refuse its assent to any Federal law which it deemed unjust. To Jefferson Davis and his associates it meant the right of a sovereign State to withdraw from the confederacy alto- gether when the acts of the confederation were injurious to its interests. How pervasive this doctrine that government rests on the con- sent of the governed had become in America is evidenced by the fact that Mr. Buchanan, who denied the right of a state to secede, also denied the right of the Federal government to prevent 16 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY secession, and that Horace Greeley, the foremost anti-slavery editor of the North, besought the nation to let the erring sisters depart in peace. The result of the Civil War has been to expel absolutely from the consciousness of the nation, both North and South, the doctrine that just government depends on the consent of the gov- erned. The Union of to-day is not what Horace Greeley feared it would be, that of a triumphant North over a subjugated South. It is a Union ce- mented by mutual respect, affection, and esteem, based on the tacit assumption that government is something more than copartnership, whether of individuals or of States ; that it is a divine or- ganism, deriving its authority, not from the con- sent of the governed, but from the justice with which the governors exercise their authority, and is neither founded on consent nor can be dis- solved by dissent. Thomas Jefferson advocated an occasional revolution, much as the doctors of the old school advocated an occasional blood-letting, as a useful measure of hygiene. "God forbid that we should be twenty years without a rebel- lion. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been but one rebel- lion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each State. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion ? What THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 17 signifies a few lives lost in a century or two ? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." 1 That phase of Jeff ersonian- ism would to-day find no advocate in America in any section of the country. Even the wildest-eyed anarchist, if he ventured to afiirm it, would be listened to, if at all, with scant politeness. i. The doctrine that government rests on the consent of the governed carried with it by nec- essary implication that all the governed must have some share in making the government. Universal suffrage as one of the natural rights of man was a logically necessary element in the Latin theory of law and liberty. " The right to vote for representatives," says Professor Dun- ning, " was held to be an immediate corollary of the principle that every man was by nature free and could be subjected to government only by his consent; for government must be by law, and law must be the will of each individual, expressed either in person or through a representative." 2 The omnipotence of the majority carried with it, in the minds of certain theorists, the infalli- bility of the majority. Strictly speaking, there 1 W. E. Curtis, The True Thomas Jefferson, p. 81. 2 W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu, p. 236. 18 THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY was no real minority and could be none. Says Kousseau : When a law is proposed in an assembly of the people, what is asked of them is not exactly whether they ap- prove of the proposition or whether they reject it, but whether or not it conforms to the general will, which is theirs ; each one in giving his vote gives his opinion upon it, and from the counting of the votes is deduced the declaration of the general will. When, however, the opinion contrary to mine prevails, it shows only that I was mistaken, and what I had supposed to be the general will was not general. If my individual opinion had prevailed, I should have done something other than I had intended, and then I should not have been free. 1 The Puritan doctrine, on the other hand, re- garded suffrage as a prerogative to be earned by a worthy character. "The saints should govern the earth," said the Puritan; and not all men were saints. In the early New England colonies, therefore, suffrage was conditioned on possession of property, possession of intelligence, paying of taxes, and, in some cases, on church membership. It is true that the disciples of neither school were always consistent. Political theories in practical application rarely are consistent. Thomas Jeffer- son advocated a restricted suffrage based on edu- 1 J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, book iv, Chap. 2. THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 19 cational and property qualifications. Henry Ward Beecher, the Puritan son of Puritan ancestors, advocated universal suffrage as a natural right, and would have it given to women, to the newly landed immigrant, and to the just emancipated negro. In this respect, curiously, the doctrine of uni- versal suffrage, as a natural right, has dominated the North, and limited suffrage now dominates the South. I believe that Massachusetts is the only New England state which requires educa- tional qualifications as a condition precedent to the vote. On the other hand, the South, suffer- ing during the Reconstruction period from the intolerable rule of an ignorant majority, led by unscrupulous self-seekers, has, with substantial unanimity, adopted the doctrine that suffrage is not a natural right, but an acquired prerogative, and should be given only to those who have proved themselves capable of exercising it for the benefit of the state. Even in the North, es- pecially in our great cities, there is an increasing tendency to question the practical wisdom or justice of universal suffrage. It is always difficult to take away political power when once it has been given ; but the recent adoption of the Aus- tralian ballot system, of careful registration, and of greater care in the naturalization of foreign- 20 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY ers, has its secret cause in the recognized peril of unqualified suffrage. Up to a very recent date the doctrine that it is the duty of the State to provide education for all the people was practically unknown in most Latin countries. Education was regarded as a function of either the family or the Church, and to the family and the Church it was largely left. Even to-day in France the question whether the State or the Church shall educate the children of the Republic is probably the most bitterly con- tested question in that country. Half a century ago there was no public-school system in the southern half of this country, unless North Car- olina may be regarded as an exception, and even there the exception was rather theoretical than practical. To-day there is no state, territory, or possession of the United States in which there is not a more or less efficient public-school system. The Southern States, with a persistence, a hero- ism, and a self-sacrifice too little appreciated in the North, have established a system which aims to make equal provision for the children of all classes and both races, in a settled determination to give, so far as in them lies, despite no little unintelligent and prejudiced opposition, a fair opportunity for every child, poor or rich, black or white, to make the most he can of himself. THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 21 Some readers of this chapter will remember with what combined invective and derision in 1850 the country greeted W. H. Se ward's de- claration that there is a higher law than the Con- stitution. The doctrine that government grows out of a compact and rests on the consent of the governed carried with it the doctrine that there could be no higher appeal than to the written Constitution which embodies that compact and expresses that consent. The era of Daniel Web- ster's statesmanship was dominated by that doctrine, and his appeal was habitually to the Constitution as the ultimate authority. The coun- try could go no higher. The temperance reform, the anti-slavery reform, the educational reform, so- cial and industrial reform, all combined to compel attention to other than merely constitutional considerations. To-day we ask, not, What is con- stitutional? but, What is right? If a policy is right, we seek by a liberal construction of the Constitution to find a way to secure it ; and if that is impossible, we begin to question, What amendment to the Constitution is required and is practical? In discussing the currency question, the temperance question, the colonial question, and the railway-rate-regulation question the peo- ple take but a languid interest in constitutional arguments. They are effective only in so far as 22 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY they produce an impression that the law pro- posed may prove inoperative because the Su- preme Court may declare it unconstitutional. Our questions to-day are, Is the free silver or the gold standard right? Is prohibition or limited license right ? Is it right for us to govern a pro- vince which is not a part of self-governing Amer- ica? Is it right for the Congress to interfere with the regulation of the railways, or are they private property which justice requires should be left to private control ? In a word, if we do not yet ask, What are the laws of God? and if we are not content to take as an ultimate appeal, as the Puritans were, the interpretation of those laws as found in the Old Testament, still less are we content merely to ask what past compacts demand or present majorities desire. Political leaders and editorial writers outvie the pulpit in pressing upon their constituencies the question whether proposed policies and platforms are in harmony with those eternal laws of right and wrong which, whatever their basis, find their interpretation and their enforcement in the uni- versal conscience. Thus, during the last hundred years, in these four respects the country has been steadily moving away from the Latinized conception and toward the Puritan conception of law and lib- THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 23 erty : away from government founded on the consent of the governed and toward government a divine organism ; away from universal suffrage toward limited suffrage ; away from leaving edu- cation to private enterprise toward treating edu- cation as a State function ; and away from political authority resting on the will of majorities to po- litical authority resting on eternal and immutable laws of right and wrong. Nor can I doubt that this movement has been in the right direction : that a social democracy with government founded on the moral law, and re- garded as a divine organism to be carried on co- operatively for the common benefit, is more truly and radically democratic than an individualistic democracy, with government founded on mutual consent, regarded as a necessary evil, confined in its functions to the protection of person and pro- perty, and leaving each individual to take care of his own individual interests regardless of his fel- lows, except as his political selfishness is modified by personal benevolence. So far I have treated democracy as purely polit- ical that is, a form of government. But it is more than political ; more than a mere form of govern- ment. The spirit of democracy is the creation neither of France nor of England, of Latinism nor of Hebraism. Democracy is primarily the 24 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY growth of humanity. It is the emergence of man from a state of pupilage toward the state of manhood, with all his animal appetites and pas- sions, all his higher aspirations and desires, as yet neither understood nor controlled. It is the spirit of growth, of progress, of development. Demo- cracy is not merely a form of government ; it is . not merely a phase of society ; it is a spirit of life. Democracy, therefore, does not merely have to do with the political organization. It is the reign of the common people in every department of life. It therefore revolutionizes every department of life : architecture, mechanics, invention, litera- ture, art, the home, the school, industry, govern- ment, religion. Latin democracy and Hebrew democracy are only the directions in which this movement of the common people is being di- rected. A brief glance at the course of the last hundred years will suffice to illustrate this truth ; a volume would be needed fully to interpret its various applications. Demos builds no temples equal to those of Greece, no cathedrals equal to those of mediaeval Christianity. When an attempt is made to build one, as in New York City or in the suburbs of Washington, there is a vague feeling that it is an anachronism, a building born out of due time. Demos builds pewed churches where the worshiper THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 25 may sit at ease, measures the service by its ability to serve the worshiper, not by its fitness to please God, and puts emphasis on the sermon as a chief instrument of instruction and inspiration. Demos builds no palaces equal to those of ancient times. But he builds innumerable homes which offend the taste by barrenness of architectural ornament or vulgarity of ostentatious display, but which abound in comforts that the most luxurious lords of the Middle Ages or patricians of ancient Rome never knew. Demos owns no finer horses than the ancient landed proprietor, and has no such gilded coaches and liveried outriders. The principal sur- vival of the old coaching days is an occasional four-in-hand driven by an amateur and highly cultivated Tony Weller. But the roads are incom- parably better than those on which princes jolted and jostled when they drove at all, and the railway invented in the last century for the convenience of Demos covers in an hour more distance than his noble ancestors could have covered in a day. No modern artist in color surpasses a Titian, a Rem- brandt, a Frans Hals. But public picture galleries, unknown before the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury, give to the plainest and humblest of the people access to the noblest and rarest art. No wood-en- graving of to-day surpasses that of AlbrechtDiirer in beauty of design and perfection of execution ; 26 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY but photo-engraving, not yet half a century old, lays the work of the designer on every cottage table. For our present literature we go back to the crea- tive geniuses of the past; but the printing-press, which gives us in the morning daily the equivalent in amount of a moderate volume for a penny, also puts into one's hands for the price of a pot of beer or a cigar the great works of the great mas- ters. And the first public library, established in England in 1850, has been followed by such a pro- geny of children that in the United States there is scarcely to be found in any except the most sparsely settled States any town of moderate size without its library free to all the people. The public school puts the fundamentals of education within the reach of the great majority of the children of even the poorest and less educated ; and the half -million of pupils who crowd the high schools, which have been in existence but little over half a century, bear witness to the avidity with which the higher branches of education are sought by increasing numbers of boys and girls. In short, democracy means radical changes in all the material conditions of life, and in the nature and the spirit of life : in the means of in- tercommunication and transportation ; in the tools and implements of industry ; in the comforts of the homes; in the opportunities for self -develop- THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 27 ment; in the fundamental conceptions of the aims and the uses of the institutions of religion. It means not merely government of the people, by the people, and for the people : it means, no less, wealth, industry, education, religion, in a word, life, for the people. That in this developing life we are to accept the guidance of the Hebrew- Puritan democracy rather than that of the Latin- French democracy, the theistic rather than the untheistic, the social rather than the individual, appears to me so axiomatic that it needs only to be clearly apprehended in order to be approved. At all events, I shall assume that we are tending, and that we ought to tend, in the direction of a social democracy ; and I shall try to indicate what light this guiding principle throws on the current questions of the Family, the School, Industry, and Politics. CHAPTER III THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY MR. ZANGWILL has characterized America as a "Melting-Pot." Not merely various races, nation- alities, and religious sects are thrown into this melting-pot, but, no less, conflicting ideas and ideals. All creeds, traditions, theories, institutions, are brought into the laboratory by democracy to be analyzed. In this process, the more radical and revolutionary the reformer, the more sure he is of a hearing. Curiosity is agog, and the more novel the hypothesis, the more eager we are to know what it is. The experience of the past counts for little, partly because the modern re- former is often ignorant of the past, partly be- cause in his eager and impatient haste for change he regards the convictions of his ancestors as val- uable only because they show him what to avoid. The family is the oldest and the most sacred, as it is the most fundamental, of all social organ- isms, but the family is not exempt from this pro- cess of reinvestigation. There is no possible question about the family that is not asked, no possible change in the family that is not proposed. Ought the family to be one husband and one THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 29 wife, or one husband and several wives? Poly- gamy is no longer a relic of ancient times. It has reappeared on American soil in an ecclesias- tical organization which absolutely dominates po- litically one State and holds the balance of power in at least one other State. Philosophers have sometimes excused polygamy as an economic ne- cessity in the earlier stages of society. Jesus ex- plained its permitted existence in the Hebraic Commonwealth as a concession to human passion. But Mormonism has glorified polygamy as a divine institution, has urged it upon women as a con- dition of future canonization, if not of future salvation. Whether the canonization or the sal- vation which several women get by marrying such a single husband as they usually get under such a system is worth the price it costs them is a doubtful question. If it be true that polygamy is decreasing, or has even absolutely ceased, the fact is due, not to a conversion from the Mormon faith, but to a concession to Gentile prejudice. I am not aware that polyandry, or the marriage of one woman to several husbands, has been seriously proposed in America. We are grateful to the reformers for that ; but I suspect that' their re- serve is due to the fact that there are not men enough to go around. , What is the nature of the family ? Is it a di- 30 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY vine organism ? or is it simply an economic and social partnership? Do this husband and wife come together to constitute the basic institution on which all society rests? or do they come together for industrial or social advantage? Is this marriage permanent or temporary ? Do they marry for " better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part " ? or do they marry until the wife's fortune is run through, or the husband meets with bankruptcy, or until one or the other discovers faults in the mate before not suspected, or until one becomes an invalid and the other grows weary of the watch- ing, or until some complaisant and convenient court can be found to part these two, who do not need to wait for death ? These questions are not put by a satirist or a cynic ; they are the ques- tions that actually confront American society to- day. It has been well said by an American humorist that the difference between a Mormon and some other Americans is that the Mormon drives his wives abreast and the other drives them tandem. In the decade ending 1906, 600,593 divorces were granted in the United States of America. For convenience of arithmetical figuring, let us call them 600,000. This would be 60,000 a year. If we grant three hundred working days in the year, and I do not think any court in the United THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 31 States works as many days as that, the American courts have granted two hundred divorces a day ; and if we allow eight working hours for the day, and I think few courts work more hours, the courts have granted twenty- five divorces every hour of every working day for the ten years ending in 1906 ! Evidently marriage is not very permanent in America. In marriage what are the relations between hus- band and wife? Is she simply an upper servant or an agreeable toy ? That she is simply an upper servant would seem to be implied by one of the decisions of, I think, a California court, which divorced the husband from the wife because she had failed to sew on his shirt-buttons for him. Is she the money-spender and he the money-getter ? This would seem to be the idea of a woman whom I heard of in Europe last year. She met a friend, who asked, " Where is your daughter? " " I have put my daughter in a convent school, and I am going to travel." " But where is your husband?" "Somebody has got to stay at home and earn the money ! " Does marriage entail any duties upon the hus- band other than supporting the wife ? Does it entail any duties upon the wife other than living without unreasonable complaints on such support as the husband can provide for her ? Or should 32 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY the wife be the wage-earner and the man be sup- ported by her? This theory is not infrequently exemplified in practice, but since no reformer ventures to defend it in theory, I do not here consider it. Finally, does parenthood entail any duty upon the parents? Do the father and the mother owe any personal duty to the child whom they have brought into the world ? In considerable sections of American society such duty is ignored. By some reformers it is formally denied. Our indus- trial system is such that thousands of fathers, working ten or twelve hours a day, rarely see their children except in bed or on Sundays and holidays. A less number of mothers, compelled to eke out the inadequate subsistence earned by their husbands, leave their children in day nur- series while they maintain by their labor their overpraised economic independence. At the other end of the social scale are men and women who are prevented, not by their industry, but by their idleness, from giving any personal attention to their offspring. Such a mother, whose daughter was regularly late at school, apologized to the teacher by saying : " Of course I am never up at half-past eight, when my daughter should be starting from home, and one can never trust one's servants to be punctual." The reformer who pro- THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 33 poses that children should be turned over to ex- perts, that the mothers may be released from the cares of motherhood, only puts into words the method of parental dealing with children which mothers preceding her have put into practice. Finally, might it not be better to abolish mar- riage altogether, or have temporary and experi- mental marriages? One reformer has proposed the latter course. It is due to her, however, to say that she simply suggests that it would be better for the husband and wife to try the experi- ment for a year, and, if it failed, try again, than to be permanently married and to separate at the end of the year by means of a divorce decree. One so-called reformer urges the abolition practically of marriage altogether. G. Bernard Shaw writes: " What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrele- vant conditions implied in the institution of mar- riage. . . . What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other and never intend to see each other again to produce children under certain definite public conditions without loss of honor." l Recent investigation into the so-called white-slave traffic indicates that a state of condi- tions already exists in certain of our great cities 1 Quoted by C. W. Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture, p. 179. 34 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY which does not differ materially from G. Bernard Shaw's ideal, and which, so far as known, has not contributed to the breeding of a noble, progres- sive, and promising race. It is true that G. Ber- nard Shaw is not to be taken seriously, because he does not take himself seriously. He likes to shock us, and I decline to be shocked. But the fact that he gives this message to the twentieth century, and the twentieth century listens to it, taken in connection with the serious conditions concern- ing marriage and divorce which I have already described, is not without significance. Such are some of the questions which we are to-day asking of ourselves in America concern- ing the family. Is the family founded on the marriage of one husband to one wife, or of one husband to many wives? If one husband to many wives, should he have them living together in one home, or should he have them in succes- sion, each one in turn departing to make room for her successor ? Is the family the social unit on which the organization of Church and State and industry depends, or is it a mere incident in a purely individualistic society ? Should marriage be permanent or transient, for life or for the mutual pleasure of the parties? Does the hus- band owe any duties to the wife ? Does the wife owe any duties to the husband? If so, what are THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 35 they ? Do they owe any duties to their children, or may they leave their children to be super- intended, nursed, educated, and trained vicari- ously for them by trained servants, by private benevolence, or by the State ? These questions are asked to-day in America, not only theoreti- cally by reformers, but practically by current so- cial customs. On these questions the experience of the past throws some light. What has that ex- perience to tell us ? At first the wife was the slave, or serf, of the husband. He sometimes had many wives ; but polygamy was always rare even in polygamous countries, because considerations of economy prevented general indulgence in polygamy. There are few men in Turkey or in Utah who are rich enough to maintain a household with a number of wives. But whether marriage was polygamous or monogamous, the wife was the serf of the household. There was no contract of marriage, no mutual assenting, no asking, " Wilt thou?" or "Wilt thou not?" The bride was captured in war or bought with a price. Even the courtship was founded on this conception of capture, for one ordinary method of courtship was for the woman to run as fast as she could, while the man ran after her until he overtook her. Having once entered into this relationship, she 36 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY became absolutely her husband's property. He could sell her, he could give her away, he could lay any burdens upon her, impose on her any tasks, could chastise her at will. She was as much his servant as the slave whom he had bought in the market, as absolutely subject to his will as the child that had been born in his family. The marriage thus formed was largely a commercial employment. The wife was taken that she might perform drudgery and toil which the man was reluctant to perform ; or she was taken that she might bring to him children, who could be sold in the market if they were daugh- ters, or, if they were sons, used to bring by mar- riage other women into the household, and so in- crease the domestic service. Out of this grew a new experiment. If this commercial and industrial partnership had for its end the raising of children, and these children were an asset of the State, why should not the State undertake the work ? why should not the State supervise the marriage? why should not the State determine what man and what woman might marry, what children should be reared, and what children should be preserved? Plato proposed this. He suggested a community of wives and a community of children, with the added suggestion that they should be so brought THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 37 up that by no possibility should the child know its own mother. When I read Plato, I am always in doubt whether I am getting Plato or Socrates, and when I read the story of Xantippe I think possibly that the suggestion may have come from Socrates, who might well have wished that no husband should know his own wife. This theoret- ical suggestion of Plato was put in operation by Sparta. The industrial and economic organiza- tion which had been called the family was taken in charge by the State, was put under the super- vision and control of the State, and the children were taken from father and mother into the hands of the State. In order to make sure that the State did not enter upon a disadvantageous economic enterprise, the children were brought before triers, and if the child proved to be a feeble child, not likely to do the work of the State, it was promptly put to death. This plan did not, however, work as well for the State as the reformers had hoped it would, for the re- formers left out of life then, as reformers have often left out of life since, that which is the most potent force in all humanity love. Because these Spartans had no homes, no families, no wives, no children, they soon lost their love for their country. Patriotism was throttled, and the State died. It is said of one of the great Spartan 38 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY leaders, sent on an expedition against a foreign foe, that he betrayed his country, and sold it, in order that he might marry the daughter of the prince with whom he was battling, and so get a wife that belonged to him and not to the State. Marriage a condition of servitude, the wife a slave, her property, her person, her interests, her children, all under the absolute control of her master and her lord, became in time intolerable, and a reform was inaugurated. Marriage became a civil contract. The husband and the wife agreed to marry. And this civil contract lasted only so long as the agreement lasted. While husband and wife were satisfied, they remained husband and wife ; when they ceased to be satisfied, they dis- solved their bond and tried again. In the Roman Empire that plan was tried, though without the checks and limitations which we have put upon it, when to-day it has been put in practice in some of our States in the name, curiously enough, of woman's rights. On the whole, I am inclined to think that it was a reform ; that a marriage which is a contract is better than a marriage which is slavery, and a marriage dissoluble by the contract- ing parties is better than a marriage which puts the wife, her person, her property, everything she has or holds dear, in charge of one despotic au- thority. THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 39 However that may be, at the close of the eigh- teenth century the European states had, in their laws, adopted this pagan conception of marriage. It is true that this pagan conception had been ameliorated by human sentiment, and that some of the women had, despite it, developed noble characters, and were highly honored by the com- munity and by their households. It is also true that this pagan system was never recognized as true by the Christian Church, and was never ac- cepted as the whole truth by the people, who usually attempted to combine with this pagan con- ception the Christian ideal of which I shall speak in a succeeding chapter. But the twofold pagan conception of marriage, on the one hand as a civil contract, on the other as a servile subordina- tion of the woman to the man, was woven into the fabric of European laws. In Latin countries marriage before a civil officer was required. It might be followed by an ecclesiastical marriage, but the ecclesiastical marriage was not necessary in law. In England marriage might be performed by the priest, but need not be. It could also as well be performed by a civil officer. By this mar- riage the wife passed into the possession and power of her husband, though not quite so absolutely as she had done in the old paganism. But by marriage her legal existence was suspended, or at 40 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY least incorporated and consolidated with that of her husband. All her property passed into his hands ; all her earnings belonged to him. Her children were legally his children and under his control. 1 The only ameliorating circumstance that I recall was that, while her property passed into his hands, he was also liable for her debts reasonably con- tracted by a person in her condition. I am not quite sure whether under English law the man had a legal right to chastise his wife, but that he exercised that right very often in the lower classes English literature abundantly testi- fies. That supposed right has not been wholly disregarded even in America to-day. An acquaint- ance of mine recently congratulated a colored man in the South on his golden wedding. " Uncle," he said, " I see you have lived fifty years with Aunt Dinah." "Yes, sah! I have, sah!" replied the husband ; " and I have not had to hit her a lick once in all that fifty years ! " The conception that woman was made for man and was to be educated for man was wrought not only into the legal institutions of Europe but into its ideals. Rousseau was one of the radical 1 "By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is sus- pended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consoli- dated into that of her husband." Blackstone, Commentaries. Quoted by Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England. THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 41 reformers of his time, a recognized idealist of the close of the eighteenth century. It is interesting to read what he said about the object of woman in creation : Women are specially made to please men. All their education should be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to bring them up when young, to take care of them when grown up, to counsel, to con- sole them, to make their lives agreeable and pleasant these, in all ages, have been the duties of women, and it is for these duties they should be educated from infancy. Even in their religious beliefs the subordina- tion should be complete : Even if this religion is false, the docility with which wife and daughter submit to the order of Nature effaces in the sight of God the sin of error. Being incapable of judging for themselves, they ought to ac- cept the decision of their fathers and their husbands like that of the Church. 1 This conception that woman was made for man, that in marriage she lost her personal identity and became merged and consolidated with the man, entered into and determined the popular ideal of woman's education. She was to be educated to be 1 mile, quoted by W. E. H. Lecky in Democracy and Liberty, vol. ii, p. 505. 42 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY a wife and a mother, and this practically meant to be an upper servant of her husband and the nurse and governess of his children. The only education that was counted as proper for a woman was that which fitted her either to be a good house- keeper, on whom the care of the younger children devolved, or a parlor ornament creditable to her lord and master. She was to know how to cook, to do chamberwork, and to nurse the children, and she was to learn to do needlework, to play the piano, perhaps to draw and paint a little, and to be a good conversationalist. Charlotte Bronte gives an ac- count of the kind of education which woman re- ceived in the early part of the nineteenth century. It is thus illustrated in the prospectus of the school to which she was sent in her girlhood : The terms for clothing, lodging, boarding, and edu- cating are ,14 a year, half to be paid in advance when the pupils are sent; and also 1 entrance money for the use of books, etc. The system of education com- prehends history, geography, the use of globes, gram- mar, writing, and arithmetic, all kinds of needlework, and the nicer kinds of household work, such as getting up fine linen, etc. If accomplishments are required, an additional charge of <3 a year is made for music or drawing, each. 1 I have thus stated the questions which America 1 E. C. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte, chap. 4. THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 43 is asking to-day respecting marriage and the fam- ily, and have stated, though very briefly, the an- swer which paganism gives to those questions. How far the answers which some of our modern reformers give are really derived from this ancient paganism I shall consider in the next chapter, which will be devoted to presenting, in contrast with the pagan ideal, that which we have derived from the Hebrew Scriptures. CHAPTER IV THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY THE Hebrew ideal of the relationship between man and woman, and of marriage and the fam- ily, growing out of that relationship, is found chiefly in three passages: the first chapter of Genesis, the second chapter of Genesis, and the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs. In the first chapter of Genesis the writer de- clares that " God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him ; male and female created he them " ; and that to them jointly he gave supremacy over the earth : " God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and re- plenish the earth, and subdue it ; and have do- minion over the fish of the sea, and over the foul of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." He is not represented as giving authority to one over the other, of making the one for the other, of creating the one in his image more than the other is created in his image. The image of God, the supremacy over na- ture, is not in any man : it is not in any woman ; THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 45 it is in humanity, the man and woman, neither of whom completes the image of God, neither of whom is sovereign on the earth. Both the American and the English poet have truly interpreted this Hebraic conception of the relationship of the sexes : Nor equal, nor unequal ; each fulfills Defect in each, and always thought in thought. Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, The single pure and perfect animal, The two-celled heart heating with one full stroke, Life.' As unto the bow the cord is, So unto the man is woman. Though she bends him, she obeys him ; Though she draws him, yet she follows : Useless each without the other. 2 This is not the relationship of husband and wife. It is the relationship of man and woman. The two together make humanity. Man is not complete without the woman ; woman is not com- plete without the man. Woman is no more made for man than man is made for woman. Woman is no more to be educated for man than man is to be educated for woman. Nor do they duplicate each other. Their char- acteristics are not the same. Their function in 1 Alfred Tennyson, The Princess. 1 Henry W. Longfellow, Hiawatha. 46 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY society is not the same. Their education ought not to be the same. Man is not a woman in trou- sers ; woman is not a man in petticoats. Neither is a model to be imitated by the other, neither is the standard by which the other is to be mea- sured. A masculine woman and a feminine man are equally abhorrent to nature ; they are ab- normal specimens of the race. This truth, that man and woman do not duplicate but do comple- ment each other, which Tennyson and Longfellow have put in poetry, Mr. Frederic Harrison has put in almost equally beautiful prose : Who now wishes to propound the idle, silly question which of the two is the superior type ? For our part, we refuse to answer a question so utterly un- meaning. Is the brain superior to the heart, is a great poet superior to a great philosopher, is air superior to water, or any other childish conundrum of the kind ? Affection is a stronger force in women's nature than in men's. Productive energy is a stronger force in men's nature than in women's. The one sex tends rather to compel, the other to influence ; the one acts more directly, the other more indirectly ; the mind of the one works in a more massive way, of the other in a more subtle and electric way. But to us it is the height of unreason and of presumption to say anything what- ever as to superiority on one side or on the other. All that we can say is that where we need especially pur- ity, unselfishness, versatility, and refinement, we look THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 47 to women chiefly; where we need force, endurance, equanimity, and justice chiefly, we look to men. 1 The first chapter of Genesis gives the Hebrew conception of manhood and womanhood, the sec- ond chapter of Genesis the Hebrew conception of marriage. We have lost much out of our Bible by our unwise literalism, by insisting that there is no poetry, no fiction, no legend, that all is prosaic fact; that only Gradgrind could have written the Bible and only Gradgrind can interpret it. Let us read this second chapter of Genesis as we should read it if we found it in any other liter- ature than the literature of the Hebrew people. Man is in a garden, in the days of innocence, before sin, before temptation, before society exists, before cities are built or work is begun. He is lonely, this man in this garden, and the good God brings to him one animal after another for companionship. He is to christen and to name them. The horse comes saying: "I will bear your burdens." " Will you bear my sor- rows with me ? " " No ! I cannot do that." The dog comes: "I will watch by your side." " If I am sick, will you nurse me back into life ? " 1 Frederic Harrison, Realities and Ideals, p. 91. In some de- tails I should put the contrast differently. Thus, I think, in a certain type of endurance woman is superior to man. 48 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY " No ! I cannot do that." The cat comes : " I will lie in your lap, and you shall caress me." " And will you caress me in turn ? " " No ! I cannot do that." The bird comes: "I will sing sweet songs to you." " Will you rejoice with me ? _ No ! I cannot do that." The man turns from the animals whom he has christened and says to his Father : " None of these is a companion to me " ; and the good God says : " No, for you are not yet finished. You are only half made ; you are only half a man ; you have only half a life. Wait ! See ! Out of your very side I will take her who shall be your comrade. She shall bear your sorrows with you, and you shall bear hers. She shall give you strength to carry your burdens, and you shall carry hers. She shall watch by you in time of your sickness, and you shall watch by her. She shall sing softly and sweetly to you, and your heart shall feel the thrill of the heart that is like your own." And from that opening chapter all through this collection of sacred literature there is no hint of servitude or separation save as they appear as the outgrowth of selfishness and sin. The two are one in their creation, co-equal comrades. The two are one in their life, co-equal mates. The third Hebrew ideal is contained in the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs : THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 49 A worthy woman who can find ? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband trusteth in her, And he shall have no lack of gain. She doeth him good and not evil All the days of her life. She seeketh wool and flax, And worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchant-ships ; She bringeth her bread from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, And giveth food to her household, And their task to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it : With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, And maketh strong her arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable : Her lamp goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the distaff, And her hands hold the spindle. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor ; Yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household ; For all her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh for herself carpets of tapestry ; Her clothing is fine linen and purple. I venture to say that not in pagan literature, not in the ethics of Confucius, not in the Vedic hymns, not in the poetry of Greece or Rome, not 50 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY in legend or story of Scandinavian tribes, is to be found such a picture of the dignity and glory and honorable service of woman. She is no toy and no dependent idler. She has her work to do, and glories in it. She counts no honorable industry servile, works willingly with her hands. She is no narrow-minded provincial. Her vision stretches out over other lands. She knows what the world is doing, has some share in it; is like the merchant ships, and brings food both for mind and body from afar. She is not cottoned or cozened in the bed of idleness, but rises betimes for her work ; never counts execu- tive ability unwomanly ; is a wise and efficient mistress of maidens. She has no notion that in- validism is interesting, that to be attractive she must be pale and bloodless. She girdeth her loins with strength, and her arms are strong. Her charity begins at home, but does not end there. Her sympathies reach out beyond her husband and her children. She is a wise almoner of charity, and not through contribution-boxes and charitable or- ganizations only. She does not shun contact with the lowly and the unfortunate. She stretches out her hand to the poor and the needy. She has not the notion that simplicity and ugliness are synony- mous, that beauty in dress and furniture is sinful. She is not blind to the lessons of nature, which THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 51 clothes this world in a great glory of form and color. Her household are clothed with scarlet, and her own clothing is fine linen and purple. She takes thought for the morrow, and therefore does not take anx- iety for it. Because she is forethoughted she can laugh at the time to come. She does not con- found innocence and ignorance, does not think it unwomanly to be well educated ; she openeth her mouth with wisdom. Nor does she think to show her wisdom by the sharpness of her tongue. Nor is she a gossip-monger. In her tongue is the law of kindness. Her personal ambitions run not beyond her household. She has no longing for public place and public service. She seeks her coronation within the walls of her home, happy if her children rise up and call her blessed, and her husband praises her. This ideal of creation, of marriage, of woman- hood, derived from the Hebrew people, passed over into Europe together with the pagan ideal derived from Imperial Rome. Wherever pagan- ism dominated, woman was dishonored and mar- riage was reduced to a commercial partnership. Wherever Christianity dominated, woman was glorified and marriage was treated as a sacrament. The Church honored woman. It put by the side of the Lord himself the Virgin Mother who bore him. The adoration of the Virgin was one of the 52 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY messages of the Catholic Church. Wherever that adoration was offered, wherever that mother and child were painted, wherever the Ave Maria was played or sung, there womanhood and mother- hood were exalted and adored. With this ideal of womanhood there went an ideal of marriage as a sacred sacrament binding husband and wife to- gether in an indissoluble bond. And wherever these two went, there went also the idea of com- plete comradeship ; for these three Hebrew ideals are really one in three, a sacred trinity of love : man and woman created one; man and woman created to be comrades ; and man and woman united by marriage in an indissoluble bond. For it is not merely the husbands that are to be comrades. The comradeship may be between husband and wife, or between brother and sister, or between father and daughter, or between friend and friend. It is man and woman who are made in the image of God ; it is man and woman who are united in a sacred fellowship. There is no space here in which adequately to illustrate this comradeship which the Hebrew ideal puts before us. Life is the best interpreter of the Bible. From the book of life I select one single picture of this comradeship between brother and sister. Much has been made of what Charles Lamb did for Mary Lamb, and we have sometimes wondered THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 53 at the patience of the brother in bearing with his ofttimes crazy sister. It came to me somewhat as a surprise when a friend called my attention to Charles Lamb's testimony of what that sister had been to him : I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary, but I cannot feel it so. Meanwhile she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand ; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I can conceal nothing I do from her. She is older, wiser, better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself, by resolutely thinking on her good- ness. She would share life, death, heaven and hell with me. She lives but for me. I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has clung to me for better, for worse ; and if the balance has been against her hitherto, it was a noble trade. 1 1 Letter written to Dorothy Wordsworth by Charles Lamb when Mary Lamb was in the asylum, during one of her attacks of insanity, June 14, 1805. Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas; letter 133. 54 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Many a brother, many a father, many a hus- band who has not the pen of Charles Lamb has had his experience, and bears silent witness to the service which has been rendered to him by the inspiring presence of a sister, a daughter, or a wife. Thus in the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury there were in Europe these two contrasted streams of influence, one coming from paganism through Imperial Rome, the other coming from the Hebrew race through the Christian Church. Both were imported into America, the pagan idea from deistical France, the Christian idea from Puritan England. Rousseau's interpretation of the pagan ideal I quoted in the preceding chap- ter. J. R. Green has well interpreted the Puritan ideal : Home, as we conceive it now, was the creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere depend- ents on the will of husband or father, as husband and father saw in them saints like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine Spirit and called with a di- vine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fel- lowship gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections. " He was as kind a father," says a Puritan wife of her husband, " as dear a brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world had." The willful and lawless passion of the Renas- cence made way for a manly purity. Neither in youth THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 65 nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblamable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal nor temptation. 1 It is to this Hebraic, Christian, Puritan influ- ence we owe the modern idea of woman's educa- tion ; that she is to be educated, not as Rousseau had said, to make the lives of men agreeable and pleasant, but for God and for herself. In 1819 Miss Willard opened what I believe was the first school for the really higher education of women in this i country. In 1837 Mount Holyoke fol- lowed under Mary Lyon. In 1861 Vassar College was founded ; then, following, Smith and Welles- ley and Bryn Mawr. 2 All these were in the con- ception and ideal of their founders distinctly Christian institutions. Meanwhile Western col- leges were opening their doors to women, and secondary schools for girls enlarged their curri- cula and raised their standards, until to-day, after a century of education, it may fairly be said that educational facilities for woman in this country are, considering the length of time they have been established, approximately as good as the 1 J. R. Green, History of England, vol. iii, p. 19. 1 This of coarse does not aim to be a complete list of colleges and collegiate institutions. 56 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY educational facilities for man. The same methods of study are open to her as to her brother in the preparatory schools. She is admitted to the same high schools, and to a large extent the same higher education is furnished to both in the col- leges. The new education has changed the old pagan- ism, but has not converted it. The struggle be- tween the pagan and the Christian conceptions of woman, marriage, and the family continues on our soil, though in a new form. Paganism no longer affirms that woman was made for man, or that she is to be educated to make life agreeable and pleasant for him, and that she is to be his servant or his toy. But loud voices are calling on her to become his competitor ; to join in the struggle of life, not with him, but against him. A little child of my acquaintance, who had heard, more intelligently than any one had imagined, the woman question discussed in the family circle, asked his governess one day when they were gathering wild flowers, whether she preferred Dutchman's breeches or ladies' slippers. That is the Woman Question in a sentence. Does she wish to be a woman or a modified man? The new paganism assures woman that the difference of sex is but an incident in life ; that, with the same education as man, she has become THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 57 or is becoming the same kind of being, en- dowed with the same characteristics, called to the same service, intended to fulfill the same social function ; that there is no more difference between man and woman than there is between individuals in either sex ; that she is to be not man's comple- ment but his duplicate, not his comrade but his competitor, in the market-place, the factory, the court-room, and on the hustings ; that as man is, woman is his toil her toil, his task her task, his place her place ; that marriage is only a partner- ship between the two, to be continued while it proves mutually agreeable; that children are a painful inconvenience, to be avoided if possible, and, when inevitable, discarded as soon as may be. This is what pagan democracy demands of woman and for woman. Hebraic, Puritan, Christian "democracy, in its interpretation of life and in its demands both on woman and for woman, is the antithesis of the modern paganism. There is no accident of sex. Man and woman are not cast in the same mould, created for the same function, or called to the same service. They are created to be comrades, not competitors ; for cooperation, not for rivalry. She is not made for him more than he is made for her ; she is not to be educated for him more than he is to be educated for her. They are made for 58 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY each other. Marriage is not a partnership ; it is not a civil contract ; it is a divine order ; indis- soluble save for the one disloyalty which does by necessity destroy the family. The home is the basic organization on which both Church and State are founded, for which both Church and State exist. The rearing and training of children is the end of life, which alone gives it significance. To protect from enemies while this work of rear- ing and training children is carried on is the func- tion of government. To provide food and shel- ter for the family while this rearing and training of children is carried on is the function of the material industries. To supplement the family in this rearing and training of children is the func- tion of the school and the Church. In this work of rearing and training children woman is supreme, made so by her divine equipment, and in it pro- tected and provided by her mate. Neither master and servant nor competitors and rivals, but com- rades, neither independent of the other, neither complete without the other, each made for the other, are man and woman in the world's great work, which is the creation of children of God. CHAPTER V THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION THERE are two conceptions of education put in sharp contrast by two interesting fables, similar in form, contrasted in the lessons which they teach the fable of the colts, by Pestalozzi ; the fable of the dogs, by Rousseau. The Two Colts. Two colts as like as two eggs fell into different hands. One was bought by a peasant whose only thought was to harness it to his plough as soon as possible ; this one turned out a bad horse. The other fell to the lot of a man who by looking after it well and training it carefully made a noble steed of it, strong and mettlesome. Fathers and mothers, if your children's faculties are not carefully trained and directed right, they will become not only useless, but hurtful ; and the greater the faculties, the greater the danger. The Two Dogs. Just look at those two dogs ; they are of the same litter, they have been brought up and treated precisely alike, they have never been sepa- rated ; and yet one of them is sharp, lively, affection- ate, and very intelligent ; the other is dull, lumpish, surly, and nobody could ever teach him anything. Simply a difference of temperament has produced in 60 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY them a difference of character, just as a simple differ- ence of our interior organization produces in us a difference of mind. To Pestalozzi the mind of a child is like the plastic clay which the teacher fashions ; to Rous- seau, like the stone image, the teacher can only polish it a little. To Pestalozzi education is the whole process of human development; to Rous- seau Nature is the mother of us all, and the less we interfere with her processes the better. Pesta- lozzi would have education begin at the cradle ; Rousseau would have what education there is begin at twelve years of age. I hold with Pestalozzi that education fashions and shapes the growing child ; it cannot begin too soon. Education is simply directed growth, and the education should begin when the growth be- gins. The mind of a child is like a garden bed. There are in it seeds of flowers and seeds of weeds. The teacher cannot change the weeds to flowers, but the teacher can eradicate the weeds and de- velop the flowers. This is education. The teacher puts the child on a path and knows not where it will lead ; only this, that the path leads up into the clouds or down into a dark and bottomless The weakest of all animals is the infant, know- ing nothing, able to do nothing, absolutely de- THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 61 pendent for his very existence on the nursing mother. At the other extreme of life, developed by the processes of a life education, stands Glad- stone shaping the nation's destinies, or Browning singing songs the ages will listen to, or Edison gathering the lightning and making it light our houses and run our trolley-cars. The difference between this little, insignificant, useless creature in the cradle and this great statesman, this great poet, this great inventor, is education. There seems to me nothing so great as this work of a teacher, whether we call this teacher mother, or father, or instructor, or pastor. To take a character and mould and make it what the builder will there is nothing greater than that. It is a great thing to paint a wonderful portrait that, when she whom I loved is gone, will speak to me with eloquent lips and look at me with gleaming eyes ; but it is a greater thing to make the character of which that is but a portrait. It is a great thing to be a poet and por- tray with burning words a living citizen ; but it is a greater thing to create the living citizen. It is a great thing to be a great statesman, holding the helm of state and guiding it on its perplexed course; but it is a greater thing to make the statesman, and the nation which he is guiding. Says Erasmus : 62 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Would it not be a horror to look upon a human soul clad in the form of a beast, as Circe is fabled to have done by her spells ? But is it not worse that a father should see his own image slowly but surely becoming the dwelling-place of a brute's nature? It is said a bear's cub is at birth but an ill-formed lump, which by a long process of licking is brought into shape. Nature, in giving you a son, presents you, let us say, a rude, unformed creature, which it is your part to fashion so that it may become in- deed a man. If this fashioning be neglected, you have but an animal still ; if it be contrived earnestly and wisely, you have, I had almost said, what may prove a being not far from a God. If it is a great work for mothers to do this for a few children, or teachers to do this for a few more children, what a wonderful work it is for a nation to do this for itself ! And that is what the American nation is doing. We are not only a self-governing people : we are what is far more important, a self-educat- ing people. We are dependent for our education, not upon a few learned or a few wise men, save as we select the learned and the wise : we are de- pendent on ourselves. We fashion our schools, build our schoolhouses, select our curriculum, determine our educative processes. A nation of eighty millions of people is educating itself. What kind of education are we giving ourselves ? THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 63 What is the result of our self-development ? An orator, boasting of his abilities in a public speech, said, " Fellow-citizens, I am glad to say I am a self-made man." An auditor in the distance called out, " You have taken off your Creator a very heavy responsibility." We are a self-made nation. What kind of a nation are we making? How came we to enter on this so audacious experiment? To answer that question, we must trace rapidly, and far too briefly, the history of the growth of education. Professor Dicey says that not until 1832 did England recognize any national responsibility for education, or even impose any legal obligation upon parents to educate their own children. 1832! This progressive Anglo-Saxon race, to which many of us are proud to belong, is, then, from twenty -five hundred to three thousand years behind the Hebrew race; for the Hebrew Commonwealth enacted, somewhere between six hundred and a thousand years before Christ (scholars differ as to the date, and it is not neces- sary to discuss the question here), a law which required parents to teach their children. Whether that law was enforced by legal penalties I do not know, but it was law ; and that law further pro- vided for certain great gatherings from time to time, like our camp-meetings or our Chautauqua 64 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY assemblies, to which the professional teachers of the nation should come, and from platforms and pulpits should teach the men and women and chil- dren. For woman's education does not date from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but from a thousand years before Christ. And the law, a little later, provided for itinerant teachers who should go from village to village, teaching the people by a kind of itinerant school-mastership. Out of this primitive system of education, very primitive it certainly was, but adapted to a primitive condition, there had grown by the time of Christ a Jewish system under which there was a synagogue school connected with every synagogue, and a university of considerable pro- portions connected with the great Temple at Je- rusalem. It was to that university at the Temple at Jerusalem that Jesus was drawn when he was a boy only twelve years of age, not to teach the doctors, but to learn from the rabbis what he could not learn from -the less instructed rabbi of the synagogue in his village home. Up to this time there had been nowhere else in the world, except possibly China, any system of education provided by either State or Church. There were schools in Greece and later in Rome, and the philosophers of Greece and Rome urged on par- ents the duty of education ; and there were well- THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 65 educated men in Greece and in Rome. But the State as a state with the possible exception of Sparta for a few short years and the pagan Church as a church made no provision for popu- lar education. The schools were subsidiary to the home; they were aids to the parents. If the parents had the inclination and the means, they sent their children to school or had teachers to teach them at home ; if the parents lacked either the inclination or the means, the children were left to grow up untaught; and, in point of fact, in ancient Rome the great majority of the chil- dren were so left to grow up untaught. The Hebrew religion, transformed, developed, to use Jesus' own words, fulfilled, passed over into Europe, and carried with it the syna- gogue school, transformed into a Christian school. It is difficult for us to state exactly what happened in the first two or three centuries of the Christian era ; history, if not absolutely silent, speaks in ambiguous terms. But we know that at the close of the third century there were Christian schools connected with most of the Christian churches. By the sixth century a de- cree issued by one of the great Councils called upon the Church to establish such schools in connection with every church ; and from the sixth century down to the sixteenth there f ol- 66 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY lowed decree after decree and edict after edict from synod, from council, and from popes urging on the Church the duty of providing ed- ucation for the people by the establishment of parochial schools for the primary work, and of cathedral schools for the higher work. The great universities of to-day are the children of these early Church schools. Cambridge and Oxford, for example, are the outgrowth of schools in the same places, and to a considerable extent in the same buildings, originally established and main- tained by the Koman Catholic Church. At the beginning of the sixteenth century was born the great democratic movement. It had two aspects: the Renaissance, with its home in Italy; the Reformation, with its home in Germany. And with this birth of the democratic spirit there came a new conception of education. This was partly a new conception of its breadth and ex- tent, but it was largely a new conception of the instrument by which it should be carried on. Both Erasmus, the prophet of the Renaissance, and Luther, the prophet of the Reformation, insisted upon schools organized, supported, and governed by the State. They were not satisfied to leave education in the hands of the parents or in the hands of the Church ; they demanded that the State should undertake the work of popular THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 67 education ; that it should become a national ob- ligation. It is interesting to find in the writings of Erasmus on education the same objections re- ported which are repeated to-day in the twentieth century, met by the same arguments by which they are met to-day. You say [says Erasmus] that you have no time to educate your children. If you will give up some of your foolish pleasures, if you will give up some of your useless avocations, and especially if you will de- vote less time to your senseless social functions, you will have time enough to educate your children. You have no money. No money ! Why, you pay less for your teachers than you pay for your cook. [I believe that is still sometimes true in New York City.] You mothers are more particular to dress your children than to educate them. You are anxious for their hats and their dresses that they should appear well. If you must gratify your vanity by dressing somebody, buy a monkey and dress him. You say that education im- pairs the health. I should certainly always advise moderation in the amount of mental exertion de- manded, but I have little patience with critics who only become anxious about the youthful constitution when education is mooted, but who are indifferent to the far more certain risks of overfeeding, late hours, and unsuitable dressing in the classes about whom I am here concerned. 1 1 W. H. Woodward, Erasmus Concerning Education. I here summarize, not quoting with verbal accuracy. 68 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY That would not be a bad lesson in some homes in America. Erasmus laid stress on the taking up of education by the State. He was more radical than the most radical of advocates of State edu- cation to-day. Secular education, or none at all, was his cry. Luther spoke on this subject with even greater f orcef ulness : Since we are all required, and especially the magis- trates, above all other things to educate the youth who are born and are growing up among us, and to train them up in the way of virtue, it is needful that we have schools, preachers, and pastors. If the parents will not reform, they must go their way to ruin ; but if the young are neglected and left without education, it is the fault of the State, and the effect will be that the country will swarm with vile and lawless people, so that our safety, no less than the command of God, requireth us to see and ward off this evil. [He main- tains in this letter that government] as the natural guardian of the young has a right to compel the peo- ple to support the schools. What is necessary to the well-being of a state, that should be supplied by those who enjoy the privileges of such state. 1 Since the sixteenth century the public school, that is, the school supported and maintained by, and under the government of, the political organ- ization, has been the constant companion and the 1 Letter of Martin Luther to the Elector of Saxony, quoted in Barnard's German Pedagogy, p. 13. THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 69 true foundation of every democratic state. The public schools of Germany date from the days of Luther. Their excellence is due in part to the fact that they have been under a process of har- monious development for more than three centu- ries. The public schools passed gradually over into other countries, which gradually became demo- cratic. It was not until 1870 that the State made any provision for public education in England. It was not until 1881 that the State undertook compulsory education in France. The Puritans brought their system of public education with them as the foundation of their theocracy. It extended, after the Civil War, into the South, and has now gone wherever the Amer- ican flag has gone. One of the most inspiring surprises which the visitor to Porto Rico sees to- day as he travels over that island is the rural schoolhouse in every village, and oftentimes in spots remote from any town. In Porto Rico, 1 in Hawaii, in the Philippines, the public school that is, the school supported and carried on and maintained by the State has followed, accom- panied, been the foundation of, the democratic 1 The latest statistics available at this writing show in Porto Rico : schools, 2,040 ; scholars, 87,236 ; teachers, 1,736. And when our troops landed in Porto Rico, there were no schools outside a few of the larger towns, and not a school building in the island which had been erected for that purpose. 70 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY movement. I sat one night recently by the side of Baron Kikuchi, the head of the Educational Department of Japan, and he told me that in that country ninety-eight per cent of the children were in the public school. I said to him, " You are in advance of America." I wonder how long it will be before we catch up. Thus there have developed from very primitive beginnings three instruments of education, the Home, the Church, and the State. How the edu- cation should be divided between these three is a matter of hot debate. In France the govern- ment has recently prohibited the Church from doing any teaching. In Germany the State does the teaching, but in some parts of the Empire the Church comes in after hours to add religious instruction. In England the Church and State combine to render instruction, the Church carry- ing on some schools, the State others. In Amer- ica the State carries on the schools, but the Church is perfectly free to establish and maintain schools by its own action and under its own direction, if it sees fit to do so. I [believe that these three organizations, the Home, the Church, and the School, should com- bine in education. How they should combine, and what education they should furnish, I shall consider in a succeeding chapter. CHAPTER VI THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL EDUCATION begins at the cradle. The first edu- cator is the mother. The first lesson to be taught is obedience. This is the first lesson which must be learned by a self-governing member of a self- governing community. We are born into a world of law. We cannot do as we please. We are not at liberty, if liberty means exemption from law. If a man thinks he has liberty to fly, and jumps off the roof of the house, he finds when he reaches the sidewalk that he has not even liberty to walk, unless first he has learned the laws of aerial navigation and flies in accordance with them. Obedience to law is the foundation of all civilization, material, in- tellectual, social, spiritual. The first thing the child has to learn is that there are other wills su- perior to his will, and laws to which he must him- self be obedient. An indulgent mother is a cruel mother. She is sending out her child unprepared for the restraints of law, which will be enforced by seemingly cruel penalties. If she were wise and strong, she would temper law to the child's 72 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY capacity. We try to put up a gate at Ellis Is- land to keep the Anarchists out ; we ought to put it up in our nurseries. There our children are being taught lawlessness ; taught that they may obey or not obey, as they will ; there laws are given to them, and then, when disobeyed, left unenforced. The babe in the cradle readily understands whether or not he must obey. The sooner he learns that he must, the sooner he is fitted for a self-governing member of a self- governing community, the sooner he is fitted for a happy life in the world. It is not enough, however, that he obeys laws that are interpreted to him by father or mother ; if he is to be a self-governing member of a self- governing community, he must learn how to understand laws that are not written and not in- terpreted ; he must know how to read the invisi- ble laws written in the human constitution, and yield them, not a reluctant obedience because they are enforced, but a glad and willing obedi- ence because he recognizes their value. What are the bonds which bind Democracy together ? Not armies, or navies, or policemen. There are two bonds : truth and justice. Truth gives us mutual confidence in one another in the inter- communication of ideas; justice gives us mutual confidence in one another in the actual transac- THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 73 tions of life. Take out either and the community drops to pieces. These are the invisible hoops that hold the barrel together. Any kind of a person, says E. S. Martin, will do for a parent except a liar. I am afraid that is a large exception. I do not think I am a pes- simist ; but I do verily believe that more lies are told by mothers, fathers, and nurses to children than all the rest of the lies put together. We lie to them with false threats ; we lie to them with false promises ; we lie to them with false stories ; we teach them by our practice that a child has not a right to truth ; and then we wonder that they learn the lesson. Nor do I think that mothers are generally very good in teaching jus- tice. They teach kindness, gentleness, considera- tion, generosity but not justice. Among the first lessons our children ought to learn in the home are the elemental rights of property and rights of person. Every child is born a robber. Put two babies on the floor, and give one of them a rattle, and see the other crawl to his com- panion, and, if he is strong enough, wrest the rattle away from his companion. He is a high- way robber. It is not his fault ; he has not yet learned the rights of property. The little child will romance, and be rebuked for falsehood. He has not learned the difference between falsehood 74 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY and fiction, and it is to be taught him. He does not know the difference between a fairy tale and a lie. The difference is so subtle that even grown folks do not seem always to understand it. Truth and justice these are to be taught in the nur- sery before the child has gone out to the larger life of the schools. Taught? Yes! but teaching is not enough; trained. There are many people, I think, who imagine that the Bible says, " Govern a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it " ; and they do govern a child in the way he should go, and as soon as he es- capes from the authority he does depart from it. What the Bible says is, " Train up a child in the way he should go," and neither governing nor teaching is the same as training. Training is the production of habit. Actions oft repeated be- come a habit; habit long continued becomes a second nature. When you have trained your child in habits of justice and of truth, when you have formed in him the habit of telling the truth and the habit of acting justly, he will not depart from them, because he cannot depart from him- self. The father and the mother have opportunities of training that the teacher does not have, if the father and mother are willing to take the time THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 75 and the trouble and the patience, and, ahove all, are the kind of parents they ought to be. For training does not come chiefly through lectures or exhortations, or laws enforced by penalty. It comes chiefly through the atmosphere of the home and through the example of the parents. If you want your child to love the truth, love it yourself; if you want your child to love justice and purity and simplicity and honesty and cour- age, love them yourself. You cannot by your teaching give your child that which you do not possess. A profane man cannot teach a boy not to be profane. A smoking father cannot teach a boy not to smoke. "A drinking man cannot teach a boy not to drink. The boy will walk in his father's footsteps, and the more he honors his father the more likely he is to walk in those footsteps. I do not attempt to tell what is the education which parents should give. I only attempt to point out certain fundamental lessons necessary to a democracy that is educating itself to be a self-governing democracy, and in the family these three things are essential : Training by example as well as by precept in justice, truth- fulness, and obedience. What is the specific contribution which the 76 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Church should make to the education of the child ? I state my view of the difference in func- tion between the Church and the State in the words of an eminent Roman Catholic divine, not because I think they represent the dominant sentiment in the Roman Catholic Church, but be- cause they represent a sentiment very widely en- tertained in that Church, and I choose them that they may appear to be, as I think they truly are, neither distinctively Protestant nor Roman Catho- lic: The Church has received from her Divine Founder the mission to teach the supernatural truths. . . . But the Church has not received the mission to make known the human sciences, she has not been estab- lished for the progress of nations in the arts and sci- ences, no more than to render them powerful and wealthy. . . . Her duty of teaching human sciences is only indirect a work of charity or of necessity : of charity when they are not sufficiently taught by others who have that duty; of necessity when they are badly taught, that is, taught in a sense opposed to supernatural truth and morality. This is why the missionary, setting foot in a savage land, though he begins with the preaching of the Gospel, very soon establishes schools. . . . There are men who seem to assert that the Church has received the mission to teach human as well as divine science. They give to the words of Christ, Euntes docete (go and teach), an indefinite interpretation. But such an interpreta- THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 77 tion is evidently false. . . . The question here is not of the authority of the State over the teaching of re- ligion and over theological schools. It is clear that the State has no jurisdiction in that sphere. . . . We affirm that the State has authority over education. This authority is included in that general authority with which the State is invested for promoting the common good, for guaranteeing to each man his rights, for preventing abuses. . . . The State has the right to prevent the unworthy and the incapable from as- suming the role of educators. . . . The State has au- thority to see to it that parents fulfill their duty of educating their children, to compel them, if need be, and to substitute itself for them in the fulfillment of this duty in certain cases. ... If the State may coerce parents who neglect the education of their children, so also may it determine a minimum of in- struction and make it obligatory. ... If the State may exact on the part of the teachers evidences of ca- pability, on the part of children a minimum of instruc- tion, if it may punish negligent parents, it follows that it may also prescribe the teaching of this or that branch, the knowledge of which, considering the cir- cumstances, is deemed necessary to the majority of the citizens. No more difficulty in the one case than in the other. Moreover, it is not needed that we should re- mark that the State has over all schools the authority of inspection as to hygiene and public morality. 1 I wish to supplement that statement with one 1 From a pamphlet of Dr. Bouquillon, of the Roman Catholic University of Washington, D. C., 1893. Now out of print. 78 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY other. The State has no moral right to prohibit the parents from teaching, or the Church from teaching. If in France, as is alleged, the Roman Catholic Church in its schools is giving its chil- dren teaching which is undermining the author- ity of the Republic, the State has a right, and that right is recognized by this extract, to pro- hibit such teaching ; but it has no moral right to issue a general law that the Church shall do no teaching except as directed and controlled by parties who are inimical to the Church. What is the Church, as distinguished from the State and from the home, to teach? Broadly speaking, we may say, religion ; more narrowly, to teach the relation of the children and of the adults to God, and to the invisible and eternal world. This is the specific function of the Church. It may go further ; it often has gone further. But if it neglects this duty, who shall take it up ? I do not propose to criticise synagogue schools, for I know nothing about them; nor Roman Catholic parochial schools, for I know almost nothing about them. But I do know something about Protestant Sunday-schools, and as a Pro- testant I have a right to criticise the Sunday- schools of that large body of churches with which I am myself identified. There are many noble and worthy exceptions; but, with those THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 79 exceptions, the Church is not, through its Sun- day-schools, teaching the youth religion ; that is, it is not teaching the youth, with any effective- ness, their relation to God and to the immortal life. For the most part, Sunday-school teaching consists of lay sermonettes, or else of asking out of the book questions which are to be answered by the pupil. Even if the school has begun to get hold of modern criticism and teach a little of that, it is not so taught as to give a comprehen- sive conception of the Bible, according to either the old conception or the new. I think it was a graduate of one of our Sunday-schools who, on being examined as to his Bible knowledge, was asked the question, " Who wrote the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis?" and replied, " The first chapter of Genesis was written by God, and is generally correct; the second chapter of Genesis was written by the Lord God, and is full of inaccuracies." I should like to know how many children who have graduated from our Sunday-schools could tell anything comprehensively about the Bible, which is the textbook of religion for the Protes- tant. How many of them know that it contains sixty-six books, and was written by forty or fifty different writers? How many of them know that it is a body of literature which was a thousand 80 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY years or more being collected? How many of them know that it contains almost every type of literature known in the literatures of the world? How many of them have any comprehensive con- ception of its political teachings? How many of them know that the Hebrew Commonwealth was the first government on the face of the globe to put restrictions upon the absolute power of a mon- archy, the first to have a popular legislative as- sembly, the first to ask for a judgment of the people in general elections, the first to organize government in three departments, legislative, judicial, and executive, the first to prohibit class or caste distinctions, the first to make any pro- vision for popular instruction ? How many of the children of our Sunday-schools know the simple facts of its political teaching? And yet this self- governing Republic is anchored on those great fundamental principles. How many of them know the ethical teachings of the Bible? How many of them could give anything like a comprehensive, or even a partial, fragmentary interpretation of those teachings? How many of them know that the Ten Commandments form the briefest, the most comprehensive, the most compact code of morals the world has ever seen, down even to this day? How many of them know that the four great rights of man the rights of property, of THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 81 person, of reputation, of the family cover all the fundamental rights of humanity? How many of them know what the rights of property are as interpreted by the Bible, or the rights of the per- son, or the rights of the family, or the rights of reputation? How many of them can tell what are even the more simple and fundamental prin- ciples inculcated in this book which we call the Book of Religion? How many of them could tell anything about what it teaches respecting God? How many of them know that the Hebrew peo- ple were the first people and the Hebrew litera- ture the first literature to recognize that God is a righteous God and demands righteousness of his children, and demands nothing else? How many of them know that the Hebrew Scriptures were the first literature and the Hebrew people the first people to recognize the fact that God will help men to righteousness if they wish to be helped? These are the truths that lie upon the surface and are wrought into the texture of the Bible; the truths that every Christian ought to know, and never will be taught by homiletic ser- monettes given by uninstructed teachers upon selected passages of eight or ten verses a Sunday. Never ! The family is to train the child in habits of 82 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY obedience to outward law and obedience to the inward laws of justice and truth. The Church is to teach man's relation to God, and, incidentally growing out of that, man's relation to his fellow- men ; to teach also his relation to the future, and, growing out of that, his duty in the present. What ought our public schools to teach? I am not attempting in this book to cover the whole ground of education. There are many things which our public schools ought to teach and are teaching, of which I shall not speak; I consider only those things which the schools ought to teach which are essential to be taught to self- governing members of a self-governing commu- nity. In the first place, the State ought to teach every boy and every girl the duty of, and give to every boy and every girl the capacity for, self- support. The first duty of a self-governing mem- ber of a self-governing community is not to be a beggar; his first duty is to put as much into the treasury of life as he takes out of it. I do not mean that every man and every woman is to be in a wage-earning profession; I do not mean that every man and every woman is to pass over the counter something for which on the other side of the counter money will be given in return. There are no members of the community that are THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 83 so ill paid in money for their splendid service as the wives and mothers in the home. When I hear a modern reformer demanding a woman's eco- nomic independence, I laugh at her. The wife is not more economically'dependent on the husband than the husband is on the wife, as many a hus- band could testify whose fortune has been due to the wise administration of his wife, and some hus- bands could also sorrowfully testify, who cannot make money so fast but that their wives can spend it still faster. The first duty of a citizen of a self-governing community is to be self-support- ing, and therefore the first duty of the public school is to give the boy and the girl capacity for self-support. The end of education is the de- velopment of character; the test of character is capacity for service. The Hebrew law required every professional student first to learn a trade. So Paul, though he became a rabbi, was a tent- maker, and it stood him in good stead. There is a curious prejudice against industrial education which I do not understand ; a curious notion that industrial education is on a lower plane than a literary or scholastic education. Is a lawyer indus- trious ? then a law school is an industrial school. Is a doctor industrious? then a medical school is an industrial school. Is a minister industrious? then a theological school is an industrial school. 84 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Whatever fits a man for public service in practi- cal industry in life is industrial education. Nor can I understand the prejudice against manual training the education of the hand. I always hesitate to criticise those who directed my childhood. We older men look back across the gap of years and remember the defects rather than the excellencies in our training. But as I look back it seems to me that I got the idea that the only use of the hand was to hold a book, and the only use of the eyes was to read it. That nature is to be studied, that we must know how to act as well as to think, that the hand is to have skill to do as well as the brain skill to plan this was hardly in the education of my childhood, and is not too much in the education of the children of to-day. Germany is in advance of us in this re- spect. It differentiates its system of education, and provides alike for the mechanical, the commercial, and the professional career. But not by the same kind of education. Thought is valuable only as it is translated into action. I hope I am giving my readers some thoughts in this book ; but if that is the end, the book is useless. It is useful only as parents and teachers put them into action. The function of manual training is to connect the brain with the hand, and thus show how to trans- late thoughts into deeds. THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 85 In the second place, every self-governing mem- ber of a self-governing community ought to be taught to think for himself. Our slaves, says Plato, take the thoughts of others and act upon them ; we might transpose that sentence and say, He who takes the thoughts of others without thinking for himself is a slave. Give the ballot to a thousand men without capacity to do their own thinking and they will blindly follow the dema- gogues who appeal to their passions and their prejudices. If we want an autocracy, then we should educate the boys and girls to act unques- tioningly upon authority and obey it ; if we want a democracy, we should educate our boys and girls to think for themselves. And there is no possible way by which we can educate them to think for themselves in one department of life and not in another. We cannot teach our boys and girls to think in the realm of politics without teaching them to think independently in the realm of re- ligion and in the realm of industry. He who will ask why in the one case will ask why in the other. There is no possible way by which the workingman can be made free from the political boss and subservient to the industrial boss ; no possible way by which the great American people can be made free from the government of machines in politics and subject to government of ecclesi- 86 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY astics in the Church. There must be independence everywhere or nowhere. In the third place, our boys and girls must be taught to understand the thoughts of other men whom they do not agree with, for they have to go out into life and work with other men they do not agree with, and we cannot work with another efficiently unless we can understand him. We may differ from him, but we must understand him. Our boys and girls must be taught to be open- minded ; the windows must be thrown open, and all thoughts and all teachings they must be ready to consider, weigh, and judge. This Christian boy must learn to understand what is agnosticism, and this agnostic boy what is Christianity ; this Roman Catholic boy what is Protestantism, and this Pro- testant boy what is Roman Catholicism ; this laborer what are the theories of capitalists, and this capi- talist what are the theories of the laborer ; this Republican what are the opinions of the Demo- crats, and this Democrat what are the opinions of the Republicans. We take our own church paper, and do not know what the other church paper is saying ; we take our own political paper, and do not know what the other political paper is saying ; the laborer goes to the trades union and does not know what the capitalists are saying, and the capitalists go to their own meeting and hardly THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 87 know what the trades unions are saying except when they cannot help but hear. Power to think for one's self, power to understand those one does not agree with these two things are absolutely essential to peace, harmony, and cooperation in a self-educating and self-governing community. And, next, understanding of the great laws of the social order what they are, how they oper- ate. What does the Golden Rule mean as applied to modern conditions? How ought the conscience to act? What ought to be the moral judgment on current questions ? I know some eminent teachers who think that all moral instruction should be left to the family and the Sunday- school, and I know some others who think it should be only a by-product. I cannot agree with either. If we must understand the great laws of nature and how its forces act, we must also under- stand the great laws of human nature and how its forces act. The public school ought to be set free from the conventions which have sometimes en- chained it, and not only be permitted but required to teach the great fundamental laws of person, of property, of chastity, and of reputation. This self -governing community must have great ideals. Progress is proceeding from a past achieve- ment toward a future of as yet unrealized achieve- ment. The man who has no ideals is dead and 88 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY does not know it, though his neighbors do. The nation that has no ideals is dead ; it has no energy or enterprise. Energy and enterprise depend on the ideals. It was an idealist who in the days o the stagecoach conceived of the steam locomotive. It was an idealist who dreamed of the time when we should communicate by electricity. Idealists have enabled us to run like the deer, swim like the fish, fly like the bird. When it was proposed to add Oregon to the United States, practical men said, " It will never do ; before your Representa- tive can get from Oregon to Washington, Con- gress will have adjourned." It was an idealist who conceived the idea of building a steel bridge from Washington to Oregon. The fathers of our Revo- lution were idealists, and gave to the world their vision of a Government resting on self-govern- ment. If we ever come into that state in which we think, as some people seem to think, that nothing can be done to-morrow which was not done yesterday, we shall be ready to be wrapped in our burial clothes and put in our graves. But we must also know how to test these ideals and determine what are realizable hopes and what are impossible dreams. We must not only know the great literature of the past, written by the idealists, we must know the great experiences of the past in which ideals have been tested and tried. THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 89 We must not only know how to think, but we must know how to apply our thinking to the actualities of life, and how to test our thinking by the practical experience of the world. This is the value of history. The knowledge of history is, or ought to be, the knowledge of what the world has been doing, how the world has been growing. The life of the past shines out as a headlight on the track of the future. If all our country had understood the experience of the French Revolution, we should hardly have had a greenback heresy foisted on us. If all the coun- try had realized what universal ignorance suf- frage had wrought into San Domingo, we should hardly have had universal suffrage in the South- ern States foisted upon us. If all the world knew to-day the result of the Socialistic experiment in other lands, our idealistic Socialists would at least pause a little perhaps. A self-governing community must not only know how to act and how to think ; there is some- thing more than action, something more than thinking. Life includes beauty as well as know- ledge. No man is a complete man who goes through the land blind to beauty and deaf to music. A true nation, a prosperous nation, a liv- ing nation, lives not only in its industrial activi- ties, its commercial activities, its theological and 90 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY philosophical activities ; it lives also in its artistic activities. America needs to know what the Greeks knew so well, who had one word both for virtue and beauty. To them virtue was a form of beauty, and beauty was a form of virtue. Good- ness, beauty, truth these are but three aspects of the one great reality. It is in vain that Mr. Carnegie multiplies his libraries if we are not multiplying intelligent readers to get life out of them. It is in vain that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan endows and enriches the Metropolitan Museum if we are not educating boys and girls to take delight in statuary and in pictures. It is in vain that we build music-halls and opera-houses if our boys and girls are not so educated that their life will be expressed and enriched by the music which is there rendered. What is all this but saying that we must edu- cate for life and by means of life ? We must attach our schools to life. We must bring them forth from life. We must make education the process from a child's experience to a man's experience, as the growth of the plant is from the seed. Some teachers tell me that in their schools they find the children of the rich more awkward than the children of the poor, because the children of the poor have been expected to take care of them- selves and the children of the rich have been taken THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 91 care of so much that they do not know how to move with gracefulness. Some teachers tell me that the children of the poor grapple with intel- lectual problems better than the children of the rich, because the children of the poor have been thrown upon their own resources and compelled to grapple, while the children of the rich have been taken out of life by a mistaken kindness. Perhaps this is too broad a generalization from too narrow an experience ; I do not know ; but this I do know, that wherever a child is robbed of the experience of life he is robbed of the benefits of education. Education must begin with experience and go through experience to a perfected experi- ence. Pestalozzi went at one period of his career to Paris, and a friend endeavored to present him to Napoleon the Great. Napoleon declined. "I have no time for A B C," he said. When Pesta- lozzi returned to his home, his friends asked him, *' Did you see Napoleon the Great ? " " No, I did not see Napoleon the Great, and Napoleon the Great did not see me." Napoleon the Great lived to see the empire which he had founded on soldiers crumble to pieces because he had had no time to attend to A B C. The builders of this Nation are not the men at Washington; the builders of this Nation are the fathers, the mothers, the teachers. To educate 92 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY the child from the cradle, to habituate him to obedience, to develop in him the sense of justice and of truthfulness, to train him to habits of a divine manhood, then, with this training, to launch him into the school, and there, not to work against the school, as some mothers do, not to be indif- ferent to the school, as many fathers are, but to cooperate with the teacher, in support of her au- thority, in sympathy with her instruction, in aid of her work, and in that cooperation to connect all that teaching with the home and with the life, so that this child, growing to manhood, may learn how to support himself, to do his own thinking, to understand the thoughts of his neighbor, to live with that neighbor in harmony, in justice, righteousness, and fair dealing; to give the child splendid ideals beckoning him on, to give him the lessons of past history holding him in check, to give him the joy that comes through beauty, and to make all his teaching grow out of his life and fit him for his life this is the work of education in a self -educating community preparing itself for self-government. CHAPTER VII PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY A RECENT English writer has thus described a scene which one may witness any Sunday morn- ing in the streets of one of the greatest commer- cial capitals of Christendom, the city of London : Sunday morning witnesses the strangest sight in these streets. The lodgers hold a bazaar. From end to end the railings are hung with fusty and almost moving rags, the refuse of the week's picking and stealing, which no pawnbroker can be brought to buy. Neighbors, barely dressed, many of them with black eyes, bandaged heads, and broken mouths, turn out to inspect this frightful collection of rags. There is bar- gaining, buying, and exchanging. Practically naked children look on and learn the tricks of the trade. If you could see the bareheaded women, with their hang- ing hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths ; if you could see them there, half dressed, and that in a draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible; and if you could hear the appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could never have, been like this ; that these people are mov- 94 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY ing on in a line of their own ; that they have produced something definitely non-human, which is as distinct from humanity as the anthropoid ape. Ruth, or even Mary of Magdala, at the beginning of the line ; two thousand years of progress ; and then these corrupt and mangy things at the end ! This is not to be believed. No ; they do not belong to the advancing line, they have never been human. For the honor of humanity one rejects them. 1 The picture is not too dark. Any one who has visited the slums of London can attest its photo- graphic reality; and although I think the slums of London are probably the worst slums in Chris- tendom, worse than those of Paris or Naples, worse than those of New York or Chicago, yet almost every civilized city contains a population somewhat answering to the description from which I have taken this paragraph. Different in degree, but not different in kind, of misery, vice, and de- gradation, such are some of our neighbors in most of our great cities. How came they here? What responsibility have we for them? I re- call that story of the rich man who dressed in fine linen and fared sumptuously every day, and for- got the beggar at his door. You and I, reader, are not rich men, as we sometimes count riches, and perhaps fare not very sumptuously every day, 1 Harold Bcgbie, Twice-Born Men, pp. 34, 35. PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 95 and yet if we forget this Lazarus at our door we shall subject ourselves to something of that con- demnation which the Master visited on the indif- ferent rich man of the olden time. What shall we do with this fruit of Christen- dom? How came the tree to bear such fruit? These are the questions to which in this and the two succeeding chapters I ask my readers' atten- tion. First, I shall trace rapidly the course of his- tory which has produced these phenomena ; next, point out briefly some proposed remedies for the evil." 1 At first the capitalist owned the laborer : that was slavery. Then the capitalist owned the land and the laborer was attached to the land ; the la- borer owed the landlord service, the landlord owed the laborer protection : that was feudalism. Then came individualism in industry, as there came in- dividualism in government ; the laborer was free, no longer attached to the master, no longer at- tached to the land, might go where he would, owed nothing to the master ; and the master was free, owed no longer protection to the slave, owed no longer protection to the villein. Each was free ; 1 Habitual readers of The Outlook and readers of my book publications on social topics will find the ideas, and perhaps even the phraseology, of this chapter familiar. I am here simply put- ting into compact form ideals which I have been persistently urging by voice and pen for nearly half a century. 96 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY and the laborer could sell his labor in the hig-h- o est market, the capitalist could buy his labor in the cheapest market. This might have served if society had remained individualistic. But society did not remain indi- vidualistic ; it became organized. Two causes pro- duced this industrial organization. First, the dis- covery of natural forces to do the world's drudgery for it, and the accompanying invention of ma- chinery. Second, the discovery that the division of labor was of great economic advantage in the production of articles. In the place of single looms owned and operated by single weavers, there grew up, through the discovery of steam and the in- ventions that followed it, the great factory, with its numerous spinning-wheels and its numerous looms. Thrifty men who had put by a little money, or fortunate men who had inherited fortunes, com- bined and built the factory in combination. The partnership and the corporation followed ; and so grew up, by a natural and necessary process, a combination of capital. But, in order to run the factory, the railway, the mine, it was necessary that labor should be organized as well as capital, and each particular kind of labor assigned to the particular laborer. Thus organized labor and or- ganized capital grew up side by side. We sometimes find men discussing the question PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 97 -whether labor ought to organize. Labor must be organized. We cannot carry on modern industry unless labor is organized. We cannot have a loco- motive engineer saying, " This morning I will run a locomotive, to-morrow morning I prefer to be a brakeman, and the next morning I will not come at all." Railway workmen must be organized, and so must factory workmen and mine workmen. The ojily real question is whether the men who con- stitute the organization shall have anything to say respecting the nature of its organization. Organi- zation of capital, organization of labor, that is inherent, indisputably inherent, in the modern industrial organization. Thus has grown up the modern system, some- times called capitalism, sometimes called the wages system. Under this system a comparatively small body of men own all the tools and implements with which industry is carried on : the lands, the mines, the factories, the railways, the forests; and a great body of men do the work with these tools and implements, not owning them. The men who own the tools we call capitalists, the men who do the work with the tools we call laborers. Sometimes the laborers hire the tools from the capitalists and pay what we call rent ; sometimes the capitalist hires the laborer to work with the tools and pays what we call wages. Occasionally the capitalist and 98 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY the laborer make a bargain that the laborer shall work with the capitalist's tools and divide the pro- ceeds in some ratio between the two. That is not an uncommon method on some of the Southern plantations to-day. But whichever way the ar- rangement is made, one small body of men own practically all the tools and implements with which industry is carried on, and those tools and imple- ments are called capital, and the men who own them are called capitalists; and a great body of men carry on the industry with these tools and implements, and they are called laborers or wage- earners. Many persons imagine that this wages system has lasted from eternity and will last to eternity, because they have never known any other system. In point of fact, it was born about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and I do not believe that it will outlast the twentieth century. The evils of this system are many and great, and have been often recognized by scholars of every class. In the first place, this system divides society into two great classes, more or less hostile : a body of laborers who desire to get the largest possible wage, that is, the largest possible share of the proceeds of the industry, and a body of capital- ists who, except as their desires are modified by humanity, desire to pay the least possible wage to PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 99 get the product of the industry. Both desires were not only recognized, they were fostered, by the old political economy. The capitalist was instructed to buy the labor in the cheapest market, that is, he was to pay as little wages as he could and get the work done, and the laborer was instructed to sell his labor in the highest market, that is, he was to do as little work as possible and get his wages ; and a good many of both classes lived up to the principle thus inculcated. In the second place, this wages system inevi- tably creates a concentration of wealth. It creates a small class of more or less, and generally in- creasingly, wealthy men, and a large class of more or less dependent men. The startling facts are thus given in Charles B. Spahr's book on "The Present Distribution of Wealth," the best book, I think, on the subject in the English language : To sum up the whole situation, therefore, it appears that the general distribution of incomes in the United States is wider and better than in most of the coun- tries of western Europe. Despite this fact, however, one eighth of the families in America receive more than half of the aggregate income, and the richest one per cent receives a larger income than the poorest fifty per cent. In fact, this small class of wealthy prop- erty-owners receives from property alone as large an income as half our people receive from property and labor. 100 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY I would like to put that in a little more dra- matic form. The average wage of the workingman in America ranges from 75 cents to $5 a day. The wage which Mr. Gould received in his life- time was $13,000 a day; the discrepancy the work- ingman thinks too large, and I personally agree with him. Mr. Vanderbilt Cornelius, the elder died, after a long and useful life, leaving a property estimated by the newspapers at $200,- 000,000 ; I do not vouch for the estimate I take it as I find it. If Adam was created, as our old chronology thought he was, six thousand years ago, and if he had lived to this day, and had been an industrious worker and had never lost a day through sickness or misfortune, and had laid up $100 every working day of every year of that six thousand years, he would not have laid up as much money as Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired in one lifetime. This is the second objection to the present sys- tem : inequality in the distribution of the product of labor. The laborer who works with the tools gets too small a share, the tool-owner gets too large a share, and the great laboring class are de- pendent on the tool-owners for the opportunity to work. " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,'* says the divine command ; the wages sys- tem says to hundreds and thousands of Ameri- PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 101 cans, and untold multitudes in the Old World, Thou shalt not earn thy daily bread by the sweat of thy brow thou shalt have no chance. In a prosperous time there are comparatively few men who cannot find a chance to do some work some- where for some sort of pay ; but a few years ago there were tramping through this country, it was estimated, three millions of men seeking for jobs some of them earnestly seeking, some of them not so much in earnest, but still out of work. Josephine Shaw Lowell, who is a careful statisti- cian, reported that one year there were 220,000 individuals helped by charity in the city of New York, and she says, " There is no possibility of the duplication of individuals in this estimate." I do not vouch for these figures in the one case or in the other, but they unquestionably represent immense masses of men and women who live on the verge of starvation, and who, if they are laid aside for a week, or even for a day, by illness or misfortune, wonder where the next week's bread will come from for their wives and their children. Sometimes the contrast is pathetic, sometimes dramatic. One day the diners at the Waldorf-As- toria were startled by having an Indian club flung through the plate-glass window and fall upon their table. Men rushed out and arrested the as- sailant, and he was taken to the police station ; 102 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY and this was his story : That he was a mechanic ; that he was out of work ; that he could get no- thing to do anywhere ; that he was an expert with Indian clubs ; that it finally occurred to him that he could give some exhibitions with the Indian clubs in saloons ; that he went from one saloon to another ; that he could earn nothing by his ex- hibition ; and finally, hungry and sore at heart, and walking up Fifth Avenue, he saw these men and women feasting on viands that they could not digest after they had eaten them, and in a moment of passionate rage flung his club through the window. I believe he was locked up. I thought the magistrate showed wisdom in giving him a good dinner. Reader, imagine, if you can, yourself walking the street, looking for work, and compelled to come back night after night to hungry children and a disappointed wife. Out of this dependent class dependent on the capitalist for opportunity to work there grows another great dependent class. Out of the tramps seeking for work the beggars are developed, and out of the beggars the sneak-thieves, and out of the sneak-thieves the burglars. Thus men grow up in an atmosphere of hostility to society. As there is a profession of lawyers, and one of doc- tors, and one of ministers, and one of teachers, so there is a profession of burglars, for which PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 103 children are trained from the cradle by men whose hearts have been embittered against modern so- ciety that refuses them a place, an opportunity, a right to live. I do not justify it, but I do not wonder at it. If this process was only accompanied at the end by something to compensate for it, if by this wage-earning system we were sacrificing some in order to develop a high and noble aristocracy, if we could only believe with Nietzsche that the end of civilization is to develop one single typical man, and we could find this man among our plutocrats, we might bear the condition with philosophy. But, in point of fact, neither the beggars nor the criminals are all found among the poor. Hark ! Hark ! The dogs do bark! The beggars are coming to town ; Some in rags, and some in tags, And some in velvet gowns. Yes, " some in velvet gowns." For the men and the women who do not by some kind of service, in the mill, in the factory, in the street, in the school-room, in the family, in the home, put into society as much as they take out belong in the beggar class, whether they tramp in outworn shoes or in steamers and automobiles. Nor do we find the criminals all recruited from the poor. There is to-day more than one man 104 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY serving his sentence in the penitentiary who last year, as the president of a great corporation, oc- cupied a position of trust and honor in the com- munity. And it is a matter of common knowledge that there are men of large wealth who employ skilled lawyers to teach them how they can vio- late the law and yet escape the penalties of the law. Vice, in certain aspects of our rich soci- ety, is more gilded but not less awful than the same sort of vice which has been described by the writer quoted above, as existing in the slums of London. Sensuality and intoxication are not bet- ter because they are well dressed ; vice is no nobler in Fifth Avenue than it is on the East Side, nor the drunken bout the better for being incited by champagne instead of by whisky. What are the remedies ? Is there any remedy ? There are many persons who, so far as they have thought of it at all, consider that the only remedy is regulation by law, improvement by edu- cation, and amelioration by charity. The wages system seems to them inherent and essential. There is no getting along without it. But society can regulate the actions of the capitalist, and can easily regulate the actions of the workingman, and can punish the crimes into which either of them are led. At the same time, by the pulpit and the press, we can develop a better public conscience. PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 105 In addition, we can do something to relieve the distress and reform the vices which are born of this system. So, fifty years ago, good Christian men in the South believed that slavery was essen- tial to the well-being of society. It could not be abolished. But slaveholders could treat their slaves with justice and kindness, harsh slave laws could be repealed, certain rights of the slaves could be protected, and gradually, with the moral elevation of the race, the divine institution of slavery could be rid of its more noxious fruits. I do not believe that either regulation or gradual moral reform or charity will set the world right. I do not believe that the evil of our present in- dustrial system will be cured by anything less than a radical change, though it may be, and I think it will be, a gradual one. I am quite of the mind of Thomas Carlyle : This general well and cesspool, once baled and clear, to-day will begin to fill itself anew. The universal Stygian quagmire is still there, opulent in women ready to be ruined, and in men ready. Toward the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human sin ooze and gravitate, as heretofore. Except in draining the universal quagmire itself there is no remedy. 1 More radical than mere regulation by law and amelioration by charity is the proposal for " col- 1 Latter-Day Pamphlets, Chapman & Hall ed., p. 24. 106 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY lective bargaining." The individual workingman has no chance in dealing with collective capital. This workingman must take the wages the rail- way will give to him, because his going puts the railway to no inconvenience ; but his going means idleness and misery to him. This factory man must take the wages which the factory offers, if he stands alone, because his individual with- drawal produces no inconvenience to the factory; but for him his withdrawal is from something to nothing. So workingmen have organized in trade unions to protect their interests and put them on an equality with organized capital in their bar- gaining. They have organized in trade unions in order that labor may act as a body in its bargain with capital acting as a body in its bargaining. I think they have done well. If I were a working- man, I should desire to join the trade union of my trade, though whether I joined or not would depend somewhat, I am sure, on what kind of a union it happened to be. Trade unions have raised wages, improved conditions, shortened hours, called public attention to labor conditions that were intolerable, helped to lessen the hours of woman's labor, helped to get children out of the factory and the mine, produced a spirit of co- operation among workingmen, and promoted ar- bitration for the settlement of labor disputes. All PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 107 this labor unions have done. But labor unions in competitive bargaining with capitalistic unions do not constitute the consummation of industrial democracy. The democracy of America is two democracies, one individual, one social; one inherited from France and pagan Rome, the other inherited from the Puritans and the Hebrew Commonwealth. Out of these two democracies this present Ameri- can democracy of the twentieth century has grown, gradually and increasingly taking on the social aspect ; so that we are no longer trying in this country to develop merely a community of indi- viduals governing themselves, we are attempting to create a self-governing community, a com- munity that cooperates and combines in opera- tion for its common interest. That is not accom- plished by organizing all the workingmen on the one side and all the capitalists on the other side, that they may drive their bargains with each other on something like equal terms. That is not a self- governing brotherhood. If A has a house to sell and B wishes to buy a house, it is well enough for A to put what price he pleases and B to offer what price he pleases, and let the negotiations go on in- definitely. But when the owners of the coal mines of Pennsylvania are on one side and the coal workers are on the other side, and one group says, 108 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY We will not work until you come to our terms, and the other says, You shall not work until you come to our terms the rest of us freeze. Or if, on the other hand, the laborer says, Raise my wages and add it to your bill, and the capitalist says, I will raise your wages and add it to my bill, we get high prices, from which the com- munity is now suffering. Peace brings one injury, war brings the other. A bargain between two in- dividuals concerns only the bargainers ; but in a bargain between ten thousand workingmen and ten thousand shareholders in a great corporation the community is interested. And whether the bargain is not made at all, or whether it is made without regard to the interests of the general pub- lic, in either case the general public suffers. Col- lective bargaining furnishes some protection to the individual laborer from the injustice which in- evitably follows from bargaining by an individual laborer with organized capital. But it furnishes no protection to the community. And it does not bring industrial peace or create a true industrial brotherhood. The two other remedies proposed Political Socialism and Industrial Democracy I shall con- sider in the next two chapters. CHAPTER VIII POLITICAL SOCIALISM THERE are two radical and even revolutionary changes between which Democracy has to make its choice, if the spirit of Democracy is ever to dominate American industrial institutions : the first is Political Socialism ; the second is Industrial Democracy. If any of my readers are inclined to think that Political or State Socialism, as in this chapter defined, is no longer maintained in Socialistic circles, I can only say, first, that I hope he is right, but, second, that my observa- tion of the currents of to-day leads me to agree with Edmond Kelly, an advocate of a modified Political Socialism, in his statement, " State So- cialism, therefore, is the form probably most in vogue among workingmen." 1 And I believe the best way to meet it is to define it clearly, and to distinguish it from what may be called voluntary Socialism, but what I prefer to call " Industrial Democracy." I avoid the term State Socialism because that term is often used to designate the doctrine of Bismarck : " That the State should 1 Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 235. 110 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY take better care of its needy members than here- tofore is not only a dictate of humaneness and Christianity, but also a necessity of conservative politics, which should aim to cultivate in the non- possessing classes of the population, who are at the same time the more numerous and least in- structed, the view that the State is not only a necessary but also a beneficent institution." This is directly opposed to Socialism which aims to abolish the distinction between possessing and non-possessing classes. It is as difficult to define Socialism as it is to define Orthodoxy ; whatever definition one offers, there is sure to be a Socialist to declare that the definition is wrong. For there are many types of Socialists. Among them are some discontented men who want a larger share of wage and a less share of work ; some cranks who think they could manage the universe, though they cannot manage themselves ; some idealists who dream beautiful dreams, but do not understand human conditions or human nature ; some great thinkers who have done good work for the world and whom the world ought to recognize as teachers and leaders ; and some in whom these contradictory qualities are mingled in various proportions. And as there are many types of Socialists, so there are many varieties of Socialism. I speak of a single type POLITICAL SOCIALISM 111 when I speak of Political Socialism, and, in order that I may not be accused of putting up a man of straw to knock him down, I invite these same Socialists to give my readers their definition of Socialism as they understand it. Says Mr. H. M. Hyndman : " In the end the entire power and means of production will belong to the State or its delegates, who will then be like the State itself, simply one great body of equal men organized to act in concert, with lead- ers chosen by themselves." l That was in 1883, my Socialist friend may say, twenty-seven years ago ; Socialism has changed since then. Consider, then, John Spar- go's definition, published in 1906, four years ago : " In the same general manner, we may sum- marize the principal functions of the State as follows : the State has the right and the power to organize and control the economic system, comprehending in that term the production and distribution of all social wealth, wherever private enterprise is dangerous to the social well-being, or is inefficient." And he adds in a note : " I use the word ' State' throughout in its largest, most comprehensive sense, as meaning the whole po- litical organization of society." 2 According to 1 Historical Basis of Socialism in England, p. 457. 3 Socialism, p. 219. 112 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Socialism as thus defined by two leading Social- ists, the political organization is to control and administer the industries of the community. Those are individual definitions, my Social- ist friend will say. Then compare with them an official definition from the German " Social Democratic Programme," Germany, October, 1891: Nothing but the conversion of capitalistic private ownership of the means of production the earth, and its fruits, mines, and quarries, raw material, tools, machines, means of exchange into social ownership, and the substitution of Socialistic production, carried on by and for society in the place of the present pro- duction of commodities for exchange, can effect such a revolution that, instead of large industries and the steadily growing capacities of common production be- ing, as hitherto, a source of misery and oppression to the classes whom they have despoiled, they may become a source of the highest well-being, and of the most perfect and comprehensive harmony. 1 English Political Socialism does not differ from Continental Political Socialism. It is thus epito- mized by Jane T. Stoddart in her summary of Socialistic Congresses : Its cardinal principle is that the State should take 1 The Erfurt " Social Democratic Programme " of October, 1891, The Socialists at Work, p. 170. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 113 out of private ownership the means of production, distribution, and exchange. This single sentence con- tains the quintessence of the creed drawn up at Social- ist Congresses. The workers, as Socialists believe, can be lifted out of their present misery only by the estab- lishment of a democratic Work-State. 1 Or, if this epitome by an outsider is questioned, the reader may take this, quoted by Professor R. T. Ely, from one of its well-known leaders : " Perhaps no society of Socialists includes in its membership a larger number of highly educated men than the Fabian Society of England. One of its members, Mr. William Clarke, defines a So- cialist as 'one who believes that the necessary instruments of production should be held and organized by the community, instead of by indi- viduals or groups of individuals, within or out- side of the community.' " 2 It may be said that the "community" is not synonymous with the "State." That is true; and some Socialists anticipate in the community two legislative or g'wcm-legislative bodies: one industrial, the other political. But neither is the public school district identical with the town or the county. And yet we speak of education by the State in modern democratic communities as 1 The New Socialism, p. 36. 2 The Strength and Weakness of Socialism, p. 24. 114 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY contrasted with education by the Church in the mediaeval feudal communities. The essence of Political Socialism is not the machinery by which the community will do its work, but the doctrine that all the tools and implements of organized labor shall be owned by the community and all or- ganized labor shall be directed by the community ; that, to quote again John Spargo, " the State has the right and the power to organize and control the economic system." It is also true that the Socialist State, as it is conceived by the Political Socialist, is in some important respects unlike the modern. In the view of some Socialists, all, or practically all, the injustices which now exist in society grow out of capitalism that is, the private ownership of means of production and will disappear when capitalization disappears and all the means of production are owned by the State. They hold, therefore, that there will no longer be any need of criminal laws or governmental power to pro- tect persons and property, and none for taxes because there will be no governmental expenses to be provided for. But this impossible vision deceives only the Socialists who dream; it does not deceive the Socialists who think. Mr. Morris Hillquit, himself a radical Socialist, after defin- ing the State by the sentence, " the State makes and enforces laws and levies taxes," goes on to POLITICAL SOCIALISM 115 define the Socialist State in the following para- graph: For the purposes of public works, health, safety, and relief, the Socialist commonwealth will need vast ma- terial resources, probably more than the modern State, and these resources, in whatever form and under what- ever designation, can come only from the wealth-pro- ducing members of the commonwealth thus there must be a direct or indirect tax on the labor or income of the citizen. The collection of this tax, the direction of the industries, and the regulation of the relations between the citizens will require some laws and some rules or instruments for their enforcement ; hence, even the element of coercion cannot be entirely absent in a Socialist society, at least not as far as the human mind can at present conceive. The Socialist society aa conceived by modern Socialists differs, of course, very radically from the modern State in form and substance. It is not a class State, it does not serve any part of the population, and does not rule any other part of the population ; it represents the interests of the entire community, and it is for the benefit of the entire com- munity that it levies taxes and makes and enforces laws. It is not the slave-holding State, nor the feudal State, nor the State of the bourgeoisie it is a Socialist State, but a State nevertheless, and since little or no- thing can be gained by inventing a new term, we shall hereafter designate the proposed organized Socialist society as the Socialist State. 1 1 Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 99, 100. 116 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Basing my definitions on those thus quoted from the advocates of Socialism, let me give my own. Political or State Socialism means this : That the city, or the county, or the State, or the Nation, or all four, each in its separate sphere, shall own all the tools and implements of collec- tive industry, all the trolleys, all the railways, all the factories, all the mines, all the forests, in a word, all those industrial enterprises which are carried on by groups of men acting together; and this State shall organize and direct this com- plicated industry as it now organizes and directs the army or the post-office ; and it shall assign to every one of us his place in this great indus- trial organization, and shall take the proceeds and divide them equitably among all the people. The thoughtful reader will perceive that Po- litical Socialism continues the wages system, though in a new form. Society will still be divided industrially into employer and employed. The State will become the employer ; all the citizens of the State the employed. We shall all be employees working for a wage. The work will be assigned to us, the wage determined for us by our employer. It is true that the all, constituted as a State, will be the employer of the all as individuals. In this sense, and in this sense only, will the employer and the employed be the same. But in a Socialist POLITICAL SOCIALISM 117 State all the members of the community would be as truly working under a wage system as are now the post-office clerks or the host of clerical employees at Washington or the soldiers in the standing army. Each man's task would be as- signed to him by the State, and by the State the hours and conditions of his labor would be de- termined and his wages allotted. This is not industrial liberty. It is industrial servitude to a new master. Because I believe in industrial liberty and not in industrial servitude to any master, I am opposed to Political Social- ism. " Conscience and honor," says H. A. Taine, " everywhere enjoin a man to retain for himself some portion of his independence." In Political Socialism the individual retains none of his in- dustrial independence. " If," continues M. Taine, " in every modern constitution the domain of the State ought to be limited, it is in modern democracy that it should be the most restricted." In Political Socialism the domain of the State is almost in- definitely extended. What the democratic State with unrestricted powers may do in destroying the independence of the individual M. Taine has well shown in his" History of the French Revolution." The curious reader will find the elaborate restric- tions imposed by such a State upon the industrial and economic liberty of the individual illustrated 118 THE SPIEIT OF DEMOCRACY in over thirty pages of Taine's " History of the French Resolution." * In this State " the social pact gives the social body absolute power over all its members." The State takes his products of commerce, manufacture, and agriculture, takes " grain from the farmer's barn, hay in the reaper's shed, cattle in the fold, wine in the vats,' hides at the butcher's, leather in the tanneries, soap, tal- low, sugar, brandy, cloths, linens, and the rest, in stores, depots, and warehouses," and pays for them in worthless paper, and sometimes not at all. It musters into military service all young men be- tween eighteen and twenty-five, and condemns to death whoever evades the military draft ; summons under pain of imprisonment all workmen who are needed for the service of the State, installs them and assigns them their tasks. It claims the right to close the churches, demolish the steeples, melt down the bells, send all the sacred vessels to the mint, proscribe every form of worship, exile the priests, change the market days so that no Catholics shall be able to buy fish on a fast day. It claims the right to put limits on individual fortunes, to fix the price at which articles may be sold, to de- termine the rate of wages, to enact that the servant who works for any citizen shall belong to his family and sit at his table. In this universal bond- 1 Volume iii, book 6, chapter 1. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 119 age to the State it claims the right to dissolve all other bonds, as those of employer to employed, of worshiper to the Church, of husband and wife, of parent and child. Marriage is held to be simply a civil contract ; it may be dissolved at any time at the option of the parties. Parental authority is denied : " It is cheating nature to enforce those rights through constraint. The only right that parents have is their protection and watchful- ness." Such are some of the claims of the leaders of Democratic absolutism in the hour of its tem- porary victory ; such some of the regulations which they made during the brief period of their supremacy. They amply justify the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville : If " ever the free institu- tions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority." They emphasize the truth that the absolutism of democracy is as dangerous as any other form of absolutism, and that it is as necessary for the pro- tection of society to limit the power of a democratic State as it is to limit the power of an individual monarch. That Political Socialism demands, on the one hand, a great extension of the functions of gov- ernment, and, on the other hand, the practical abolition of all checks on the power of the ma- jority, is sufficiently illustrated by a reference to 120 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY the platform of the Socialist party of the United States in the last Presidential election. That plat- form demanded as immediate measures " the col- lective ownership of all railways, telegraphs, tele- phones, steamship lines, and all other means of social transportation and communication"; "the collective ownership of all industries which are organized on a National scale, and in which com- petition has virtually ceased to exist " ; and the perpetual public ownership, and by implication cultivation, of all mines, quarries, forests, and water-power. And it also demanded the abolition of the Senate, and of the power of the Supreme Court to pass upon the constitutionality of legis- lation enacted by Congress, power of the majority to amend the Constitution, and the election of all judges by the people for short terms. Aftd these immediate measures were declared to be " but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole power of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry, and thus qome to their rightful inheritance." This last sentence appears to me to be a very clear definition of the aims of Political Socialism and a striking illustration of that " omnipotence of the majority" which Taine, over half a century ago, declared to be the greatest peril to America's free institutions. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 121 That the Socialist State would infringe individ- ual liberty is frankly conceded by some Socialis- tic writers. Thus Karl Kautsky says : " It is true enough that Socialistic production is incompat- ible with full freedom of work ; i. e., with the free- dom of the laborer to work where, when, and as he wills. But this freedom of the workman is impossi- ble under any organized association of laborers, whether founded on capitalistic or collectivist principles." Similarly, Antoine Menger says: " We should be wrong, however, if we rejected entirely the idea which lies at the basis of these objections. While it is certain that for the com- munity as a whole the lessening of economic freedom is not necessarily bound up with the democratic Work-State, the danger does undoubt- edly exist that this form of Government should misuse its great economic powers for the enslave- ment of the individual, as the present individu- alistic Power-State misuses its political supre- macy." But perhaps the most striking of these testimonies to the possible despotism which might arise in a Socialistic State is this programme laid down by M. Deslinieres : (a) The granting of arms to the executive gov- ernment for the prevention of all disorder from the beginning. This right is to be used with extreme mod- eration. 122 THE SPIKIT OF DEMOCRACY (5) The suspension of the liberty of the press and of public meeting at the will of the government. (c) The restoration to the government of the right of appointing municipal bodies. (e) All men of full age who have not yet reached the age of retirement are to be required to work in the public service, in return for a fair salary. (e) For those who refuse, the punishment will be confiscation of all income above the wage of a journey- man of the third class ; for those with a smaller in- come, enrollment among the pensionaries of the social poor law. (f) Any one who, without permission from the government, lives more than three months abroad is to lose his national rights and his property. 1 It is true that the advocates of Political So- cialism indignantly deny that it infringes indi- vidual liberty. But after a somewhat careful study of their denials I cannot see that they do anything more than show that capitalism also infringes individual liberty. Their general con- clusion amounts to that frankly avowed by Karl Kautsky, that "the freedom of the laborer to work where, when, and as he wills " is impos- sible under any system. Mr. Edmond Kelly 2 does indeed argue, with elaborate comparative 1 All these quotations are taken from Jane T. Stoddart's book, The New Socialism, chapter 7. 2 Twentieth Century Socialism, pp. 227-234. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 123 statistics, that a work-day of four hours would be sufficient in the Socialist State for self-support, giving the rest of the waking hours for leisure. But leisure for twelve hours is not liberty for sixteen. A slave is not a free man because the master who allots him his tasks and gives him his support only requires four hours a day to the task allotted. This sacrifice of liberty in the Socialist State is supposed to be compensated for by the at- tainment of justice. The motto of democracy is liberty, equality, fraternity. By this Socialistic programme liberty is thrown overboard in order that equality and fraternity may be retained. I believe that no equality or fraternity can exist that is not founded on justice, and that the Socialistic State would sacrifice justice as well as liberty. There is neither equality nor fraternity in a state of Society in which the individual is denied his natural rights, and these the Socialist State does deny. The Socialist State organizes all the industries, employs all the workers, allots them their tasks, assigns them their wages, and divides to the members of the community the product of the labor. How shall this product be divided? Upon this question State Socialists are not agreed. But every scheme of division which they have 124 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY proposed threatens to violate fundamental human rights. One scheme proposes as the principle of divi- sion, " From every man according to his ability, to every man according to his need." To so modern and clear-minded a writer as Morris Hillquit this appears to be the ideal. " To the Socialists," he says, " the old communistic motto, 1 From each according to his ability, to each ac- cording to his needs,' generally appears as the ideal rule of distribution in an enlightened hu- man society, and quite likely the time will come when that high standard will be generally adopted by civilized communities." 1 High standard of what ? Social justice ? No ! That is a principle of generosity, not of justice. Justice requires that society should secure to me what is my own. Generosity pleads with me to use what is my own for the benefit of my less fortunate neigh- bor. For society to take from me the product of my labor and give it to one who is more needy than I am is neither justice nor generosity. What the individual produces by his unaided labor is his. It belongs to him because he has projected himself into it, and it is thus, as it were, a part of himself. The tailor makes two over- coats. They are his because they are the product 1 Socialism in Theory and Practice, p. 117. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 125 of his industry. He is wearing one and carrying the other over his arm when a strange man ap- proaches him and takes the second overcoat from him, saying, " I have no overcoat, you have two ; I will take the second overcoat from you on the principle ' From every man according to his abil- ity, to every man according to his need.' " That is highway robbery. Or the tailor hangs his two overcoats on the hat-tree in his hall. A man who has no overcoat creeps into the hall, takes one from the hat-tree and carries it off. He is acting on the principle " From every man according to his ability, to every man according to his need." That is thieving. Observe, I do not say that Political Socialism is either highway robbery or thieving ; I say that it has in it the same element of injustice in that it takes from the man his property without his consent and without com- pensation ; and that is always unjust. Or the State comes into the tailor's house and takes one of his overcoats and gives it to his unpro- vided neighbor, and justifies the act by the motto, " From every man according to his ability, to every man according to his need." That is Political Socialism in one of its forms. What I have produced by my labor no man, no body of men, no State, has a right to take from me without giving me adequate compensation for it. 126 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY My Socialistic friend says, Does not the State take your property by taxation ? Yes, and it gives me the protection of a just Government in compensation. If it does not give me such pro- tection, then the State is a robber. Or he says : Does not the capitalist take the laborer's pro- duct, give him what the capitalist thinks, or ap- pears to think, is a just return for the labor, and keep the rest of the product for himself ? Yes ! And that is the reason why I object to capitalism. And the injustice involved in the capitalist tak- ing the labor product, paying a wage for the la- bor, and appropriating the rest of the product as he thinks best is not cured by having the State take the labor product, pay a wage for the labor, and appropriate the rest as the State thinks best. A second method of distribution is thus stated by Annie Besant : Since in public affairs ethics are apt to go to the wall and appeals to social justice too*often fall on deaf ears, it is lucky that in this case ethics and convenience co- incide. The impossibility of estimating the separate value of each man's labor with any really valid result, the friction which would arise, the jealousies which would be provoked, the inevitable discontent, favorit- ism, and jobbery that would prevail : all these things will drive the Communal Council into the right path, equal remuneration for all workers. 1 1 The Fabian Essays on Socialism, pp. 148, 149. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 127 Annie Besant is not an authority on Socialism, and " equal remuneration for all workers " finds few advocates among Socialistic writers, though it is stated by Jessica Peixotto to be in the pro- gramme of the Modern French Socialists. 1 It is by no means certain that it would not find many advocates among the workers in a Socialist State. The fact that the somewhat similar motto, " Equal wages for equal work," the equality of work being determined by the official position occu- pied and the hours spent, was enthusiastically advocated as a principle of absolute justice by a large number of schoolteachers in New York City, is ominously significant. Whatever may be said of that motto, Mrs. Besant's " Equal remu- neration for all workers" is palpably unjust. The worker is entitled to be paid for his work according to the benefit which he confers, not according to the time during which he is em- ployed. The bank president's work is worth more to the community than the bank porter's work. Justice demands that each man should receive the product of his labor because it is his labor. If that is impossible, then he should receive its equivalent. 1 " The average labor hour is the unit of value, and all distri- bution and exchange will take place on the basis of such a unit of value." Jessica Peixotto, The French Revolution and Mod- ern French Socialism, p. 354. 128 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY To secure to each worker such a just equiva- lent for his work some Socialists propose to con- stitute a Board or Council which would take all that is produced by the organized labor of the State, sell it, and divide the* proceeds among the workingmen as the Boa'rd might deem equitable. The practical objections which Mrs. Besant tersely presents to that scheme, # the jealousies which would be provoked, ,the inevitable discontent, favoritism, and jobbery that would prevail," are impliedly recognized by other Socialistic writers. Mr. Edmond Kelly thinks that " it will be indis- pensable to submit these matters to an industrial parliament in which every industry will be repre- sented." i He does not explain why it will be in- dispensable, but we may assume that his objec- tion to an administrative board is the one assigned by Mrs. Besant. But past political experience does not indicate that parliaments are immune from jealousies and jobbery. A principal objection to a protective % tariff is the fact that the various in- terests represented in Congress struggle each for the largest possible share in the protection. One is appalled in imagining what would be the con- ditions in an industrial parliament whose main business it would be to divide the proceeds of the industry of the Socialist State among all 1 Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 305. POLITICAL SOCIALISM 129 the officials and the workers in the socialized industry. Finally, some Socialistic writers pass by the question how the proceeds of industry shall be distributed in the Socialist State with the air of " we will cross that bridge when we come to it." But we have already come to it. It is the crux of the whole question. The only reason for any form of Socialism is the fact that under our pre- sent industrial system the rewards of labor are unevenly distributed. He who proposes to us a better system must make it clear to us that his proposal involves a better distribution. The whole labor problem is nothing else than this : How in organized industry should the product be shared by those who are engaged in it ? In our modern complicated society the laborer cannot avail him- self of the product of his labor. The chef in a hotel cannot eat all the food he cooks, the tailor cannot wear all the clothes he makes, the shoe- maker in a factory cannot use the eyeholes which he punches in the shoes for the shoe-strings, nor can the tanner use the skins which he cures. Since the workman cannot receive the product of his labor, justice demands that he should re- ceive the equivalent for that product. The labor problem reduced to its simplest terms is this : In what proportion should the value of an article 130 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY made by a score of cooperating workers be divided among them? To give it all to the tool-owner and leave him to give what he will or what he can be made to give to the laborer is unjust. To require every man to contribute all he can and allow him to take only what he needs is unjust. To give an equal share to every worker regard- less of what he has produced is unjust. To unite all the workers in any community in one great industrial corporation, and to have a Board of Directors elected by the stockholders that is, all the citizens in the community to divide the product as they think best, is at least an attempt to secure justice. But past political experience does not justify the sanguine hopes of those who expect that it will in fact produce a just result. I do not object to Political or State Socialism because it is an impossible ideal ; I do not think that any true ideal is impossible. Whatever ought to be done can be done. My objection to State or Political Socialism is that it is not an ideal ; that it is the reverse of an ideal ; that it would be unjust and injurious to all concerned ; that it would take the community out of a rather un- comfortable frying-pan and put it into an intoler- ably hot fire. Whatever evils exist in the present industrial system and I think there are such evils and that they are very great will be cured, POLITICAL SOCIALISM 131 not by a denial of the fundamental rights of men, but by a clear recognition and a better pro- tection of those rights ; not by the destruction of industrial liberty, but by the development of industrial liberty ; not by a continuance of the wages system with the State the only employer and all citizens wage-earners, but by the substi- tution for the wages system, in which a few men own the tools and implements of industry and the many work with them, a system of Indus- trial Democracy, in which the tool-owners will be workers, and the workers will be tool-owners ; a state of society in which the present division into two classes of capitalists and laborers will come to an end because the capitalists will become laborers and the laborers will become capitalists. One may call this Socialism if he will. But it is voluntary, not compulsory Socialism. It does not sacrifice individual liberty to organization, but makes organization at once the product and the instrument of individual liberty. CHAPTER IX INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY THE real and radical remedy for the evils of capi- talism is the organization of an industrial system in which the laborers, or tool-users, will them- selves become the capitalists, or tool-owners, in which, therefore, the class distinction which exists under capitalism will be abolished. This is some- times called Socialism. Thus Mr. Thomas Kirkup, the author of the well-known article in the En- cyclopaedia Britannica on Socialism, defines the system in the following sentences : " Whereas in- dustry is at present carried on by private capital- ists served by wage-labor, it must in the future be conducted by associated or cooperating work- men jointly owning the means of production. We believe, on grounds both of theory and history, that this must be accepted as the cardinal prin- ciple of Socialism. . . . Against the evils arising from the practical and virtual monopoly of land and capital by the few, society would protect itself by a system of joint ownership of the means of production, and against the evils of unlimited competition, by the principle of associated labor INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 133 systematically working for the general good." x It is evident, however, that this is something very different from Political Socialism, and Mr. Kirkup makes this distinction very clear in his volume. To avoid that confusion which inevitably arises from using the same word to distinguish two radically different systems, I call this phase of Socialism " Industrial Democracy." Let me first make the difference between the two systems clear to the reader. A great cotton factory employs, let us say, a thousand hands, and is owned jointly by a thou- sand stockholders. The stockholders own the tools and implements with which the business is carried on, the wage-earners are dependent on the consent of these stockholders for the right to carry on the business. It is evident that if the thousand employees should become the thousand stockholders, the factory would no longer be an autocratic institution ; it would be democratic. The workers with the tools would be the owners of the tools and would direct the management of the industry. It is also evident from history that State control is not the same as liberty, even though the State be democratic in its Constitu- tion. In England the State controls and, to some extent, supports the Church, but it is the churches 1 An Inquiry into Socialism, p. 105. 134 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY that are not owned or controlled by the State that are known as Free Churches. When in demo- cratic New England the Puritan State controlled the Church, when in democratic Virginia the Episcopal Church was controlled by the State, religion was not free. Freedom came when the Church was emancipated from control by the State, and those who worshiped in the Church were given control of the Church. Industry will not be made free by making the State the owner of the railways, the mines, and the factories. It will be made free when the men who work on the railways, in the mines, and in the factories own the tools and the implements of their industry; in other words, become the capitalists. Does the reader say, This is an unpractical ideal? I reply, that it is not only practical but practiced. It is not only possible for the same man to be capitalist and workingman, it is a com- mon experience. A concrete illustration helps to make clear a general principle. I have a little stock in The Outlook Publishing Company; to that extent I am a capitalist. I am one of the directors of The Outlook Publishing Company ; to that extent I am an employer of labor. I am a wage-earner in the Outlook Company ; so I be- long with the laboring classes. It is quite possi- ble that I might, as a wage-earner, desire a larger INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 135 salary than I, as Director, think it prudent to give; but even in that case I could hardly get up a very serious quarrel with myself on the subject. Many of our bank presidents, railway officials, and fac- tory managers are capitalists, managers, and wage-earners. What I look forward to is the time coming when what is now the exception will be- come the rule ; when the great mass of wage- earners will become capitalists, and will, as capi- talists, elect the managers to direct the enterprises in which they are engaged. When my friend says to me, That is an impossible dream, I reply, Nothing is impossible that is right. More than that, I can see in the history about me move- ments that are tending to this consummation. Those movements wise men will endeavor to guide, perhaps to expedite, but not to halt or hinder. We are beginning to see that the common peo- ple are already capitalists if their rights are ac- corded to them. A commonwealth owns wealth in common. A first step toward industrial de- mocracy is securing to the common people this wealth which by right belongs to them. It must be nearly forty years ago that Senator Booth, of California, put the railway problem in a sentence : Formerly the means of locomotion were poor and the highways were public property; 136 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY now the means of locomotion are admirable and the highways are private property. We have com- paratively recently discovered that the highways ought not to be private property ; that if they are operated as private property for private inter- ests, public interests are sure to suffer. Since this book was commenced the railways have practi- cally agreed with the President of the United States that in the future the alteration in the rates which they charge for carrying freight and passengers over these highways shall be sub- mitted to, and approved by, the Government that is, by representatives of the people of the United States before the change is put in op- eration. The railways themselves have come to see that it is not even for the interest of the own- ers of the property that it shall be operated under purely private direction and for purely private interests. It does not follow that because the highways of right belong to the people that the people must manage them. The Constitution provides that the United States shall have power "to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin." The United States has delegated to pri- vate banks the right to issue the currency on which the people depend for their interchange of commodities in other words, to manage the INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 137 banking ; but it has brought these private banks under such Governmental control that they are operated for the benefit of the public, and the value of the money which they issue is as secure as if it were issued by the Government itself. Thus in our banking we have a combination of private interests and public regulation cooperating to promote the public welfare. It is not only en- tirely conceivable but highly probable that we can work out in somewhat similar fashion a method by which the railways will be operated by private enterprise under Governmental regulation so as to promote the interests both of the private own- ers and the public users of the highways. What- ever may be the solution of the problem, we have already reached the conclusion that the public has a quasi ownership in the public highways, or, at least, that right of regulation and control which we are accustomed to connect with ownership. In a previous chapter I have insisted that every individual is justly entitled to the product of his labor. He is not justly entitled to anything but the product of his labor, except as he derives his title thereto from the voluntary act of the com- munity. He is not entitled to ownership in the sunshine, or the air, or the ocean, or the navi- gable rivers. This is universally conceded. He has no more right to private ownership in the 138 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY unnavigable rivers than in the rivers that are navigable ; no more right in the soil and its con- tents than in the ocean and its contents. What- ever rights to navigable rivers and the soil he possesses he has derived, not from his own ex- ertions, but from the action of the community to which the soil and the rivers belong. This is not the affirmation of a radical or Socialistic re- former, it is the affirmation of English and Amer- ican law. For the convenience of the reader I will turn here, not to the law books, but to the encyclopaedias, which give in compact form the principles laid down in the law books : There is no such thing as absolute property in land, says the chief English writer on that subject ; a man can only have an estate or interest in land. Every landowner, in the popular sense of the phrase, is, in the eyes of the law, a tenant only; and such is the case with the largest and most unlimited interests known to the law that of an estate in fee simple. The owner in fee is the tenant of some one else, who, in his turn, is the tenant of another, and so on, until the last and only absolute owner is reached, viz., the King, from whom directly or indirectly all lands are held. 1 This principle is equally recognized in Ameri- can law : 1 Encyclopcedia Britannica, " Feudalism," p. 107. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 139 Personal property was left, as in other legal systems, subject to ownership in the full sense of that term. But real property could only be "held" of some one else and in subordination to the rights of a superior holder. We have, therefore, landholders, not land- owners. The distinction is of fundamental and far- reaching importance. The only owner of the land is the King, the State. The subject can have at most an estate in it, i. e., a status with reference to it. The greatest estate possible the pure fee simple absolute is less than complete ownership, being a derivative and subordinate right, subject to the superior claims of him whether a private person or the State of whom the land is held. Property in land, therefore, is not the land itself, but an estate of longer or shorter duration in the land, together with certain rights of use and enjoyment. Nor are these mere statements of abstract and unpractical principles. In fact, all land titles in America are derived from the original owner, the Government. Land titles in the East are largely derived from Colonial grants by the King, who represented the people of Great Britain ; land titles in the West from National grants by the Federal Government, which also represented the people. The people were the landowners, and they still retain in Great Britain, and in all the States of the Union, a certain indefinable interest in the land, and of this legal interest they avail 140 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY themselves in such public acts as the taking of real estate for a public park or a National high- way, not at the price for which the owner chooses to sell it, but at the price which the State thinks it right to pay. At the present time the people of the United States still own, absolutely and unquestionably own, millions of acres of land which they have never granted to private parties. Of this land they are both the owners and the holders. Some of it is forest lands containing valuable tim- ber; some of it mining lands containing gold, or silver, or copper, or iron; some of it coal lands; and some of it, at present, unfertile lands which depend for their fertility on either irri- gation or drainage. The people of the United States have recently waked up to the fact that they are immense landowners, and are consider- ing the question how they can make this owner- ship most profitable to themselves. Mr. Roosevelt was not the first to discover this land ownership, or to speak of it, but he has spoken of it in such a way that the whole Nation has listened. In his address at Jamestown, Virginia, June 10, 1907, he put the whole so-called Conservation problem in a sentence, as " the question of utiliz- ing the natural resources of the Nation in a way that will be of the most benefit to the Nation as INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 141 a whole." Whether the Nation shall, through National agents, cut down the forest trees and sell the timber, open the mines and extract the gold and silver and copper and iron, operate the coal mines, and retain the ownership of the reclaimed agricultural lands and rent them to farmers ; or whether it shall pursue some other method of utilizing the natural resources of the Nation in a way that will be of the most benefit to the Nation as a whole, is a question which I need not discuss here. Personally, I believe that those results will be best utilized for the benefit of the Nation as a whole by the combination of pri- vate enterprise and public oversight, such as we have already proved practicable in the case of the banks, and are proving practicable in the case of the railways. But all I am interested in doing here is to point out to the reader that because the people of the United States own these forest lands, mining lands, coal lands, and agricultural lands, they are already large capitalists. Conser- vation means that they shall not put this capital up to be raffled for and seized upon by the most enterprising, energetic, and perhaps unscrupulous. In addition, many millions of acres of land which formerly belonged to the people of the United States have been given away or sold for a song, and are now owned by private parties. 142 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY But recur to the statement in the American En- cyclopedia : " The greatest estate possible the pure fee simple absolute is less than complete ownership " ; or recur to the statement in the Encyclopaedia Britannica : " Every landowner, in the popular sense of the phrase, is, in the eye of the law, a tenant only." According, then, to the recognized principles of law as epitomized in these two encyclopaedias, the people of the United States, or, under our Constitution, of the indi- vidual States, have some interest in the lands which have passed into private ownership. It was the discovery, or the invention, of Henry George, though in a sense he derived it from ear- lier writers, that the people of the State already collected some portion of this interest by the taxes which they levied on the land, and it was his proposition that in the future the people of the State should practically claim the rights of landlord which the law theoretically declared that they possessed, and should levy on the land a tax equivalent to a fair rental. This rental would be for the land only, not for the houses and barns which had been built upon it, nor for the or- chards which had been planted, nor for the crops which had been raised ; because the houses, and barns, and orchards, and crops are the product of private industry, and therefore are private pro- INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 143 perty. The rental would be adjusted to the value of the land in its natural state. Mr. Thomas G. Shearman, in his work on "Natural Taxation," has made a careful estimate for the purpose of showing that if such a ground rent were collected from the unimproved land, based on its valuation as unimproved, it would be more than sufficient to pay all National and local taxes and still leave a considerable margin to the landholders. 1 While we are thus coming to realize that we are already capitalists, that we have a right of quasi ownership in the railways, and unlimited ownership in millions of acres of valuable land, and a landlord's interest in many millions more, we are also beginning to acquire ability to co- operate in the management of great estates by means of voluntary organizations. These volun- tary organizations are called corporations. A cor- poration, in its modern form, is a democratic con- trivance by which a number of property-owners put their property together for the sake of se- curing greater efficiency in administration, and divide the profits of the enterprise between them 1 Thomas G. Shearman, Natural Taxation, chap, x, p. 147: " Thus all national and local taxes, if collected exclusively from ground rents, would absorb only 44^ per cent of those rents, leaving to the owners of the bare land a clear annual rent of 8763,252,000, besides the absolutely untaxed income from all build- ings and improvements upon their land." 144 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY in proportion to their respective investments. It is thus a contrivance for both the concentration and the distribution of wealth. It is concentra- tion in work; it is distribution in enjoyment. Silas Marner could in a lifetime lay by enough out of his scant wages to buy a single loom with which to earn his daily bread ; but no man can in a single lifetime lay by, out of the profits of his unaided industry, money enough to buy a great woolen mill. Therefore, a number of men unite, each paying his share, conduct the woolen mill, and divide the profits of the organized weaving. There is thus ready to the hands of the Silas Marners a means for cooperation, for each one of them can own a share in the common tool which they combine to operate, and so share in the product of their cooperative industry. The larger the corporation and the greater the num- ber of stockholders, the better chance there is for Silas Marner to become a stockholder. Three conditions are necessary to enable him to become thus a part owner with his fellow-laborer in the tools which they are using in their joint indus- try : honest administration of the corporation; facility for investment in its. property; means with which to make the investment. It is first necessary that the corporation should be administered honestly ; that is, in the interest INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 145 of the owners, not in the special interests of the directors and managers. It cannot be doubted that our standards of commercial honesty are im- proving in America. Operations which twenty- five years ago men admired as shrewd they now denounce as dishonest. For operations like those which netted millions of dollars to the operators years ago, men are now serving their time under criminal sentence in the State's prison. This gradual improvement in the standards of honesty has been accompanied with a demand for closer Governmental inspection of the great corpora- tions. The corporation tax law, recently passed by Congress, compels the corporations to file their financial reports at Washington, where they will be subjected to the inspection of the parties interested. We no longer think that men may issue stock to represent their property in any amount and sell it at any price they please. Some States have already enacted laws against stock- watering. Congress has failed to enact the law which was proposed to prevent the stock- water- ing of corporations engaged in interstate com- merce; but we may be pretty sure that a future session will enact it. If I own a horse worth $100, and offer it to my neighbor for $250, there is nothing dishonest in the transaction, if it is not accompanied with false statements, 146 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY expressed or implied. But if I divide the horse ownership into twenty-five shares of $10 each, and sell the stock to my church for $250, and the church transforms the shares into $20 each, and raffles the horse at a church fair for $500, somebody is cheated. The defense made on stock- watering is that it anticipates the future value of the property. If it is a colt worth $100 that is thus raffled for at $500, the transaction is still dishonest. The property of a corporation should be estimated at its present real value, not at its imagined future value, and it should be so or- ganized and operated that every workingman can put his savings into its stock with as much safety as he now puts them into a savings bank. Not only honesty in administration of the cor- poration, however, is necessary, but also facility for investment in its property. The workingman must have a fair chance to buy the stock in an honestly managed corporation. Corporations are beginning to see that it is for their interest to have the workingmen co-capitalists j they are be- ginning to open the door to capitalistic partici- pation with them. The most striking illustration of this is furnished by the United States Steel Corporation, nearly half of whose workingmen are shareholders. In the proportion in which workingmen become owners of stock they become INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 147 owners of the tools with which their industry is carried on. Just in that proportion the class divi- sion into laborers and capitalists begins to disap- pear. But the workingman must not only be sure that the corporation is honestly managed, and is therefore a safe investment, and must not only have the opportunity for purchasing stock and so becoming a shareholder, he must have also the means with which to purchase. It is reported by the Comptroller of the Currency that there were in 1909 nearly nine million depositors in the savings banks of the United States who owned therein $3,713,405,709. A considerable propor- tion of these depositors are wage-earners; they belong to the creditor class ; they are capitalists loaning their capital through the savings banks to the managers of great enterprises. When the great enterprises are so honestly managed that stock in the enterprise is as safe as a deposit in the savings bank, many of these savings-bank depositors will become shareholders in the enter- prise which, by their work, they are carrying on. When every post-office in the United States be- comes a savings bank, and it is as easy for the workingman to deposit his money with his Gov- ernment for safe-keeping as it is now for him to send a registered letter, we may reasonably 148 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY expect that the savings will be greatly increased an expectation which is abundantly justified by the history of other countries. The anti-saloon wave which is springing up over the country at the present time gives further justification for this faith in the economic future of the common people of America. For this movement is, in part at least, an economic one ; a protest against the waste involved in the drink traffic ; a protest against a traffic which produces, as has been well said, not public wealth, but public illth. A right to labor and an opportunity to labor are barren rights without capacity to labor. He who can contribute to the world's wealth only the product of muscular toil contributes very little. For science has learned how to set nature's forces to work, and the muscles of man compete at great disadvantage with the muscles of nature. That is not a healthy individual who labors only with his hands while his brain lies fallow, nor is he healthy who labors only with his brain while his hands are idle. The brain and the muscle were given by the Creator to the same man that he might use them both. To divide society into brain-workers and hand-toilers is to make a social order contrary to nature. This we are beginning to see. Very slowly and afar off we are follow- ing Germany, whose recent unexampled- in dus- INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 149 trial development is partly due to her recogni- tion of the value of industrial education, which occupies in her system equal place with literary education. When our educational processes, in- tellectual and moral, equip as thoroughly and as broadly for so-called industrial as for so-called professional pursuits, we shall give to working- men that equality of capacity which is really es- sential to equality of opportunity. The progress which we have made and are making in this di- rection is one of the hopeful signs of the times. In my college days there was not, I believe, an engineering school in the country, and there was practically no laboratory work in the colleges. Now in all our more progressive communities there is the industrial as well as the literary High School. Thus democratic America is, in spite of some opposition and more indifference, gradually abolishing what is called the proleta- riat, by giving to all men the opportunity and developing in all men the capacity, intellectual and moral, to be sharers in the wealth of the community. While in the corporations men are learning to cooperate on the basis of mutual trust and con- fidence in great industrial enterprises, in labor unions men who live chiefly by the industry of their hands are learning how to cooperate on the 150 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY basis of their avowed motto, "An injury to one is an injury to all; and a benefit to one is a benefit to all." I have no space here to discuss at any length the debit and credit side of the labor union. It has its evils, and some of them have been very serious. But it has taught working- men to cooperate in a common movement for the common good; it has compelled capitalists to pay respect to workingmen because they have become a force that must be reckoned with ; it has made workingmen, in a small way, capitalists by contributing to the common fund, which has sometimes reached considerable proportions; it has won for the workingman shorter hours, bet- ter wages, and improved conditions which other- wise he would not have obtained ; and, by train- ing in habits of cooperation and combination, it has laid the foundation for a future perfected industrial democracy. Perhaps the most valuable contribution to industrial democracy made by the trade unions is the increased respect for the workingmen which they have won from the em- ployers. For in democracy good will is of little value unless it is founded on respect. So far from promoting future class war, by the power to wage successful war which these organizations have created, they have laid solid foundations for future and final industrial peace INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 151 Conservation, the single tax, the growth of corporations, the beginnings of profit-sharing through stockholding, the development of the industrial virtues, thrift and temperance, and of industrial intelligence, and the growth of labor unions, are unconsciously cooperating movements toward industrial democracy. The progress which has been made in the last quar- ter-century is little realized even by students of economic life. It does not come within the scope of this book to enter upon a balancing of statis- tics. I believe, however, in spite of some indica- tions to the contrary, that we are living in an age of increasing distribution of wealth; that the statement of Edward Bernstein is abundantly justified : " The number of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees." * The French Revolution broke up the great feudal estates of France into small holdings. The recent land legislation of Great Britain is producing the same effect, at least in Ireland. The Civil War has had a similar tendency in the South, and I am informed on very good authority that recently emancipated negroes now own a total amount of 1 Evolutionary Socialism, Introduction, p. xi. 152 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY land equal in area to the whole of the New Eng- land States. I have already pointed out the fact that the corporation makes possible the division of industrial wealth among a large number of owners, and Mr. Edward Bernstein and Mr. Charles B. Spahr have shown that this division is actually taking place. Recent legislation and recent court decisions point out to us how we can redistribute the wealth which has been con- centrated in too few hands and how we can prevent such concentration in the future. The Courts have held that a progressive inheritance tax is constitutional; so eminent a capitalist as Mr. Andrew Carnegie has commended it as in- herently just and wise. By such a tax we may take from the estate of the multi-millionaire a considerable proportion of the amount of wealth which has really been created largely by the com- munity, and can return it to the community again. These great accumulations have been for the most part made by railways and by land operations. We can bring, and we are bringing, the railways under such Governmental control as will make them, after paying a reasonable tax to the owners, give the remainder of their profits to the public, either through a franchise tax or through lower rates, and both methods have been declared constitutional by the Courts. What the INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 153 Courts have declared legal the conscience of the best and ablest of the railway managers is be- ginning to recognize as just. Said Mr. William Henry Baldwin, Jr. : " The exact fair cost should be capitalized, and after capital has had its fair return and business efficiency is maintained, the surplus is to go where it belongs, to the public." * We can collect a rental in the form of a tax for the landowner (the public) from the land- holder, and in the form of a royalty on all tim- ber cut and all minerals extracted from the soil ; and England's recent Budget is a movement, and a successful movement, in this direction. We can prevent stock-watering, and can discourage, if we cannot altogether prevent, stock-gambling ; and the recent legislation against other forms of gambling, and the increasing popular condemna- tion of gambling in all its forms, give reasonable hope of a time when the attempt to get some- thing for nothing, whatever form it takes, will be accounted as immoral, even if it cannot by law be made as criminal, as theft, forgery, and embezzlement. Said Abraham Lincoln in 1861 : " Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the 1 J. G. Brooks, An American Citizen, p. 126. 154 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of the community exists within that relation. . . . There is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition of life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent pen- niless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all gives hope to all, and consequently energy and progress and improvement of condition to all." In these sentences Abraham Lincoln points the way toward the solution of our labor problem. What many independent men have done as indi- viduals in transferring themselves from the labor- ing class without capital to the capitalistic class, yet still continuing their labor, I hope to see la- borers as a class do for themselves. I hope to see a state of society in which there will be few or no capitalists who do not have to labor, and few or no laborers who are compelled to remain all their INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 155 lives without becoming capitalists ; a state of so- ciety in which no man will live on the fruits of another man's labor, and no man will be denied the fruits of his own labor. This is what I mean by industrial democracy. More specifically, it means the universal diffusion of the economic virtues temperance, honesty, and truth ; the cooperation of the head and hands in an indus- trial partnership ; a just and equitable division of the products of their joint industry between the tool-owners and the tool-users ; a fair opportunity for the tool-user to become part owner of the tools that he labors with ; growing cooperation between the laborer and the capitalist, or the tool- user and the tool-owner, in both ownership of the tool and the direction of the industry ; and a frank recognition of the fundamental truth that every individual is entitled to the product of his individual industry, to a just proportion of the product which in joint industry he has helped to create, and to a participation in that common wealth which, being produced by no individual industry, belongs of right to the entire commu- nity. Democracy appears to me to be slowly but surely coming to a recognition of these principles. In the recognition of these principles and their incorporation in the industrial life of the com- munity is the solution of our labor problem. CHAPTER X THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT IN November, 1909, three hundred miners were entombed in a mine at Cherry, near Spring Val- ley, Illinois, for a week. The living were here imprisoned with the dead. At the end of that time twenty-two miners were rescued alive. They had kept themselves free from the fatal gas by building a barricade. Saved from death by suffo- cation, they were threatened with death by thirst. Two of these men, self-constituted leaders by virtue of their character, gave orders for the pro- tection of the little community. They directed that the three members of the party who were sick should have the first chance at the little pools of water that were in the depressions that had been scooped out of the veins of coal. Against these orders some of the men revolted, and one was discovered stealing water from one of the sick miners. He was seized by the guard whom the self-constituted leaders had appointed and, after a struggle, was felled to the ground and made a prisoner. Such is always the origin of government. For ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 157 the protection of the community some man, or some body of men, exercise control, to which usually the majority yield willing obedience, and, if the government is successful, the minority an unwill- ing obedience. This government is always based upon power. A command is not a command unless there is power to enforce it. Without such power it is only advice. When one man, or a group of men, get such control in a community that they can make the rest obey their commands, there is the beginning of government ; and all govern- ments in the history of the world have begun in this way. Parental government is no exception to this fundamental principle. In the well-ordered family the child obeys the requirements of his parents because they are his parents and have a right to demand submission to their authority, as in a well-ordered State the citizens obey the gov- ernment because it is the government and has a right to demand submission to its authority. This government may be that of one strong man ruling over the rest, in which case it is an autocracy ; it may be a small body of men, or class of men, ruling over the rest, then it is an oli- garchy ; it may be the many ruling over the rest, then it is a democracy. But it is not a govern- ment at all unless the ruler, be he one, few, or many, has a recognized authority to issue com- 158 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY mands and power to enforce obedience to them. This power may be that of an armed force, then the government is a military government ; it may be a traditional or inherited power exercised by a class and resting upon tradition, then it is an hereditary aristocracy ; it may be that of a se- lected body of office-holders intrusted by long custom with practically irresponsible power, then it is a bureaucracy ; it may be the power of con- centrated wealth exercised through political forms that may be either monarchic, oligarchic, aristo- cratic, or democratic. Then, whatever the politi- cal forms, the government is a plutocracy. To these historic forms of government our fathers attempted to add another self-govern- ment. It was founded upon three fundamental principles, the truth of which was tacitly assumed rather than explicitly expressed. They were : First, that the mass of men are better able to govern themselves than the few are to govern them ; that the perils from the ignorance of the governed are less than the perils from the selfish- ness of the governors. . Second, that therefore men should be left free to manage their own affairs, and only their own affairs; that therefore each man should govern himself in respect to those things that concern only himself, and each community should govern ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 159 itself in those things which concern only itself. Hence grew up local self-government and the Federal system : the town government for the town, the municipal government for the city, the county government for the county, the State government for the State, and, finally, the Fed- eral Government for those National interests which concern the people of all the towns, cities, counties, and States. Hence the provision of the Constitution that " the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor pro- hibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." l Third, that men are not born able to govern themselves as fish are to swim, or birds are to fly, but that all men have a dominant capacity for self-government ; that they must be, and they can be, educated ; hence the public-school system. Thus was the new Nation born, inspired by a new ideal, and founded on a new political faith faith in humanity. But it needed education in a school of conflict. The Declaration of Independence was deemed, both in the South and in the North, to be appli- cable only to the white race. Slavery, which both 1 It is true that this is a subsequent Amendment to the Con- stitution, but there is no doubt that it expresses the spirit of the original document, and of those who framed that document. 160 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY in the South and in the North our fathers ex- pected would gradually disappear, grew with our growth and strengthened with our strength. It created in the South what may be called a feudal democracy, a type of aristocracy existing under democratic forms. The war between the two ideals of political life, the Southern and the Northern, established for the Republic two prin- ciples : first, the doctrine that all governments exist for the benefit of the governed is as appli- cable to the government of the negro as to the government of the white man ; second, a gov- ernment founded on self-government is not weak but strong strong enough to meet successfully what was perhaps the greatest revolt against government which the world has ever seen. This war at home was followed by one between auto- cracy and democracy, between the Land of the Inquisition and the Land of the Public School. As the Confederates had established the power of the Federal Government within the borders of the Republic, so the Spanish War established the power of the Federated Republic among the gov- ernments of the world. If it did not make the Republic a world power, it at least won for that world power a world recognition. Meanwhile, the country has grown with un- precedented growth in territory from thirteen ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 161 feeble colonies along the Atlantic Coast to a Re- public overspreading half a continent ; in popu- lation from three or four millions to eighty millions ; in wealth from poverty to one of the richest communities in the world. Its educational equipment includes a public-school system which is certainly the largest, and, unless Germany be an exception, the best in Christendom, supple- mented by private schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools not surpassed by any in the world; its material equipment of railway, telegraph, telephone, and the like puts it among the foremost nations in the march of human pro- gress; its moral ideals, exemplified in its various social and educational reforms, and in its free institutions of religion, prove the self-educative value of self-government; and its international influence is seen in the effect of its ideals and institutions upon other lands, which have adopted since the birth of America its representative houses of Legislature, its popular suffrage, its public schools, its free assemblies, and its free press. Meanwhile, this ideal of self-government has been undergoing a change which is none the less revolutionary because it has been growth, and hence unconscious ; a change from a government of self-governing individuals into a self-govern- 162 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY ing community. We have learned that the inter- est of the whole is more than the sum of the interests of all the individuals ; and that the in- terests of all individuals can only be secured by their common recognition of the interest of the whole. Some of the changes which have taken place in my own lifetime may serve to illustrate this peaceful revolution. The private penny posts which were once operated in some of our great cities exist no longer ; all epistolary communications between the members of this great community are conveyed for them by their Federal Government. The banking, which was at first a purely private enter- prise, is a purely private enterprise no longer ; as one great financier once said to me, "the United States is the greatest banking concern in the world " ; and all so-called private banks are so brought into affiliation with the United States Government and under its regulation and control that the whole banking system possesses a real, though not a strictly organic unity. Our high- ways, because of the invention of steam and rail- ways, are no longer open highways on which each man is free to travel when and as he will, but are great enterprises carried on by combinations be- tween labor and capital, and now under Govern- ment control, which, there is reason to believe, ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 163 will make sure that their operation shall be for the equal benefit of the entire community. The public-school system has not only extended over the whole Nation, as it did not at first, but has undertaken all forms of education from the kin- dergarten to the university, and is accompanied by public libraries in practically all centres of population. The public health is seen to be some- thing more than the health of individuals, or, at least, it is seen that the health of individuals can- not be secured by individualistic enterprise. We have, therefore, Health Boards, beginning in our great cities, extending throughout our States, and now, unless I am greatly mistaken, soon to be organized in a bureau of the Federal Govern- ment, for the purpose of compelling obedience to sanitary law and stamping out epidemics. Even our amusements and recreations are made a pub- lic concern, and in our cities, towns, and even smaller villages, parks are provided, playgrounds for the children, and bands of music for the sum- mer evenings. In some cases these are provided by political organizations, in others by voluntary organization, but in either case by a common and cooperative effort. These changes have been accompanied by another change. The increasing complexity of modern civilization forces upon us, whether we 164 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY will or no, an increasing complexity in our gov- ernment. The prime function of government is to protect persons and property, and the four fundamental rights of persons and property have never been better defined than in the four moral laws of the Ten Commandments : Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. The enforcement of these laws in a modern com- munity with the heterogeneous population which America contains means something very different from the enforcement of these laws in the wilder- ness, where they were first proclaimed. The law, Thou shalt not kill, means not only adequate protection of the individual from the assassin or the mob, and of the free laborer from the pistol, the dynamite, or the savage blow of the striking laborer or his ally ; it means super- vision by the Government of our food-supplies to prevent adulterations perilous to health ; protec- tion of the life of little children from the greed which sends them into life-destroying industries ; protection of the wives and mothers from insistent demands of industry which destroy their mother- hood and rob their children and their husbands of their care and companionship ; from the peril to life involved in tenement-house sweat-shops; from the corrupting of our water-supply by turning our ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 165 rivers into open sewers; from the carelessness of railway management, which in one year destroyed more lives in America than were destroyed in the Russian army by the Battle of Mukden, the greatest battle of modern times ; and from the reckless driving of automobiles, of whose death- list there is no census. Malice slays our hun- dreds, greed our thousands, carelessness our tens of thousands. It is the duty of a competent and efficient government to save life from all three of these assassins. The law, Thou shalt not commit adultery, is not adequately enforced by setting husband or wife free from the marital relation when its law is violated. What havoc in human health, what evils inflicted upon innocent women and children, are due to the violation of this law physicians have long known, and the public is beginning to know. Monsters in human form, such as the grotesque fancies of a Dickens or a Shakespeare creating a Quilp or a Caliban have never equaled, exist in American society, carrying on a white slave trade so horrible in its details that reputable men and women have been unable to believe that it could be true. Nor will our Government, Federal or State, have fulfilled its duty in the enforcement of this primitive legislation, Thou shalt not com- mit adultery, until our legislators realize, as they 166 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY have not in the past, how openly it is violated and how great is the almost epidemic evil which such violations inflict upon the Nation. Thou shalt not steal, means thou shalt not take from thy neighbor without giving him a just equivalent; it means protection of the ignorant from the wiles of the professional gambler ; pro- tection of the innocent and helpless stockholder from the chicanery of the stock gambler ; protec- tion of the insured and of the bank depositor from the tricks and devices of the dishonest financier; protection of the owners from the schemes of the railway wrecker ; and the protection of the public interest in the public property from the shrewd devices of men who are eager to acquire wealth without the labor of producing it. The law, Thou shalt not bear false witness, means prosecution and punishment of the press which violates this law, whether it does so with malicious intent or from mere careless money- making greed. The freedom of the press no more means freedom to do what one likes with his pen than freedom of action means that he may do what he likes with his hand. If I put my hand into my neighbor's pocket and abstract his purse, I am presently carried off to the police station, because I have violated my neighbor's right of property ; if I use my pen to vilify my neighbor, ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 167 or, with absolute carelessness of his rights and my obligations, print untrue and sensational gos- sip about him, I ought to go into the same prison- house and occupy the same cell with him who has robbed his neighbor of his purse. A newspaper has no more right to despoil one of his repu- tation than a thief has a right to despoil one of his property. The robber of reputation is the more despicable criminal of the two. Freedom of the press means that the newspaper may print what it will without submitting beforehand its matter to a governmental censor. It does not mean that it may print what it will without being re- sponsible afterwards for its falsehoods if it prints what is not true. Thus in two ways the function of government has greatly increased within the last century. It has increased because the elementary rights of men are more complex in our complex civiliza- tion, and the laws for their protection must there- fore be more complex. It has also increased because we have discovered that many of our fundamental rights, such as our right to go from one part to another of our Republic, our right to be preserved from the contagious disease of a careless neighbor, our right to have our children protected from the corrupting influence of se- ductive vice, our right to have them given such 168 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY education as will give them a fair opportunity for a useful and happy life, can be protected only by competent and cooperative action through government. Both causes have contributed to our growing realization of the truth that a self- governing community is something very different from a community of self-governing individuals. Many in our times look with apprehension upon this rapid extension of the function and powers of government. We are departing, they say, from the traditions of our fathers ; and they are right. We are compelled to depart from the traditions of OUT fathers. They traveled in stage- coaches, we travel in Pullman cars; they com- municated by mail, we increasingly communicate by telegraph and telephone ; they used coin as a medium of exchange, or bank-bills at their own risk, we use bank-bills without any risk ; they suf- fered from devastating epidemics, we are pro- tecting ourselves from devastating epidemics by Governmental regulation ; they burned candles or whale oil, we illuminate our houses by kerosene or electricity; they had few books and poor schools, we have excellent schools and public libraries. Life in the twentieth century is very different from life in the eighteenth ; government in the twentieth century must be very different from government in the eighteenth. It must be ORIGIN AND NATURE OP GOVERNMENT 169 either more extensive in its function and opera- tion, or far less effective in its protection of hu- man rights and its enforcement of human duties. The notion that a complex and extended gov- ernment is inconsistent with freedom grows out of the notion that freedom is exemption from law ; that liberty and independence are synony- mous. But freedom and independence are not synonymous, and freedom is not exemption from law. Leonard Bacon, in his " Pilgrim Hymn," thus describes the cargo the Pilgrims brought with them : Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God Game with these exiles o'er the waves. Laws ! Freedom ! Can these live in the same ship ? Can these flourish in the same community ? What do we mean by law? Austin, the famous writer on English law, has defined law as the edict of a superior who has the power to enforce his will by penalty, a power which confers on him his authority, and creates in the subject a duty or obligation of obedience. 1 1 " A command is an order issued by a superior to an inferior. It is a signification of desire distinguished by this peculiarity, that ' the party to whom it is directed is liable to evil from the other, in case he comply not with the desire.' ' If you are able and willing to harm me in case I comply not with your wish, the expression of your wish amounts to a command.' Being liable to 170 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY It is true that power to enforce law is neces- sary to law ; but more is necessary ; the possession of power does not of itself confer authority or create duty. Authority is rightful or just power, and something more than the mere pos- session of power is necessary to give the possessor a right to command or create in the subject a duty of obedience. If the law is an unjust law, disobedience may become duty. King Darius had power to enforce by decree his command, but the plain duty of Daniel was to disobey. The Italian bandit has power to command his prisoners, but he has no just authority over them. If law is simply an edict issued by one who has power to enforce obedience by penalty, then law and liberty are inconsistent. For reluctant submission to a superior power which I obey, not because I choose, but because I must, is not liberty. The Puritans in their revolt against the Stuarts no less than the French in their revolt against the Bourbons, refused such submission. But the Puritans were evil in case I comply not with the wish which you signify, I am bound or obliged by it, or I lie under a duty to obey it. The evil is called a sanction, and the command or duty is said to be sanctioned by the chance of incurring the evil. The three terms, command, duty, and sanction are thus inseparably connected. As Austin ex- presses it in the language of formal logic, ' each of the three terms signifies the same notion, but each denotes a different part of that notion, and connotes the residue.'" Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. xiv, p. 356. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 171 not a lawless folk ; they put an unaccustomed emphasis on the sacred ness of law. I venture to offer my own definition of law, without, however, claiming for it any originality. It is Hebraic in its origin, although, it is not form- ally stated, so far as I recall, in Hebrew literature. But it underlies the conception of law embodied in the Old Testament Scriptures. A striking illus- tration of it is afforded by the Nineteenth Psalm, which many Biblical scholars regard as two dif- ferent psalms put together by some editor. 1 I hesitate to dissent from them, but in my judg- ment the psalm is by one poet who saw what mod- ern thinkers have often failed to see, that law is essentially the same in the physical and in the spiritual world. " The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament sheweth his handi- work." That is the operation of law in the phys- ical universe. Not less is it true that " the law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul : the testi- mony of the Lord is sure, making wise the sim- ple." That is the operation of law in the spiritual realm. 1 Charles Augustus Briggs, LL.D., Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. i, p. 162 : " Psalm 19 is composed of two originally separate poems : (a) a morning hymn, praising the glory of 'El in the heavens (v. 2-5b) and glorious movements of the sun (v. 5c-7) ; (b) a didactic poem, describing the excellence of the Law (v. 8-11), with a petition for absolution, restraint from sin, and acceptance in worship (v. 12-15)." 172 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY Law is the nature of the thing of which it is predicated. By " the law of gravitation " we mean that it is the nature of material objects to attract each other in a certain definite ratio. By " the laws of health " we mean that the nature of the body is such that if one takes certain food, drink, air, baths, exercise, he will enjoy good health ; if he does not, he will have disease. By " the moral law " we mean that the social organism is such that if we respect each other's right to person, property, the family, reputation, the community will be prosperous ; if we do not, it will be un- prosperous. The scientist does not make the law of gravitation ; he finds it. The physician does not make the laws of health ; he discovers them. Moses did not make the Ten Commandments ; he interpreted them. They are not right because Jehovah commanded them ; Jehovah commanded them because they are right. If this be true, if law is the nature of things, the nature of man, the nature of society, the nature of the universe, the nature of God, there is no such thing as freedom from law. To escape from law it would be necessary to escape from the universe, to escape from God, to escape from ourselves. Liberty and lawlessness are not syn- onymous. Liberty is not escape from law. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 173 Liberty is voluntary obedience to self -en- forced law. It is the understanding of law, obedience to law, the use of law. A man is not free to jump off the roof of a house and fly like a bird. If he attempts it, he will find himself on the ground with a broken leg and not free to walk on the earth. He is free to fly when he understands the laws of aerial navigation and flies in obedi- ence to them. Man is not free to eat and drink as much as his gluttonous desires prompt. If he attempts to do so, he presently finds that he is not free to digest what he has eaten and must make up for the one day's feast by several days of fasting. Liberty does not mean that the chauf- feur may drive his automobile thirty miles an hour through the crowded streets of a city, for then the pedestrian has not liberty to cross the street. Liberty does not mean that the labor union may determine the conditions of work for non-union men, for then the independent laborer is denied liberty to work. Liberty does not mean that life-insurance directors may invest their funds as they please, for then the bereaved widow has no liberty to get her money when her hus- band leaves her in poverty. Liberty does not mean that a railway may charge what it will and give what rebates it chooses, for then the town 174 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY discriminated against has no liberty to grow, and the trader discriminated against has no liberty to trade. Only that community is free which recog- nizes the sanctity of law law written in the very nature of human society because in the nature of the men and women who constitute society and honestly and intelligently endeavors to conform its life to that inherent, immutable, eternal law. Law is written in the very constitution of the uni- verse. Nothing is just law which is not so written. The power of a lawgiver does not make law just, whether that lawgiver be one or many an aristocracy or a democracy. The consent of the governed does not make it just. Conformity to the nature of life material and psychical, in- dividual and social alone makes law just. To discard law, put it aside, live as though it were not, accept it only so far as it accords with our own whims or inclinations is anarchism. To sub- mit to it only because there is lodged in the law- giver power to inflict a penalty on the disobedient is submission to despotism. To recognize its sanc- tity, to see its value, to understand its purpose, to use it for the common welfare is liberty. For law is the nature of the thing concerning which it is predicated ; and liberty is voluntary obedience to self-recognized and self -enforced law. A man's relation to law may be either one of ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 175 three relations : he may disregard law ; he may submit to law ; he may use law. A boy grows up at home, where his health is not cared for ; where he eats what he likes, exer- cises as he likes, sleeps when he likes ; in short, is physically lawless. He is taken seriously ill. The doctor finds that he has undermined his constitu- tion, and tells him if he does not reform his life eat, sleep, and exercise according to law he has not long to live. The boy reluctantly aban- dons his imagined freedom and submits to the laws of health. He comes into the second rela- tion to the law, the relation of submission. His health improves and becomes measurably normal. He goes to college and desires to join the crew. The trainer says to him, If you wish to join the crew, you must accept the conditions of the crew. He tells the boy what he must eat and what he must not eat ; what he may drink and what he must not drink ; when he must go to bed and what exercise he must take. The boy, ambitious to get on the crew, accepts these directions, loy- ally and even gladly. He is now not merely sub- mitting to the laws of health, he is using the laws of health in order to equip himself for the position to which his ambition calls him. Disre- gard of law is suicide, obedience to law is health, use of law is power. 176 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY A community which disregards the four funda- mental rights of man the rights of person, of property, of the family, and of reputation lives in anarchy and perpetual turmoil ; the end thereof is social death. A community of individuals who yield obedience to these laws just in so far as they must and no further may have a certain measure of social health, may at least be pre- served from social death. But no community is strong, no community is on the highway to a great and common prosperity, which does not recognize in these laws the conditions of well- being, which does not by its united action pro- mote the health and life of its members, the social purity of its members, the material prosper- ity of its members, and the reputation and honor of its members. Only such a community is a strong, self-governing community ; only such a community is truly free. CHAPTER XI WHO SHOULD GOVERN? GOVERNMENT is power to enforce command; government is just when the commands en- forced are in accord with the great eternal laws of right and wrong. The function of government in the enforcement of these laws is primarily the protection of the four fundamental rights of man, the rights of the person, the rights of the family, the rights of property, and the rights of reputation. Government may exercise other func- tions ; but if it does not exercise this function, it is inefficient and incompetent. On whom is the duty of protecting the rights of persons and property laid ? Upon whom does it devolve in a self-governing community? Says Abraham Lincoln : " When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also another man, that is more than self-government ; that is despot- ism." That is true in its immediate application to slavery ; absolutely and unqualifiedly true. For one man to] govern another man, to take charge of him, determine what are his interests and con- 178 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY trol his actions, is despotism. It may be a bene- volent despotism ; it may be a just despotism ; but whether benevolent and just or malevolent and unjust, it is despotism. When a criminal is put into State prison, where all his actions are de- termined for him by another, he is living under a despotism. But Abraham Lincoln also said : " The legiti- mate object of government is to do for the peo- ple what needs to be done, but which they cannot by individual effort do at all, or do as well for themselves." When the people do collectively what needs to be done, but what they cannot by individual effort do at all, or do as well for them- selves, that is not despotism : that is social self- government, although in that social self-govern- ment each individual exercises a certain amount of control over the actions of every other indi- vidual. The community, by its collective action, not only establishes a public school, but compels the parents to send their child to school ; it not only digs a sewer, but it compels the individual householder to connect his house with the sewer and send the waste, which otherwise would be a nuisance to the community, through the sewer ; it not only constructs a highway, but it determines the rate of speed at which the automobile may be driven along the highway. Social self-government WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 179 necessarily involves the government of one indi- vidual by other individuals. That is, the compel- ling of one individual to do what he does not wish to do, or to abstain from what he does wish to do, because his will is oppugnant to the will of the community. Who have the right to take part in this social self-government, in its determining what the individual may do or may not do? The advocates of universal suffrage claim that every member of the community of adult age may take part in this social self-government. Starting with the assertion, as an axiom, that every man has a right to govern himself, they deduce the con- clusion that every man has a right to take part in the government of others. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. On the contrary, I believe it may be laid down as a political axiom, on which all self-governments should be based, that .ZVb man has a right to take part in govern- ing others who has not the intellectual and moral capacity to govern himself. The close of the eighteenth century was an epoch of revolution. It was characterized by an uprising of an oppressed people against their op- pressors. In France and in America, following the example which had been set in the preceding century by the Puritans in England, the common 180 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY people demanded their rights. The question of political philosophy was, what are the rights of the common people ? The claim of despotism was that the common people had no political rights ; they were children who were to submit without question to the authority of their parents. Louis XVIII, returning from his exile in England to Paris, thus defined, with curious naivete, the Bourbon conception of the relation between king and people : " If my right to the throne were not altogether founded on that law [the divine right of kings, recognized by the ancient law of France], what claim should I have to it ? What am I apart from that right ? An infirm old man, a miserable outlaw, reduced to begging, far from his coun- try, for shelter and food. That is what I was only a few days ago ; but that old man, that out- law, was the King of France. That title alone sufficed to make the whole nation, when at last it understood its real interests, recall me to the throne of my fathers. I have come back in an- swer to the call, but I have come back King of France." 1 In such an epoch the emphasis, alike of leaders and of people, was laid upon rights. This view we have inherited from our fathers. We have formed the habit of looking at all the political 1 Gilbert Stenger, The Return of Louis XVIII, p. 177. WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 181 duties as rights and privileges, as something to which we have a claim, something which will confer a benefit upon us. All men, we think, have an equal right to hold office, and when one man has held office four years, his neighbor says, it is now my turn. The ballot we think of as something by which we are to protect our own interests and promote our own welfare. We se- lect a Representative, who must come from our political district, and who, in the House of Re- presentatives, will seek such legislation as will promote our local welfare ; we select Senators who will represent our State and promote the in- terests of our State in the National legislation. The next step is easy and natural. Special in- terests send representatives to Congress. Appro- priations for public buildings, or for river and harbor improvements, and special advantage for special industries in the protective tariff are en- gineered by skillful politicians, each seeking, with perhaps personal disinterestedness, to pro- mote the pecuniary advantage of his own clien- tele. Under the corrupting influence of this false conception the professional politician becomes scarcely less an advocate of a special interest in Congress than is the paid counsel before the courts. But the evil effect of this point of view does 182 THE SPIEIT OP DEMOCRACY not stop with the professional politician. The individual voter votes for his own interests : one man to secure a higher protection for his manu- factured goods, another to get a contract from the government, a third to get a job from the con- tractor, and a fourth to get a five-dollar-bill from the political committee. The story is told I believe it is authentic that a Western cowboy arrested for murder wrote to Mr. Roosevelt for financial aid in securing competent defense, but subsequently returned the contribution, saying: " I do not need it ; we have elected the district attorney ! " It is high time we changed our point of view ; high time that we realized that suffrage is not a natural right is not a right at all. It is a sacred duty; a right only as every man has a right to do his duty. " Public office is a public trust." How that sentence rang through the land ! It was better than a speech. Suffrage is a public office, and therefore a public trust, and no man is entitled to have that public trust commit- ted to him unless he is at least able to govern himself. The Southern States have in this re- spect set an example which it would be well if it were possible for all the States to follow. Many of them have adopted in their Constitution a qualified suffrage. The qualifications are not the WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 183 same in all the States, but there is not one of those States in which every man, black or white, has not a legal right to vote provided he can read and write the English language, owns three hundred dollars' worth of property, and has paid his taxes. A provision that no man should vote unless he has intelligence enough to read and write, thrift enough to have laid up three hun- dred dollars' worth of property, and patriotism enough to have paid his taxes would not be a bad provision for any State in the Union to in- corporate in its Constitution. We talk about giving to the negroes, to the Filipinos, and to the Porto Ricans self-govern- ment. What President Wilson, of Princeton Uni- versity, has said on this subject would be well worth printing on a card and sending to every voter : We cannot give them self-government. Self-gov- ernment is not a thing that can be " given " to any people, because it is a form of character and not a form of constitution. No people can be " given" the self-con- trol of maturity. Only a long apprenticeship of obedi- ence can secure them the precious possession, a thing no more to be bought than given. They cannot be pre- sented with the character of a community, but it may confidently be hoped that they will become a community under the wholesome and salutary influences of just laws and a sympathetic administration ; that they will 184 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY after'a while understand and master themselves, if in the meantime they are understood and served in good con- science by those set over them in authority. 1 Hitherto the duty of protecting the funda- mental rights of persons and property in civilized communities has devolved upon the men. There is a small but very earnest minority of "women who insist that women should share in this duty of protection. Are they right? Does this obliga- tion rest upon them, or are they exempt from it ? To answer that question let us consider briefly the problem of life. What are we on this earth for? Is there any interpretation of its enigma, any rational meaning to existence ? We are born ; grow up in families, under the protection and guidance of father and mother. We are nursed, taught, trained for life's work. We grow to maturity; marry; children are given to us ; we provide for them until they are old enough to provide for themselves ; govern them until they are old enough to govern themselves; then they marry and children are given to them. We tarry a few years as grandparents, to enjoy the privilege of the children without the responsibility, and then pass off the stage. And so the process goes on generation after gen- 1 Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, p. 53. WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 185 eration ; every generation growing a little in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue; but each mem- ber of every generation, if the parents are cap- able and efficient, growing from ignorance to knowledge, from folly to wisdom, from incapacity to ability, from innocence through struggle to virtue. What does it all mean ? What can it mean but this ? that we are in one stage of an existence the future stages of which no one can foresee any more than the acorn can foresee the oak or the seed the flower, or the cater- pillar the butterfly. What can it mean but this? that life is itself a preparation for life, a long schooling, and death a graduation. And in this process woman is the creator of life. She is physiologically its creator. She is in the order of nature the custodian of the infant in all the earlier stages of its existence. She is the one who feeds and nurses and leads and trains and educates it. And while she is thus absorbed in the highest and divinest ministry, in serving the very end of life itself, the man is the bread-winner and protector. He goes out to wrest from nature food for the supply of the family. If enemies at- tack it from without, he arises to defend it from assault. If criminals by violence or by fraud en- deavor to rob it of its sustenance, he is its natural guardian from the wrongdoer. His influence is 186 THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY not unneeded in the training of the children, but it is incidental and secondary ; it must be inci- dental and secondary, because, if mother and child are to be fed, sheltered, and protected, he must be, during most of the hours of the day, away from home. There is a pathetic story in the Old Testament, a transcript from life, which il- lustrates this parental relationship. A boy is with his father and the reapers in the field. The hot sun overpowers him. He cries out, " My head, my head ! " The father says to a servant, " Take him to his mother," and goes on with his work. And the child lies on his mother's lap until noon, and then dies. It is the instinctive message of father and mother the world over, and will be while the world stands. From the father, " Carry the child to his mother." From the mother, " Give me the child." By a law of nature written in the constitution of the family, written in her constitution and in his, written in their physical nature and in their mental and moral nature, she is the creator of life and the minister to life, and he is the bread-winner and protector while she fulfills her sacred task. If she is wife and mother, this high, sacred, supreme creative duty demands and has all her thought, all her life. If she is not, still she finds in supplemental service opportunities for this min- istry to life. She teaches in the school, she nurses WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 187 in the hospitals, she ministers in the charities of the community and of the church, she cooperates as domestic, as sister, as aunt, with the overworked and overburdened mother in carrying on the life of the household. Hers is the vital, the essential service. His is necessary that she may do hers. They cannot possibly exchange. In the nature of the case he never can do hers. Shall she take his in addition to her own, and become not only the life- giver, but also the bread-winner and the protector ; not only the mother, the nurse, the teacher, but also the magistrate, the policeman, the tiller of the soil, the sailor of the ship, the worker of the town ? Can she do both and do them well ? I do not wish to speak in derogation of the ad- vocates of woman suffrage. Among them are some noble, womanly women, driven or drawn into the movement by the faith that the suffrage in woman's hands would be an instrument of incal- culable value in the work of life ministry. But not many of the mothers devoting their lives to hus- band and children at home, not many of the teach- ers absorbed in the fascinating task of making men and women out of boys and girls, not many of the women active in the philanthropic work of our Christian churches or in our public chari- ties, are among those whose names are bruited in the newspapers as advocates of this revolu- 188 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY tion. How can they be? They have too much of more important work to do. How can the agi- tators be simultaneously caring for their own children or the uncared-for children of others? They are absorbed in the one task of getting the ballot as the one important and essential achieve- ment for the redemption of society. I am an advocate of woman's rights her right to be exempt from the duty of protecting persons and property ; to be exempt from sharing in the burdens and responsibilities of government ; her right to give herself wholly and unreservedly to the task which God has given her of being the creator and developer of human life, the maker of character. It would be the grossest injustice for us men, who have hitherto had this duty to perform, to shirk our duty and impose it upon women, except upon the most conclusive demon- stration that she desires to assume it. At present all the evidence points us to the conclusion that she has no such desire. This is indeed an uncontested point, admitted by the more intelligent and fair- minded of the advocates of the great revolution. And I urge all women whom my voice can reach or my words can influence not to follow the blind leaders of the blind, not to be cheated by a false political philosophy and a false social sentiment, not to turn aside from their great vocation, the ministry WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 189 to life, which no one can take up if they lay it down, in order that they may take up the lower and lesser vocation. To protect life and property is not so great a service as to use property in ministering to life. To promote by political action the gen- eral welfare is not so great a service as to create and develop the individual for whose creation and development governments exist, and whose per- sonal character is the supremest factor in the general well-being. How shall a self-governing community ascer- tain the judgment and the will of the members of the community? In a pure democracy the people pass on every proposition, as in the old-time New England town meeting or in the present demo- cratic government in Switzerland. In representa- tive government the people elect representatives into whose hands they intrust the work of the government. They select the men, but the work of carrying on the government is intrusted to the men whom they select. There is a movement in our day in America toward more pure democracy, toward less representative government. Theoreti- cally we elect our Presidents by an electoral col- lege ; that is, by representative government. In fact, we elect them by a popular vote. Theoreti- cally, the election of our Senators is left to the representative bodies in the various States, but in 190 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY an increasing number of those States the election is generally effected by the people directly. On the other hand, our tendency in other than political circles is toward representative govern- ment rather than pure democracy. In our great corporations the stockholders do not vote on such questions as what stock they will issue, what branch roads they will build, what rates they will charge. The stockholders elect certain trusted men, and leave the decision of these questions in their hands. As in the great commercial enter- prises, so in the great philanthropic and religious organizations. The churches do not pass in detail upon the questions that come before the church. They elect a board, and the board elects an execu- tive committee and secretaries, and the adminis- tration in detail is left in the hands of these ex- ecutive committees and of the secretaries. I need not undertake to discuss in this connection the relative advantages of pure democracy and repre- sentative government. It is enough to point out to my readers that if representative government is really representative, if the persons elected do really represent the judgment and the will of the electors, a representative government is as truly democratic as a pure democracy. Representative government has been injured in our country by the false notion that if we elect WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 191 a great many officials we are more democratic than if we elect a few, whereas, in fact, we are more democratic if we elect a few than if we elect many. In New York State we elect a Governor and five heads of departments: a Secretary of State, a Comptroller, an Attorney-General, a State Engineer, a Treasurer. How many New York readers of this book could tell the names of these officials for whom many of those readers voted in the last election? Nay, more than that how many think themselves competent to elect an Attorney-General or a State Engineer ? I confess frankly that I am not. I can form some judg- ment as to the man who I am willing should act for me in choosing an Attorney-General familiar with the law, or a State Engineer competent to supervise the engineering work of the State, but I have neither the personal knowledge nor the professional knowledge which fits me to make the selection myself. In the Federal Government we pursue a wiser, and really a more democratic course. We elect a President and a Vice-President, and the President appoints his heads of departments. He can, there- fore, rightly be held responsible for all that is done, or left undone, in the various departments. Under the present method in our Federal elec- tions we select one man and hold him responsible 192 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY for results ; in many of our States, in New York State, for example, we cast our vote between two sets of candidates selected for us by leaders whom we often do not know and whom we cannot hold responsible if the selection does not prove satis- factory. Government is by parties, and in a self-gov- erning community the parties ought to be self- governing. To-day they are not self-governing in fact, whatever they may be in theory. The forms and methods differ in different communities, but the following description may serve by way of illustration : 1 The members of the party in a given district meet in some appointed place in what is known as a primary. In fact, the meeting is composed almost exclusively of place-hunters and their friends. To this meeting a list of dele- gates to a nominating convention, or a series of nominating conventions, is presented by a com- mittee which is practically self -constituted, al- though it has been formally elected by a previous primary. The character of these primaries as conducted in the " good old times " that is, a 1 I follow James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, chaps, liz, Ix, Ixi, and Ixii. Some material improvements have been made and in some of the States radical and revolutionary changes since this work was written (1888), but it still remains an excellent description of the primary method of nomination as devised and operated by the professional politician. WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 193 quarter of a century ago is indicated by the fact, reported by Mr. Bryce, that, of the 1007 primaries and conventions of all parties held in New York city preparatory to the election of 1884, 633 took place in liquor saloons. There has been some improvement since then, and in many of the States the primaries are now recognized and regulated by law. But the per- sonnel remains largely what it was formerly. If independent voters attend, they are generally outvoted, or, if that by any chance proves impos- sible, they are outmaneuvered, and the prepared list of delegates put forward by the Committee is elected either without opposition or despite an opposition which is futile. These delegates attend the nominating conventions town, county, and State and nominate the candidates previ- ously designated by the committee, and usually previously designated to the committee by the boss. So well is this understood that newspaper men, when the convention meets, rarely inter- view the delegates, except such as are known to be near the boss and likely to be acquainted with his orders. Occasionally public sentiment in a State runs so strongly for a particular man that the boss yields, or the convention overrules the boss. But this rarely happens, and it never happens except in the case of some important 194 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY office, like that of Governor or United States Senator. When the election takes place, the two sets of candidates nominated in this fashion, nominally by a convention, really by a small and irresponsible committee, or a still smaller and more irresponsible boss, are put before the voter, and his sole function in politics is to select between the two. How far this method of nominating a host of candidates for all the offices, and nominating them by an irresponsible oligarchy, is from self-government the following paragraph from Mr. Bryce's "American Com- monwealth" makes very clear: The elective offices are so numerous that ordinary citizens cannot watch them, and cease to care who gets them. The conventions come so often that busy men cannot serve in them. The minor offices are so unat- tractive that able men do not stand for them. The primary lists are so contrived that only a fraction of the party get on them ; and of this fraction many are too lazy or too busy or too careless to attend. The mass of the voters are ignorant; knowing nothing about the personal merits of the candidates, they are ready to follow their leaders like sheep. Even the better class, however they may grumble, are swayed by the inveterate habit of party loyalty and prefer a bad candidate of their own to a (probably not better) candidate of the other party. It is less trouble to put up with impure officials, costly city government, a job- WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 195 bing State legislature, an inferior sort of congressman, than to sacrifice one's own business in the effort to set things right. Thus the Machine works on, and grinds out places, power, and the opportunities for il- licit gain for those who manage it. The remedy for this condition is very plain : it is such a reconstruction of party machinery that the voters will be enabled not merely to choose between candidates placed before them, but also to determine who those candidates shall be. Vari- ous plans have been proposed, and some plans are now on trial, having for their desired object the accomplishment of this result. It does not come within the scope of this book to discuss the mer- its of these different plans. Such comparative study as I have been able to give to them leads me to regard as the best method yet devised the one urged by Governor Hughes on the Legisla- ture of New York State. That plan would ap- pear, more successfully than any other of those proposed, to secure party organization and effi- ciency and at the same time to put them under democratic control. Two things are, however, to me very clear : on the one hand, that any efficient plan of transferring political power from the oli- garchy to the people will be fought by resource- ful and unscrupulous politicians ; and, on the other hand, that the increasing insistence of an 196 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY awakened people on their rights and duties will eventually perfect the machinery of a self-gov- erning Republic by making the parties self-gov- erning. Our free institutions are threatened by two foes : plutocracy and mobocracy, lawless wealth and lawless passion. These are the two serpents that have always come up out of the sea to strangle liberty. They destroyed Greece; they destroyed Rome ; will they destroy America ? America as a self-governing community is as yet only in its experimental stage. We can hand it down to our posterity purified and strengthened, only by being true to the oath which Abraham Lincoln, in one of his early public addresses, pro- posed to the young men of Springfield, Illinois : "Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others." We must recognize the divine nature of law and its sacred sanctions ; we must make the Republic not only a community of self-governing indivi- duals but a self-governing community ; we must 1 Address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1837. Complete Works, p. 12. WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 197 cure the evils of "present democracy by a truer and more consistent democracy ; we must recon- cile liberty and law by making law the instru- ment of liberty ; and we must carry both liberty and law not only into our government but into all our institutions. We who have emancipated the laborer from chains must emancipate him from dependence on the capitalists; we must be- gin by making capitalists and laborers partners in a common enterprise, and end by making the capitalists also laborers and the laborers also cap- italists. We must bring the home, the school, and the church into a closer and more cordial coop- eration in the work of education, and so extend that education, both in the character of the sub- jects treated and in the classes of population taught, that it will provide a fair equipment of all the people, in all the arts of life, for all hon- orable vocations, and so fit them by self-educa- tion to be both self-supporting and self-govern- ing. And we must recognize the home as the fundamental social organization, underlying all other organizations, and marriage as no mere commercial or social partnership founded on contract, but a divine order founded on the nat- ural comradeship between man and woman, who are essentially different and essentially equal. CHAPTER XII THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION TRUE religion is the same in all ages : " The life of God in the soul of man." It is doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God ; it is faith and hope and love; it is realizing the invisible world, aspiring toward a divine future, seeking the well-being of others. But because it is life it changes from age to age. " When I was a child," says Paul, " I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child ; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The man not only speaks a different language from the child, he apprehends life differently, he thinks different thoughts, and has different experiences. The faith of a man is not a child's faith ; his hopes are different, his loves are different. The religion of the twentieth century and of the first century are the same that is, they are both the life of God in the soul of man. Yet they are different, as the life of na- ture is different in October from the life of nature in May. Religion is a working life, therefore it has an organization a church ; it is an intel- SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 199 lectual life, therefore it has ordered thought a theology ; it is an emotional life, therefore it has an experience and a worship. And this church, this theology, this experience and wor- ship, change in the race as in the individual. The religious life is not the same in a democratic as in an autocratic society. Christianity, passing out from Judea into Rome, passed from a partially democratic into a wholly autocratic world. It transformed the world, but was itself transformed. The Church of Rome is not a copy of the Jewish synagogue ; the theology of Augustine is not a copy of the Sermon on the Mount ; the worship of the mass is not patterned after the primitive prayer-meetings described in the Books of Acts. The Church of Rome was an imperial church with a supreme pontiff whose power was autocratic, whose word was final. The theology of Latin Christians was an imperial the- ology : God was King ; law was his edict ; the Bible was a book of laws ; its canons of inter- pretation were legal canons ; sin was rebellion ; forgiveness was remission of penalty ; atonement was transfer of penalty from the guilty to the innocent. Man is not a bundle of separated fac- ulties. His experience determines his thinking ; his thinking colors his experiences. In this im- perial religion worship was a petition for pardon 200 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY by rebellious but penitent subjects, addressing a justly indignant sovereign whose gracious par- don was besought by intercessors and purchased by the offering of a perpetual but bloodless sac- rifice. Changes in organization are more easily effected than changes in habits of thought or in types of experience. The religious revolution which for the Protestant world overthrew autocracy in church government has more gradually intro- duced the democratic spirit into the thought of the Church, and still more gradually into the ex- perience of Christians. But we are coming to a consciousness of the change which that spirit is effecting. In the Roman Catholic Church we call it Modernism ; in the Protestant Church we call it sometimes the New Theology, sometimes the Spirit of Humanitarianism. It is criticised as an innovation and condemned as a heresy; but I believe that it is a new phase in the victory of Hebraism over paganism, of a democratic Chris- tianity over a pagan autocracy. The democratic, that is the Christian, spirit is transfusing our thoughts and our experiences as well as our po- litical and religious organizations; and we are trying, half consciously, to readjust to the new conditions our intellectual and spiritual expres- sions. The democratic spirit does not deny the SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 201 affirmations of the autocratic religion ; it reaf- firms them, but it gives to them a new signifi- cance. It conceives that God is a Sovereign ; that laws emanate from him ; that the Bible is a trustworthy interpretation of those laws; that sin is lawlessness ; that forgiveness involves some remission of penalty; and that it is ac- complished through the offering of sacrifice. But filled with the democratic, that is the Chris- tian, spirit, the legalistic theology ceases to be legalistic and becomes spiritual, ceases to be su- pernatural and is becoming more frankly human because more truly divine. There is no better definition of Political De- mocracy than Abraham Lincoln's t( Government of the people, by the people, for the people." It is the doctrine of Political Democracy that the source of authority is in the people and that authority is to be exercised by the people and for their benefit. It is the doctrine of Industrial De- mocracy that the source of wealth is in the people and wealth is to be used by the people and for their benefit. The doctrine of Religious Demo- cracy may be similarly expressed : Religion is of the people, by the people, for the people. The source of the religious life is in human nature ; its instruments and institutions exist for men and are to be controlled by men. Religion is the 202 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY natural life of man, his privilege and preroga- tive, his inheritance and equipment. It is the democratic spirit in religion which is making those changes in religious thought and life which are the despair of some, a sacrilege to many, but a joy and inspiration to an increasing num- ber. The democratic spirit regards, or is slowly com- ing to regard, the religious life as the natural life of man, and irreligion as unnatural. It regards reli- gion as a life developed in man, not as something external imposed upon him. It esteems that life as supernatural in no other sense than as art life, or musical life, or literary life, or business life is supernatural supernatural because in God we live and move and have our being. Jesus com- pares the Kingdom of God to a seed which groweth up secretly ; for the earth, he says, bringeth forth of herself. The democratic spirit accepts this figure as an interpretation of the Kingdom of God in the individual soul : the soul bringeth forth of itself. God, says the Hebrew Psalm of Creation, made man in his own image and breathed into him the breath of life. The democratic spirit believes this to be true of all men Jew and Gentile, Christian and pagan, saint and sinner. We are his offspring, says Paul, and in saying that he quotes a heathen poet. The SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 203 democratic spirit believes that the publicans and sinners are the offspring of God. It believes not less in the divineness of religion, but more ; as the gardener who believes that plants without the hothouse live not less by the warmth of the sun than those within. The democratic spirit identifies the laws of na- ture with the laws of God. The moral law, like natural law, is not imposed from without ; it is constituted within. It was not given to man, it was created in man, or, if the reader prefer, it was given to him in and by his creation. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, were all written in the conscience of man before they were written on tables of stone. They would be just as obligatory if they had not been written on tables of stone. They are just as obligatory on those who have never heard of the tables of stone. When Jesus Christ says, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength, what he says to us is : That is what you were made for ; love is your natural aptitude ; you were fitted for love as the fish for the sea and the bird for the air. The democratic spirit finds the authority and source of religion, not in priests or prophets, past or present that is, neither in the Book nor in 204 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY the Church but in the soul's own recognition of its divinely ordered duties and divinely be- stowed privileges. The Church is an authority in so far as it gives true expression to the spiritual consciousness of spiritual souls. The Bible is an authority in so far as it is an expression of spir- itual experience by men of a truly spiritual na- ture, whose experiences have power to awaken an indorsing echo in our own souls. It is this power in the Bible to awaken a re- sponse in our own souls that makes it a revelation. Revealing is unveiling ; discovery is uncovering. The two processes are identical ; the two words are synonymous. That theology uses one and science the other is not material. The scientist sees bacteria in the blood ; they were always there, but he uncovers them. He says, If you will look through the microscope, you can see them for yourself. And we do. The prophet sees God in nature and in his own soul. God was always there; the prophet unveils him. Then he says, If you will look for yourself, you also can see him. And we do. Professor Huxley watches the development of a plant or an animal from its embryo; wrought " in so artistic a way that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hid- SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 205 den artist with his plan before him striving with skillful manipulation to perfect his work." l This is revelation unveiling. Matthew Arnold watches the development of spiritual life in the history of human society and in the biography of the individual soul, and gives to the skeptic this counsel : " But if, on the other hand, they ask, 'How are we to verify that there rules an enduring Power not ourselves, which makes for righteousness ? ' we may answer at once : ( How ? Why, as you verify that fire burns by experience ! It is so ; try it ! you can try it ; every case of conduct, of that which is more than three- fourths of your own life and of the life of all mankind, will prove it to you.' " 2 God is revealed to us when he is unveiled to us, the Master Workman in nature, the guiding Personality in history, the Life of the individual soul. The experience of God in others when it awakens a similar experience in us is a revela- tion ; if it awakens no such experience in us, it is no revelation. Thus the Twenty-third Psalm is a revelation to some readers and not a revelation to others. The democratic spirit looks upon the Bible as a volume of illuminating and inspiring human experiences ; it believes that there is no ex- 1 Lay Sermons, p. 260. * Literature and Dogma, p. 267. 206 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY perience in the Book that has not its counterpart in modern spiritual experiences. It values the Book not as a substitute for such experiences but as a means of awakening them in the spirit of the reader. When the minister attempts to make the Bible speak to this democratic age with the kind of authority with which it spoke to a former autocratic age, he simply closes the minds of his hearers against its message. In the Protestant churches, which are the chil- dren of the democratic movement, the autocratic authority of the Church is vehemently denied. Even in the Catholic Church (whether Roman or Anglican), the spirit of Modernism is endea- voring to reconcile loyalty to the Church as the ultimate authority with the democratic spirit. It does not succeed and cannot. The question between Protestantism and Catholicism is not a mere question of theological creed or ecclesiasti- cal order. It is vital and fundamental : the ques- tion whether the source and authority of reli- gion resides in a divinely constituted organization, from which we are to receive our instructions and our commands, as children from their father, or whether the source and authority of religion is in the people, and the voice of the Church or the churches, whether ancient or modern, is the voice of a common spiritual consciousness, in SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 207 which we find authority as we find it in the con- current testimony of many witnesses to any facts of life, whether it be physical or spiritual ; the question whether God's inspiring and counseling presence is universal and brings with it a gift of eternal life which is as free to all as the air we breathe and the sunshine which vitalizes and em- powers us, or whether eternal life, bestowed by an absentee God, is piped and conduited through an appointed hierarchy, from whom alone the laity can receive it. It must be added that if Modernists find it difficult to maintain a doctrine and practice of liberty in an autocratic church, Protestant doctors of divinity find it not less difficult to maintain a doctrine of ecclesiastical authority in churches increasingly pervaded by the democratic spirit. Because thus the democratic spirit finds the au- thority of both Book and Church in the response which the awakened spiritual life of the individ- ual makes, it takes but a languid interest in the subject of miracles. If the authority of religion is external, if it is in messengers of an olden time speaking for God, we have a right to demand some authentication of their right to speak. But if the authority is in the Voice within our own souls, whether the marvelous events recorded in the Bible took place as recorded or whether some 208 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY did and some did not take place, becomes a his- torical, not a religious question. To one who believes that God is always in nature and in man, it is neither incredible that there should have been at times clearer and more striking, or at least more visible and material evidences of his presence than there are now, nor, on the other hand, that evidences such as are now passed by without being interpreted or even scarcely ob- served, save as curious phenomena, had in former times their inner and spiritual significance better interpreted. But it is also true that, since our faith does not depend upon those interpretations, doubts concerning them do little to disturb our faith. One who believes in the universal pre- sence of God finds it both less difficult and less important to believe in certain unusual indica- tions of that presence in ancient times as he finds them reported in the Bible. How does the democratic spirit regard Jesus Christ ? The democratic spirit is no longer interested in the old debates about the Person of Christ and is not satisfied with the old definitions. The various theological questions which are different forms of the one question, What is the meta- physical relation of Jesus Christ to the Infinite ? does not interest; the old definition of Christ as SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 209 "the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds ; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God ; Begotten not made ; Being of one substance with the Father," does not satisfy. When, on special days, the Ni- cene Creed is repeated, its phraseology is regarded, I venture to say, by most worshipers as the lan- guage of reverence, not of exact definition. The Trinitarian churches have hundreds of members who could not tell whether they are Trinitarians or Unitarians, and thousands of members who could not tell why they are Trinitarians. And yet it is certain that the tendency in democracy is toward an increasing, not a lessen- ing, reverence for Jesus of Nazareth. The multi- plicity of lives of Christ written by representa- tives of every school of thought, the regard with which, with hardly an exception, his name and character are treated by these various authors, the direct testimony to his character and influ- ence by orthodox and liberal, Catholic and Pro- testant, Jew, Gentile, and Christian, indicate a re- markable and growing unity of reverence for his life and character. Among the books in my library is a recent commentary on the Gospel of John written by a Brahmin for Brahminical readers, and one on the Synoptic Gospels written by a Jew for Jewish readers j in both Jesus is treated 210 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY as an eminent if not a supreme teacher of the reli- gion of the Spirit. The closing sentences of Re- nan's " Life of Jesus " are a classic : " Whatever unlooked-for events the future may have in store, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will increasingly renew its youth ; his story will call forth endless tears ; his suffering will subdue the noblest heart ; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men no one has been born who is greater than he." Whether democratic Christianity will attempt a new definition of Jesus Christ may be doubted. Perhaps it will be content simply to listen to him and follow him without defining him. As yet it has furnished no better definition than that sug- gested by Henry van Dyke in the phrase " the human life of God." In this sentence is indicated the direction in which we are to look for the re- conciliation between the belief of the democratic spirit that the source and authority of religion is in the people and the reverence of the demo- cratic spirit for Jesus Christ as the supreme expression of the religious life. While the faith of the future in Jesus Christ cannot now be formulated, certain things may be said respecting it, with a considerable degree of certainty. Jesus Christ is, not the founder of religion. SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 211 Religion existed before he was born, and exists to-day among many peoples who have scarcely even heard of his name. He is not the founder of a special religion. For a special religion must have its creed, its ritual, and its ecclesiastical organization; and Jesus] Christ formulated no creed, prescribed no ritual, and framed no eccle- siastical organization. 1 Jesus Christ defined his own mission in the memorable words, " I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abun- dantly." He was and is a life-giver. This life is religion : the religion of faith and hope and love ; the religion of doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. Of this life his own is a supreme example an example possible for us to follow. It is characteristically a human life. To do justly means to the Christian to act in hu- man dealings in the spirit in which Jesus Christ acted ; to love mercy means to the Christian to have compassion on the suffering and the sinful as Jesus Christ had compassion ; to walk humbly with God means to the Christian to live in the 1 Even Catholic scholars, who hold that Jesus Christ ap- pointed his Apostles and their successors to be the authoritative heads of the Church, will hardly affirm that he did more than authorize them to frame the organization of the future ecclesi- astical body ; and no one affirms that Jesus Christ formulated a creed or prescribed a ritual. 212 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY same filial relation with the Father in which Jesus Christ habitually lived. To all who profess and call themselves Christians the Christian religion can mean nothing less than this. And this is both a divine life and a human life ; a divine life because it is a human life, and a human life be- cause it is a divine life. For there is no differ- ence. And he who manifests the ideal human life does, by so manifesting the ideal human life, reveal, that is, unveil, the divine life "the human life of God." To say that the source and authority of Chris- tianity are in Jesus Christ is to say that they are in human nature, for Jesus Christ is the repre- sentative type in history of what human nature is in the conception of Him who has made man in His own image. If any of my readers are in- clined to start back at this statement, let them ask themselves what John means when he says that as he was so are we to be in this world ; what Paul means when he says that God has pre- destined us to be conformed to the image of his Son that he might be the first-born among many brethren; what Jesus himself means when he prays that we may be one in him and the Father, as he was one in the Father, that the glory which the Father had given him he gave to us, and that as he was sent into the world he in like manner sends SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 213 us into the world ; or what the New Testament means by applying to Christians in a modified form almost, if not quite, all the titles it ap- plies to Christ. He is the Well-Beloved Son of God, and we are sons of God ; he is the Light of the World, and we are lights of the world; he is the Great High Priest, and we are priests unto God ; he is the great Sacrifice, and we are told to offer ourselves a living sacrifice ; he forgives our sins, and whosesoever sins we remit are remitted unto them ; he is filled with all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and we are bid to pray that we may be filled with all the fullness of God ; he is in us the hope of glory ; we are to be crucified with him and we are already risen with him. The democratic spirit in religion, which holds as its fundamental faith that religion is a privilege and prerogative of human nature, and that in human nature we are to look for both the source and the authority of religion, finds its supremest evidence and illustration of this faith in the life and char- acter of Jesus the Christ. It needs not many words to indicate that, if religion is of the people, it is also for the people and by the people. If the spirit of faith and hope and love is inherent in the human spirit, as are the appetites and passions in the human body, then it cannot be other than a universal religion. This 214 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY life is not for the Jews only, but also for the Gen- tiles ; not for the baptized only, but also for the unbaptized; not for the elect only, but also for the non-elect ; not for the saints only, who give themselves up to lives of meditation and prayer, but for the average man, and is fitted to inspire and control the average life. It belongs not to Jews as Jews, nor to Christians as Christians, nor to saints as saints, but to man as man. Some spir- itual souls are more fruitful than others, but there are no arid lands. Spiritual suicide may be possible ; personally, I think it is. But spiritual life is cer- tainly possible; no man is shut out from it. Pagan religions are not devilish imitations devised to de- ceive the unwary. They are real beginnings of a life which has its supremest inspiration and its supremest manifestation in Jesus the Christ. And it is for this reason that he is the Christ. 1 Because this religion of faith and hope and love, of doing justly and loving mercy and walk- ing humbly with God, is the universal inheritance of the human race, it knits us together in the bond of a fellowship which transcends all other fellow- ships. Political Democracy unites us in nations, Industrial Democracy in trades, Educational De- mocracy in a Republic of Letters; but Religious Democracy unites men of all nationalities, trades, 1 Philippians ii, 5-11. SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 215 and social classes in a universal brotherhood. Because one is our Father which is in heaven, because we are all his offspring and share in his life, we are all brethren. ffitoettftbe CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . 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