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.
 
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