Chapter VII · DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS

Judged by any quantitative test, the American achievement is impressive. We have ninety per cent of the motors of the world and control seventy-five per cent of its oil; we produce sixty per cent of the world’s steel, seventy per cent of its copper, and eighty per cent of its telephones and typewriters. This and similar statistical proof of our material preëminence, which would have made a Greek apprehensive of Nemesis, seems to inspire in many Americans an almost lyrical complacency. They are not only quantitative in their estimates of our present accomplishment, but even more so if possible in what they anticipate for the future. Now that we have fifteen million automobiles they feel, with Mr. Henry Ford, that we can have no higher ambition than to expand this number to thirty million. Our present output of fifty million tons of steel a year is, according to Mr. Schwab, a mere trifle compared with our probable output of twenty years hence. In short, an age that is already immersed in things to an unexampled degree is merely to prepare the way for an age still more material in its preoccupations and still more subservient to machinery. This, we are told, is progress. To a person with a proportionate view of life it might seem rather to be full-blown commercial insolence.

The reasons for the quantitative view of life that prevails in America are far from being purely political. This view has resulted in a large measure from the coming together of scientific discovery with the opening up of a new continent. It has been possible with the aid of science to accomplish in a hundred years what even the optimistic Thomas Jefferson thought might take a thousand. The explanation, it has been said, of much that is obscure to us in the Chinese may be summed up in the words “lack of elbow-room.” We in this country, on the other hand, have received a peculiar psychic twist from the fact that we have had endless elbow-room. A chief danger both to ourselves and others is that we shall continue to have a frontier psychology long after we have ceased to have a frontier. For a frontier psychology is expansive, and expansiveness, I have tried to show, is, at least in its political manifestations, always imperialistic.

If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying. What must one think of a country, asks one of our foreign critics, whose most popular orator is W. J. Bryan, whose favorite actor is Charlie Chaplin, whose most widely read novelist is Harold Bell Wright, whose best-known evangelist is Billy Sunday, and whose representative journalist is William Randolph Hearst? What one must evidently think of such a country, even after allowing liberally for overstatement, is that it lacks standards. Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards. As an example of the inversion of standards we may take the bricklayer who, being able to lay two thousand bricks a day, is reduced by union rules to laying five hundred. There is confusion of standards, again, when we are so impressed by Mr. Henry Ford’s abilities as organizer and master mechanic that we listen seriously to his views on money; or when, simply because Mr. Edison has shown inventive genius along certain lines, we receive him as an authority on education. One is reminded of the story of the French butcher who, having need of legal aid, finally, after looking over a number of lawyers, selected the fattest one.

The problem of standards, though not identical with the problem of democracy, touches it at many points and is not therefore the problem of any one country. Europeans, indeed, like to look upon the crudity and chaotic impressionism of people who are no longer guided by standards as something specifically American. “America,” says the “Saturday Review,” “is the country of unbalanced minds, of provincial policies and of hysterical Utopias.” The deference for standards has, however, been diminished by a certain type of democracy in many other countries besides America. The resulting vulgarity and triviality are more or less visible in all of these countries;—for example, if we are to believe Lord Bryce, in New Zealand. If we in America are perhaps preëminent in lack of distinction, it is because of the very completeness of our emancipation from the past. Goethe’s warning as to the retarding effect of the commonplace is well known (Was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine). His explanation of what makes for the commonplace is less familiar: “Enjoyment,” he says, “makes common.” (Geniessen macht gemein.) Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: “I am an Epicurean.”⁠[96] It cannot be gainsaid that an increasing number of our young people are, in this respect at least, good Jeffersonians. The phrase that reflects most clearly their philosophy of life is perhaps “good time.” One might suppose that many of them see this phrase written in great blazing letters on the very face of the firmament. As “Punch” remarked, the United States is not a country, but a picnic. When the element of conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life, what remains is the irresponsible quest of thrills. The utilitarian and industrial side of the modern movement comes into play at this point. Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything (including the irresponsible quest of thrills); so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama. This definition will be found to fit many aspects of our national life besides the moving-picture industry. The tendency to steep and saturate ourselves in the impression of the moment without reference to any permanent pattern of human experience is even more marked, perhaps, in our newspapers and magazines. It was said of the inhabitants of a certain ancient Greek city that, though they were not fools, they did just the things that fools would do. It is hard to take a glance at one of our news-stands without reflecting that, though we may not be fools, we are reading just the things that fools would read. Our daily press in particular is given over to the most childish sensationalism. “The Americans are an excellent people,” Matthew Arnold wrote from Boston in 1883, “but their press seems to me an awful symptom.” This symptom was not so awful then as now; for that was before the day of the scarehead and the comic supplement. The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen. Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.

One is inclined, indeed, to ask, in certain moods, whether the net result of the movement that has been sweeping the Occident for several generations may not be a huge mass of standardized mediocrity; and whether in this country in particular we are not in danger of producing in the name of democracy one of the most trifling brands of the human species that the world has yet seen. To be sure, it may be urged that, though we may suffer loss of distinction as a result of the democratic drift, by way of compensation a great many average people will, in the Jeffersonian sense at least, be made “happy.” If we are to judge by history, however, what supervenes upon the decline of standards and the disappearance of leaders who embody them is not some equalitarian paradise, but inferior types of leadership. We have already been reminded by certain developments in this country of Byron’s definition of democracy as an “aristocracy of blackguards.” At the very moment when we were most vociferous about making the world safe for democracy the citizens of New York City refused to reëlect an honest man as their mayor and put in his place a tool of Tammany, an action followed in due course by a “crime wave”; whereupon they returned the tool of Tammany by an increased majority. The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards. In the case of our American cities, the problem of securing some degree of moral cohesion is further complicated by the presence of numerous aliens of widely divergent racial stocks and cultural backgrounds.⁠[97] In addition our population is not only about half urban, but we cannot be said, like most other countries, to have any peasantry or yeomanry. Those Americans who actually dwell in the country are more and more urban in their psychology. The whole situation is so unusual as to suggest doubts even from a purely biological point of view. “As I watch the American nation speeding gaily, with invincible optimism down the road to destruction,” says Professor William McDougall, an observer of the biological type, “I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind.”

We are assured, indeed, that the highly heterogeneous elements that enter into our population will, like various instruments in an orchestra, merely result in a richer harmony; they will, one may reply, provided that, like an orchestra, they be properly led. Otherwise the outcome may be an unexampled cacophony. This question of leadership is not primarily biological, but moral. Leaders may vary in quality from the man who is so loyal to sound standards that he inspires right conduct in others by the sheer rightness of his example, to the man who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of force, and so is, in the sense I have sought to define, imperialistic. If democracy means simply the attempt to eliminate the qualitative and selective principle in favor of some general will, based in turn on a theory of natural rights, it may prove to be only a form of the vertigo of the abyss. As I have tried to show in dealing with the influence of Rousseau on the French Revolution, it will result practically, not in equality, but in a sort of inverted aristocracy. One’s choice may be, not between a democracy that is properly led and a democracy that hopes to find the equivalent of standards and leadership in the appeal to a numerical majority, that indulges in other words in a sort of quantitative impressionism, but between a democracy that is properly led and a decadent imperialism. One should, therefore, in the interests of democracy itself seek to substitute the doctrine of the right man for the doctrine of the rights of man.

The opposition between traditional standards and an equalitarian democracy based on the supposed rights of man has played an important part in our own political history, and has meant practically the opposition between two types of leadership. The “quality” in the older sense of the word suffered its first decisive defeat in 1829 when Washington was invaded by the hungry hordes of Andrew Jackson. The imperialism latent in this type of democracy appears in the Jacksonian maxim: “To the victors belong the spoils.” In his theory of democracy Jackson had, of course, much in common with Thomas Jefferson. If we go back, indeed, to the beginnings of our institutions, we find that America stood from the start for two different views of government that have their origin in different views of liberty and ultimately of human nature. The view that is set forth in the Declaration of Independence assumes that man has certain abstract rights; it has therefore important points of contact with the French revolutionary “idealism.” The view that inspired our Constitution, on the other hand, has much in common with that of Burke. If the first of these political philosophies is properly associated with Jefferson, the second has its most distinguished representative in Washington. The Jeffersonian liberal has faith in the goodness of the natural man, and so tends to overlook the need of a veto power either in the individual or in the State. The liberals of whom I have taken Washington to be the type are less expansive in their attitude towards the natural man. Just as man has a higher self that acts restrictively on his ordinary self, so, they hold, the State should have a higher or permanent self, appropriately embodied in institutions, that should set bounds to its ordinary self as expressed by the popular will at any particular moment. The contrast that I am establishing is, of course, that between a constitutional and a direct democracy. There is an opposition of first principles between those who maintain that the popular will should prevail, but only after it has been purified of what is merely impulsive and ephemeral, and those who maintain that this will should prevail immediately and unrestrictedly. The American experiment in democracy has, therefore, from the outset been ambiguous, and will remain so until the irrepressible conflict between a Washingtonian and a Jeffersonian liberty has been fought to a conclusion. The liberal of the type of Washington has always been very much concerned with what one may term the unionist aspect of liberty. This central preoccupation is summed up in the phrase of Webster: Liberty and union, one and inseparable. The liberty of the Jeffersonian, on the other hand, makes against ethical union like every liberty that rests on the assertion of abstract rights. Jefferson himself proclaimed not only human rights, but also state rights.⁠[98] Later the doctrine of state rights was developed with logical rigor by Calhoun, whereas the doctrine of human rights was carried through no less uncompromisingly by the abolitionists. The result was two opposing camps of extremists and fire-eaters; so that the whole question of union, instead of being settled on ethical lines, had to be submitted to the arbitrament of force.

The man who has grasped the full import of the conflict between the liberty of the unionist and that of the Jeffersonian has been put in possession of the key that unlocks American history. The conflict between the two conceptions is not, indeed, always clear-cut in particular individuals. There is much in Jefferson himself that contradicts what I have been saying about Jefferson. A chief business of criticism, however, is to distinguish, in spite of peripheral overlappings, between things that are at the centre different. For example, to link together in a common admiration Jefferson and John Marshall, our most eminent unionist after Washington himself, is proof of lack of critical discrimination rather than of piety towards the fathers. Jefferson and Marshall knew perfectly that they stood for incompatible things,⁠[99] and it is important that we should know it also. “Marshall,” says John Quincy Adams in his Diary, “has cemented the Union which the crafty and quixotic democracy of Jefferson had a perpetual tendency to dissolve.”

By his preoccupation with the question of the union, Lincoln became the true successor of Washington and Marshall. In making of Lincoln the great emancipator instead of the great unionist, in spite of his own most specific declarations on this point, we are simply creating a Lincoln myth, as we have already created a Washington myth.⁠[100] We are sometimes told that the good democrat needs merely to be like Lincoln. But to be like Lincoln one must know what Lincoln was like. This is not only a task for the critic, but, in view of the Lincoln myth, a more difficult task than is commonly supposed. It is especially easy to sentimentalize Lincoln because he had a strongly marked vein of sentimentalism. Nevertheless, in spite of the peripheral overlappings between the democracy of Lincoln and that of Jefferson⁠[101] or even between that of Lincoln and Walt Whitman, one should insist on the central difference. One has only to read, for example, the Second Inaugural along with the “Song of Myself” if one wishes to become aware of the gap that separates religious humility from romantic egotism. We should be careful again, in spite of peripheral overlappings, not to confound the democracy of Lincoln with that of Roosevelt. What we feel at the very centre in Roosevelt is the dynamic rush of an imperialistic personality. What we feel at the very centre in Lincoln, on the other hand, is an element of judicial control; and in close relation to this control a profound conception of the rôle of the courts in maintaining free institutions. The man who has studied the real Lincoln does not find it easy to imagine him advocating the recall of judicial decisions.

The Jeffersonian liberal is, as a rule, much more ostentatiously fraternal than the liberal in the other tradition. Yet he is usually inferior in human warmth and geniality to the unionist. Washington and Marshall and Lincoln at their best combined practical sagacity with a central benignity and unselfishness. Jefferson, on the other hand, though perhaps our most accomplished politician, did not show himself especially sagacious in dealing with specific emergencies. Furthermore, it is hard to read his “Anas” and reflect on the circumstances of its composition without concluding that what was central in his personality was not benignity and unselfishness but vindictiveness.

Statesmen who deserve the praise I have bestowed on our unionist leaders are, as every student of history knows, extremely rare. The type of constitutional liberty that we owe to these men before all others is one of the greatest blessings that has ever been vouchsafed to any people. And yet we are in danger of losing it. The Eighteenth Amendment is striking proof of our loss of grasp, not only on the principles that underlie our own Constitution, but that must underlie any constitution, as such, in opposition to mere legislative enactment.

Our present drift away from constitutional freedom can be understood only with reference to the progressive crumbling of traditional standards and the rise of a naturalistic philosophy that, in its treatment of specifically human problems, has been either sentimental or utilitarian. The significant changes in our own national temper in particular are finally due to the fact that Protestant Christianity, especially in the Puritanic form, has been giving way to humanitarianism. The point is worth making because the persons who have favored prohibition and other similar “reforms” have been attacked as Puritans. Genuine Puritanism was, however, a religion of the inner life. Our unionist leaders, Washington, Marshall, and Lincoln, though not narrowly orthodox, were still religious in the traditional sense. The struggle between good and evil, as they saw it, was still primarily not in society, but in the individual. Their conscious dependence on a higher or divine will could not fail to be reflected in their notion of liberty. Jefferson, on the contrary, associated his liberty, not with God, but with “nature.” He admired, as is well known, the liberty of the American Indian.⁠[102] He was for diminishing to the utmost the rôle of government, but not for increasing the inner control that must, according to Burke, be in strict ratio to the relaxation of outer control. When evil actually appears, the Jeffersonian cannot appeal to the principle of inner control; he is not willing again to admit that the sole alternative to this type of control is force; and so he is led into what seems at first sight a paradoxical denial of his own principles: he has recourse to legislation. It should be clear at all events that our present attempt to substitute social control for self-control is Jeffersonian rather than Puritanical. So far as we are true children of the Puritans, we may accept the contrast established by Professor Stuart P. Sherman⁠[103] between our own point of view and that of the German: “The ideal of the German is external control and ‘inner freedom’; the Government looks after his conduct and he looks after his liberty. The ideal of the American is external freedom and inner control; the individual looks after his conduct and the Government looks after his liberty. Thus Verboten in Germany is pronounced by the Government and enforced by the police. In America Verboten is pronounced by public opinion and enforced by the individual conscience. In this light it should appear that Puritanism, our national principle of concentration, is the indispensable check on democracy, our national principle of expansion. I use the word Puritanism in the sense given to it by German and German-American critics: the inner check upon the expansion of natural impulse.”

Professor Sherman’s contrast has been true in the past and still has some truth—at least enough for the purposes of war-time propaganda. But what about our main drift at present? It is plainly away from the point of view that Professor Sherman ascribes to the Puritan⁠[104] and towards the point of view that he ascribes to the German. “The inner check upon the expansion of natural impulse” is precisely the missing element in the Jeffersonian philosophy. The Jeffersonian has therefore been led to deal with the problem of evil, not vitally and in terms of the inner life, but mechanically. Like the Jesuit he has fallen from law into legalism. It has been estimated that for one Verboten sign in Germany we already have a dozen in this country; only, having set up our Verboten sign, we get even by not observing it. Thus prohibition is pronounced by the Government, largely repudiated by the individual conscience, and enforced (very imperfectly) by the police. The multitude⁠[105] of laws we are passing is one of many proofs that we are growing increasingly lawless.

There are, to be sure, peripheral overlappings between the point of view of the Puritan and that of the humanitarian legalist. The Puritan inclined from the start to be meddlesome, as any one who has studied the activities of Calvin at Geneva will testify. But even here one may ask whether the decisive arguments by which we have been induced to submit to the meddling of the prohibitionist were not utilitarian rather than puritanical. “Booze,” says Mr. Henry Ford, “had to go out when modern industry and the motor car came in.” The truth may be that we are prepared to make any sacrifice to the Moloch of efficiency, including, apparently, that of our federal Constitution.

The persons who have been carrying on of late a campaign against the Puritans like to look on themselves as “intellectuals.” But if the primary function of the intellect is to make accurate distinctions, it is plain that they do not deserve the title. For in dealing with this whole subject they have fallen into a twofold confusion. So far as they identify with Puritanism the defence of the principle of control in human nature, they are simply attacking under that name the wisdom of the ages and all its authentic representatives in both East and West. To bestow, on the other hand, the name of Puritans on the humanitarian legalists who are now sapping our spiritual virility is to pay them an extravagant and undeserved compliment. Let us take as a sample of the attacks on the Puritans that of Mr. Theodore Dreiser, culminating in the grotesque assertion regarding the United States: “No country has such a peculiar, such a seemingly fierce determination to make the Ten Commandments work.” We are murdering one another at the rate of about ten thousand a year (with very few capital convictions)⁠[106] and are in general showing ourselves more criminally inclined than any other nation that is reputed to be civilized.⁠[107] The explanation is that we are trying to make, not the Ten Commandments, but humanitarianism work—and it is not working. If our courts are so ineffective in punishing crime, a chief reason is that they do not have the support of public opinion, and this is because the public is so largely composed of people who have set up sympathy for the underdog as a substitute for all the other virtues, or else of people who hold that the criminal is the product of his environment and so is not morally responsible. Here as elsewhere there is a coöperation between those who mechanize life and those who sentimentalize it.

The belief in moral responsibility must be based on a belief in the possibility of an inner working of some kind with reference to standards. The utilitarian, as I have sought to show, has put his main emphasis on outer working. The consequence of this emphasis, coinciding as it has with the multiplication of machines, has been the substitution of standardization for standards. The type of efficiency that our master commercialists pursue requires that a multitude of men should be deprived of their specifically human attributes, and become mere cogs in some vast machine. At the present rate even the grocer in a remote country town will soon not be left as much initiative as is needed to fix the price of a pound of butter.

Standardization is, however, a less serious menace to standards than what are currently known as “ideals.” The person who breaks down standards in the name of ideals does not seem to be impelled by base commercial motives, but to be animated, on the contrary, by the purest commiseration for the lowly and the oppressed. We must have the courage to submit this humanitarian zeal to a close scrutiny. We may perhaps best start with the familiar dictum that America is only another name for opportunity. Opportunity to do what? To engage in a scramble for money and material success, until the multimillionaire emerges as the characteristic product of a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? According to Napoleon, the French Revolution was also only another name for opportunity (la carrière ouverte aux talents). Some of our commercial supermen have evidently been making use of their opportunity in a very Napoleonic fashion. In any case, opportunity has meaning only with reference to some true standard. The sentimentalist, instead of setting up some such standard by way of protest against the wrong type of superiority, inclines rather to bestow an unselective sympathy on those who have been left behind in the race for economic advantage. Even when less materialistic in his outlook, he is prone to dodge the question of justice. He does not ask whether a man is an underdog because he has already had his opportunity and failed to use it, whether, in short, the man that he takes to be a victim of the social order is not rather a victim of his own misconduct⁠[108] or at least of his own indolence and inattention. He thus exposes himself to the penalties visited on those who set out to be kinder than the moral law.

At bottom the point of view of the “uplifter” is so popular because it nourishes spiritual complacency; it enables a man to look on himself as “up” and on some one else as “down.” But there is psychological if not theological truth in the assertion of Jonathan Edwards that complacent people are a “particular smoke” in God’s nostrils. A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog. The man who thus looks up is becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn, and, to this extent, qualifying for leadership. Leadership of this type, one may add, may prove to be, in the long run, the only effectual counterpoise to that of the imperialistic superman.

No amount of devotion to society and its supposed interests can take the place of this inner obeisance of the spirit to standards. The humanitarian would seem to be caught here in a vicious circle. If he turns from the inner life to serve his fellow men, he becomes a busybody. If he sets out again to become exemplary primarily with a view to the benefit of others, he becomes a prig. Nothing will avail short of humility. Humility, as Burke saw, is the ultimate root of the justice that should prevail in the secular order, as well as of the virtues that are specifically religious. The modern problem, I have been insisting, is to secure leaders with an allegiance to standards, now that the traditional order with which Burke associated his standards and leadership has been so seriously shaken. Those who have broken with the traditional beliefs have thus far shown themselves singularly ineffective in dealing with this problem of leadership, even when they have admitted the need of leaders at all. The persons who have piqued themselves especially on being positive have looked for leadership to the exponents of physical science. Auguste Comte, for example, not only regarded men of science as the true modern priesthood, but actually disparaged moral effort on the part of the individual. I scarcely need to repeat here what I have said elsewhere—that the net result of a merely scientific “progress” is to produce efficient megalomaniacs. Physical science, excellent in its proper place, is, when exalted out of this place, the ugliest and most maleficent idol before which man has as yet consented to prostrate himself. If the essence of genuine science is to face loyally all the facts as they present themselves without dogmatic prepossessions, one is justified in asking whether the man who forgets that physical science is, in Tennyson’s phrase, the second, not the first, is genuinely scientific; whether the very sharpest discrimination does not need to be established between science and utilitarianism. Aristotle, for example, was a true man of science; he was not a utilitarian.⁠[109] Francis Bacon, on the other hand, is the prophet of the whole utilitarian movement, but one may doubt his eminence as a man of science. Quite apart from the fact that he failed to make important scientific discoveries, one may question the validity of the Baconian method. His failure to do justice to deduction as part of a sound scientific method has often been noted. A more serious defect is his failure to recognize the rôle of the imagination, or, what amounts to the same thing, the rôle of exceptional genius in the making of scientific discoveries.⁠[110]⁠

One cannot grant that an aristocracy of scientific intellectuals or indeed any aristocracy of intellect is what we need. This would mean practically to encourage the libido sciendi and so to put pride in the place of humility. Still less acceptable would be an aristocracy of artists; as the word art has come to be understood in recent times, this would mean an aristocracy of æsthetes who would attempt to base their selection on the libido sentiendi. The Nietzschean attempt, again, to found the aristocratic and selective principle on the sheer expansion of the will to power (libido dominandi) would lead in practice to horrible violence and finally to the death of civilization. The attempts that were made during the past century to establish a scale of values with reference to the three main lusts of the human heart often took on a mystical coloring. Man likes to think that he has God as an ally of his expansive conceit, whatever this conceit may chance to be. When, indeed, one has passed in review the various mysticisms of the modern movement, as they are set forth, for example, in the volumes of M. Seillière, one is reminded of the saying of Bossuet: “True mysticism is so rare and unessential and false mysticism is so common and dangerous that one cannot oppose it too firmly.”

If one discovers frequently a pseudo-mystical element in the claims to leadership of the æsthetes, the supermen and the scientific intellectuals, this element is even more visible in those who would, in the name of democracy, dispense with leadership altogether. Thus Walt Whitman, as we have seen, would put no check on his “spontaneous me”; he would have every one else indulge his “idiocrasy” to the same degree, be a “genius,” in short, in the full romantic sense of the term. A liberty thus anarchical is to lead to equality and fraternity. If one tells the democrat of this type that his programme is contrary to common sense and the facts of experience, he is wont to take refuge in mystical “vision.” One needs in effect to be very mystical to suppose that men can come together by flying off each on his temperamental tangent. Whitman does not admit the need of the leader who looks up humbly to some standard and so becomes worthy to be looked up to in turn. The only leadership he contemplates apparently is that of the ideal democratic bard who flatters the people’s pride and chants the divine average.⁠[111] He represents in an extreme form the substitution for vital control of expansive emotion under the name of love. Pride and self-assertion, when tempered by love, will not, he holds, endanger the principle of union.⁠[112] The Union, though “always swarming with blatherers, is yet,” he says, “always sure and impregnable.” The records of the past are not reassuring as to the maintenance of ethical union in a community that is swarming with “blatherers.” At all events, the offset to the blatherers will be found, not in any divine average, but in the true leader—the “still strong man in a blatant land.” We come here to another opposition that is one of first principles and is not therefore subject to mediation or compromise—the opposition, namely, between the doctrine of the saving remnant and that of the divine average. If one deals with human nature realistically one may find here and there a person who is worthy of respect and occasionally one who is worthy of reverence. Any one, on the other hand, who puts his faith in the divinity of the average is destined, if we are to trust the records of history, to pass through disillusion to a final despair. We are reaching the stage of disillusion in this country at the present moment. According to the author of “Main Street,” the average is not divine but trivial; according to the author of the “Spoon River Anthology,” it is positively hideous. It can scarcely be gainsaid that contemporary America offers an opening for satire. A great many people are gradually drifting into materialism and often cherishing the conceit at the same time that they are radiant idealists. But satire, to be worth while, must be constructive. The opposite of the trivial is the distinguished; and one can determine what is distinguished only with reference to standards. To see Main Street on a background of standards would be decidedly helpful; but standards are precisely what our so-called realists lack. They are themselves a part of the disease that they are attempting to define.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people. How far is this appeal to the plain people justified and how far is it merely demagogic? There is undoubted truth in the saying that there is somebody who knows more than anybody, and that is everybody. Only one must allow everybody sufficient time to sift the evidence and add that, even so, everybody does not know very much. Burke told the electors of Bristol that he was not flattering their opinions of the moment, but uttering the views that both they and he must have five years thence. Even in this triumph of the sober judgment of the people over its passing impression, the rôle of the true leader should not be underestimated. Thus in the year 1795 the plain people of America were eager to give the fraternal accolade to the French Jacobins. The great and wise Washington opposed an alliance that would almost certainly have been disastrous, and as a result he had heaped upon him by journals like the “Aurora,” the forerunner of our modern “journals of opinion,” epithets that, as he himself complained, would not have been deserved by a common pickpocket. In a comparatively short time Washington and his group were seen to be right, and those who seemed to be the spokesmen of the plain people were seen to be wrong. It is not clear that one can have much faith even in the sober second thought of a community that has no enlightened minority. A Haytian statesman, for example, might not gain much in appealing from Haytian opinion of to-day to Haytian opinion of five years hence. The democratic idealist does not, however, mean as a rule by an appeal to the plain people an appeal to its sober second thought. He means rather the immediate putting into effect of the will of a numerical majority. Like the man in the comic song the people is supposed to “want what it wants when it wants it.” Our American drift for a number of years has unquestionably been towards a democracy of this radical type, as is evident from the increasing vogue of the initiative, referendum, and recall (whether of judges or judicial decisions) as well as from popular primaries and the direct election of Senators. The feeling that the people should act directly on all measures has led to the appearance in certain States of ballots thirty feet long! Yet the notion that wisdom resides in a popular majority at any particular moment should be the most completely exploded of all fallacies. If the plain people at Jerusalem had registered their will with the aid of the most improved type of ballot box, there is no evidence that they would have preferred Christ to Barabbas. In view of the size of the jury that condemned Socrates, one may affirm confidently that he was the victim of a “great and solemn referendum.” On the other hand, the plain people can be shown to have taken a special delight in Nero. But the plain people, it will be replied, has been educated and enlightened. The intelligence tests applied in connection with the selective draft indicate that the average mental age of our male voters is about fourteen.⁠[113] The intelligence testers are, to be sure, under some suspicion as to the quality of their own intelligence. A more convincing proof of the low mentality of our population is found, perhaps, in the fact that the Hearst publications have twenty-five million readers.

“There is nothing,” says Goethe, “more odious than the majority; for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and subservient weaklings, and a mass of men who trudge after them without in the least knowing their own minds.” If there is any truth in this analysis the majority in a radical democracy often rules only in name. No movement, indeed, illustrates more clearly than the supposedly democratic movement the way in which the will of highly organized and resolute minorities may prevail over the will of the inert and unorganized mass. Even though the mass does not consent to “trudge” after the minority, it is at an increasing disadvantage in its attempts to resist it. Physical science is on the side of the tyrannical minority. The ordinary citizen cannot have a machine gun by his fireside or a “tank” in his back yard. The most recent type of revolutionary idealist, though his chief concern is still to bestow benefit on the people, does not, to do him justice, hope to achieve this benefit through the majority, but rather through the direct action of organized minorities. He feels that he is justified in cramming his nostrum down the throat of the people, if necessary by force.

The radical of this type is coming round to the doctrine of the saving remnant and recognizing in his own way that everything finally hinges on the quality of the leadership. His views, however, as to this quality differ strangely from the traditional views. One must admit that, whatever theories of leadership may have been held traditionally, actual leadership has never been any too good. One scarcely suspects, as John Selden remarked, “what a little foolery governs the world.” Moreover, the folly which has prevailed at the top of society, and that from the time of the Trojan War, has ever been faithfully reflected in the rank and file (Quidquid delirant reges—). One who surveys the past is at times tempted to acquiesce in the gloomy judgment of Dryden: “No government has ever been or ever can be wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost. The persons are only changed, but the same juggling in state, the same hypocrisy in religion, the same self-interest and mismanagement will remain forever. Blood and money will be lavished in all ages only for the preferment of new faces with old consciences.” One should note, however, a difference between the bad leadership of the past and that of the modern revolutionary era. The leaders of the past have most frequently been bad in violation of the principles they professed, whereas it is when a Robespierre or a Lenin sets out to apply his principles that the man who is interested in the survival of civilization has reason to tremble.

Dryden’s passage seems to suggest that what is really needed is not new faces with old consciences, but a transformation of conscience itself. It is precisely such a transformation that a revolutionary idealist like Robespierre hopes to effect. For the corrupt conscience of the old type of aristocratic leader he would substitute a social conscience. The popular will that is inspired by this conscience is so immaculate, as we have seen, that it may safely be put in the place not merely of the royal but of the divine will. I have already tried to show that a leader who sets out to be only the organ of a “general will” or “divine average,” that is conceived at times as essentially reasonable and at other times as essentially fraternal, will actually become imperialistic. It may be well at this point to submit this democratic idealism to still further analysis with special reference to its probable effect on our own international relations. The tendency for some time past has been to treat international law, not theoretically as an embodiment of reason, but positively as an embodiment of will.⁠[114] In that case, if international law is to reflect any improvement in the relations between states, it must be shown that the substitution of the popular will for the divine will has actually tended to promote ethical union among men even across national frontiers. If we analyze realistically the popular will, we find that it means the will of a multitude of men who are more and more emancipated from traditional standards and more and more given over to what I have termed the irresponsible quest of thrills. These thrills are, as we all know, supplied by sensational newspapers and in international affairs involve transitions, often disconcertingly sudden, from pacifism to jingoism. Any one who can recollect the period immediately preceding our conflict with Spain will be sufficiently aware of the rôle that this type of journalism may play in precipitating war. Let us ask ourselves again whether the chances of a clash between America and Japan are likely to diminish if Japan becomes more democratic, if, in other words, the popular will is substituted for the will of a small group of “elder statesmen.” Any one who knows what the Japanese sensational press has already done to foment suspicion against America is justified in harboring doubts on this point.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic in its practice. The idealism and the imperialism, indeed, are in pretty direct ratio to one another. For example, to be fraternal in Walt Whitman’s sense is to be boundlessly expansive, and a boundless expansiveness, is, in a world like this, incompatible with peace. Whitman imagines the United States as expanding until it absorbs Canada and Mexico and dominates both the Atlantic and the Pacific—a programme that would almost certainly involve us in war with the whole world. If we go, not by what Americans feel about themselves, but by what they have actually done, one must conclude that we have shown ourselves thus far a consistently expansive, in other words, a consistently imperialistic, people.⁠[115] We have merely been expanding, it may be replied, to our natural frontiers; but we are already in the Philippines, and manifestly in danger of becoming involved in Asiatic adventures. Japan, a country with fifty-seven million inhabitants (increasing at the rate of about six hundred thousand a year), on a group of islands not as large as the State of California, only seventeen per cent of which is arable, has at least a plausible pretext for reaching out beyond her natural frontiers. But for us, with our almost limitless and still largely undeveloped resources, to risk the horrors of war under modern conditions for anything we are likely to gain from expanding eastward, would be an extreme example of sheer restlessness of spirit and of an intemperate commercialism. It is a part of our psychology that each main incident in our national history should take on a highly idealistic coloring. For example, we were on the verge of a conflict with Mexico a few years ago as the result of an unwarranted meddling with her sovereignty. President Wilson at once described the incipient struggle as a war of “service.” Cicero says that Rome gained the mastery of the world by coming to the aid of her allies. In the same way it may be said some day of us that, as the result of a series of outbursts of idealism, we changed from a federal republic to a highly centralized and bureaucratic empire. We are willing to admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives. We have not as yet set up, like revolutionary France, as the Christ of Nations, but during the late war we liked to look on ourselves as at least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards himself as an idealist at the same time that the foreigner looks on him as a dollar-chaser, the explanation may be due partly to the fact that the American judges himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner judges him by what he does.

This is not, of course, the whole truth. Besides our tradition of idealism there is our unionist tradition based on a sane moral realism. “It is a maxim,” says Washington, “founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted further than it is bound by its interests; and no president, statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.” All realistic observation confirms Washington. Those who are inspired by his spirit believe that we should be nationally prepared, and then that we should mind our own business. The tendency of our idealists, on the other hand, is to be unprepared and then to engage in more or less general meddling. A third attitude may be distinguished that may properly be associated with Roosevelt. The follower of Roosevelt wants preparedness, only he cannot, like the follower of Washington, be counted on to mind his own business. The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his programme of world service. Unfortunately, it is more difficult than he supposes to engage in such a programme without getting involved in a programme of world empire. The term sentimental imperialism may be applied to certain incidents in ancient Roman history.⁠[116] Some of the motives that we professed for entering the Great War remind one curiously of the motives that men like Flamininus professed for going to the rescue of Greece. Cicero, writing over a century later and only a few months before his assassination by the emissaries of the Triumvirs, said that he himself had once thought that Rome stood for world service rather than for world empire, but that he had been bitterly disillusioned. He proceeds to denounce Julius Cæsar, the imperialistic leader par excellence, as a demon in human form who did evil for its own sake. But Cæsar had at least the merit of seeing that the Roman ethos was changing, that as the result of the breakdown of religious restraint (for which Stoical “service” was not an adequate substitute), the Romans were rapidly becoming unfit for republican institutions.

Some persons, indeed, are inclined to go beyond particular comparisons of this kind and develop a general parallel between decadent Rome and modern America. Such a parallel is always very incomplete and must be used with great caution. We need, in the first place, to define with some precision what we mean by decadence. The term is often used vaguely by persons who are suffering from what one may call the illusion of the “good old times.”⁠[117] Livy is surely a bit idyllic when he exclaims: “Where will you now find in one man this modesty and uprightness and loftiness of spirit that then belonged to a whole people?” Yet if one compares the Rome of the Republic with the Rome of the Empire one is conscious of a real decline. The Senate that had seemed to Cineas, the adviser of Pyrrhus, an assembly of demigods, had become by the time of Tiberius a gathering rather of cringing sycophants. Horace was uttering only the sober truth when he proclaimed the progressive degeneracy of the Romans of his time.⁠[118] The most significant symptom of this degeneracy seemed to Horace and other shrewd observers to be the relaxation of the bonds of the family.

Are we witnessing a similar moral deliquescence in this country, and, if so, how far has it gone? One of our foreign critics asserts that we have already reached the “Heliogabalus stage”—which is absurd. But at the same time it is not to be denied that the naturalistic notion of liberty has undermined in no small measure the two chief unifying influences of the past—the Church and the family. The decline in the discipline of the family has been fairly recent. Persons are still living who can remember the conditions that prevailed in the Puritan household.⁠[119] The process of emancipation from the older restraint has not usually presented itself as a lapse into mere materialism. Idealism in the current sense of that term has tended to take the place of traditional religion. The descendants of the Puritans have gone in for commercialism, to be sure, especially since the Civil War, but it has been commercialism tempered by humanitarian crusading. As I have pointed out, the humanitarian does not, like the genuine Puritan, seek to get at evil in the heart of the individual, so that he is finally forced to resort to outer regulation. The egoistic impulses that are not controlled at their source tend to prevail over an ineffectual altruism in the relations of man with man and class with class. The special mark of materialism, which is to regard property, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, is more and more visible. The conservative nowadays is interested in conserving property for its own sake and not, like Burke, in conserving it because it is an almost indispensable support of personal liberty, a genuinely spiritual thing. As for the progressive, his preoccupation with property and what he conceives to be its just distribution amounts to a morbid obsession. Orderly party government will become increasingly difficult if we continue to move in this direction, and we shall finally be menaced by class war, if, indeed, we are not menaced by it already. Every student of history is aware of the significance of this particular symptom in a democracy. One may sum up what appears to be our total trend at present by saying that we are moving through an orgy of humanitarian legalism towards a decadent imperialism.

The important offsetting influence is our great unionist tradition. One should not, however, underestimate the difficulties in the way of maintaining this tradition. The idea that the State should have a permanent or higher self that is felt as a veto power upon its ordinary self rests ultimately upon the assertion of a similar dualism in the individual. We have seen that this assertion has in the Occident been inextricably bound up with certain Christian beliefs that have been weakened by the naturalistic movement. We are brought back here to the problem with which we have been confronted so often in the course of the present argument, how, namely, to get modern equivalents for the traditional beliefs, above all some fresh basis for the affirmation of a frein vital or centripetal element in liberty. What the men of the French Revolution wanted, according to Joubert, was not religious liberty, but irreligious liberty. In that case, the French modernist retorts bitterly, you would have us give up revolutionary liberty and become Jesuits. Similarly, if one points out to an American modernist the inanity of his idealism as a substitute for the traditional controls, he will at once accuse you of wishing to revert to Puritanism. Strictly speaking, however, one does not need to revert to anything. It is a part of my own method to put Confucius behind Aristotle and Buddha behind Christ. The best, however, that even these great teachers can do for us is to help us to discover what is already present in ourselves.⁠[120] From this point of view they are well-nigh indispensable.

Let us begin, therefore, by ridding our minds of unreal alternatives. If we in America are not content with a stodgy commercialism, it does not follow that we need, on the one hand, to return to Puritanism, or, on the other, to become “liberals” in the style of “The New Republic”; nor, again, need we evolve under the guidance of Mr. H. L. Mencken into second-rate Nietzscheans. We do need, however, if we are to gain any hold on the present situation, to develop a little moral gravity and intellectual seriousness. We shall then see that the strength of the traditional doctrines, as compared with the modernist position, is the comparative honesty with which they face the fact of evil. We shall see that we need to restore to human nature in some critical and experimental fashion the “old Adam” that the idealists have been so busy eliminating. A restoration of this kind ought not to lead merely to a lapse from naturalistic optimism into naturalistic pessimism; nothing is easier than such a lapse and nothing at bottom is more futile. Both attitudes are about equally fatalistic and so undermine moral responsibility. A survey of the facts would suggest that man is morally responsible, but that he is always trying to dodge this responsibility; that what he suffers from, in short, is not fate in any sense of the word, but spiritual supineness. There may be truth in the saying that the devil’s other name is inertia. Nothing is more curious than to trace historically the way in which some great teaching like that of Christ or Buddha has been gradually twisted until man has adjusted it more or less completely to his ancient indolence. Several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships; shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow, indeed, very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill. It was announced in the press not long ago that as a final improvement some of the prayer mills in Thibet are to be operated by electricity. The man who hopes to save society by turning the crank of a legislative mill or who sets up as a “socio-religious engineer” may call himself a Christian, but he is probably as remote from the true spirit of Jesus as some Eastern votary of the Easy Way is from the true spirit of Buddha.

The essence of man’s spiritual indolence, as I have already pointed out, is that he does not wish to look up to standards and discipline himself with reference to them. He wishes rather to expand freely along the lines of his dominant desire. He grasps eagerly at everything that seems to favor this desire and so tends, as the saying is, to keep him in good conceit with himself. Disraeli discovered, we are told, that the best way to get on with Queen Victoria was to flatter her and not to be afraid of overdoing the flattery, but “to lay it on with a trowel.” Demos, as was pointed out long ago, craves flattery like any other monarch, and in his theory of popular sovereignty Rousseau has, it must be admitted, laid this flattery on with a trowel. In general, his notion that evil is not in man himself, but in his institutions, has enjoyed immense popularity, not because it is true, but because it is flattering.

Observations of the kind I have been making are likely to lay one open to the charge of cynicism. One needs, however, to cultivate a wholesome cynicism as the only way of avoiding the unwholesome kind—that of the disillusioned sentimentalist. When I speak of a wholesome cynicism, I mean that of Aristotle who says that “most men do evil when they have an opportunity,” or that of Bossuet, expressing the moderate Christian view, when he speaks of “the prodigious malignity of the human heart always inclined to do evil.” There is no harm in cynicism provided the cynic does not think of himself as viewing human nature from the outside and from some superior pinnacle. In the sense I have just defined, cynicism, indeed, has many points in common with religious humility.

Let us pursue then our realistic analysis without fear of the charge of cynicism. Man would not succumb so easily to flattery if he did not begin by flattering himself; his self-flattery is closely related in turn to his moral indolence. I have said that the whole of life may be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. But man does not want conversion, the adjustment in other words of his natural will to some higher will, because of the moral effort it implies. In this sense he is the everlasting trifler. But, though he wishes diversion, he is loath at the same time to admit that he is missing the fruits of conversion. He wills the ends, because they are plainly desirable, but he does not will the means because they are difficult and disciplinary. In short, he harbors incompatible desires and so listens eagerly to those who encourage him to think that it is possible to have the good thing without paying the appointed price.

Two main modes in which men are thus flattered may be distinguished. First, in an age of authority and accepted standards, they are induced to substitute for the reality of spiritual discipline some ingenious art of going through the motions. An extreme example is that of the fashionable lady described by Boileau who (with the aid of her spiritual director) had convinced herself that she could enjoy all the pleasures of hell on the way to paradise. What concerns us now, however, is not the mode of flattery that is based on exaggerated respect for outer authority, but the other main mode that flourishes in an age of individualism. The cushions that, according to Bossuet, the Jesuits put under the sinner’s elbows are as nothing compared to the cushions that the sinner puts under his own elbows when left to himself. In a period like the present every man is his own Jesuit.⁠[121] Rousseau’s sycophancy of human nature proved to be particularly suited to the requirements of the individualistic era. By his sophistry of feeling he satisfied in a new and fetching fashion man’s permanent desire, especially in the realm of moral values, to have his cake and eat it too. The self-flattery that encourages the huddling together of incompatible desires has never been pushed further than in this movement. When one considers, for instance, the multitude of those who have hoped to combine peace and brotherhood with a return to nature, one is forced to conclude that an outstanding human trait is a prodigious and pathetic gullibility.

The chief corrective of gullibility is, in an age of individualistic emancipation, a full and free play of the critical spirit. The more critical one becomes at such a time, the more likely one is to achieve standards and avoid empty conceits. Now to criticize is literally to discriminate. The student of both the natural and the human law needs to be very discriminating; one should note, however, an important difference between them. The discrimination of the man of science is exercised primarily upon physical phenomena, that of the humanist primarily upon words. “The beginning of genuine culture,” Socrates is reported to have said, “is the scrutiny of general terms.”⁠[122] Socrates himself was so accomplished in this type of scrutiny that he still deserves to be the master of those who are aiming at criticism. I have said that the hope of civilization lies not in the divine average, but in the saving remnant. It is plain that in an age like the present, which is critical in every sense of the word, the remnant must be highly Socratic.

Discrimination of the humanistic type is especially needed in the field of political theory and practice. Confucius, when asked what would be his first concern if the reins of government were put into his hands, replied that his first concern would be to define his terms and make words correspond with things. If our modern revolutionaries have suffered disillusions of almost unparalleled severity, it is too often because they have given their imagination to words, without making sure that these words corresponded with things; and so they have felt that they were bound for the promised land when they were in reality only swimming in a sea of conceit. “The fruit of dreamy hoping is, waking, blank despair.” The disenchantment of Hazlitt with the French Revolution is typical of that of innumerable other “idealists.” “The French Revolution,” he says, “was the only match that ever took place between philosophy and experience; and, waking from the trance of theory to the sense of reality, we hear the words truth, reason, virtue, liberty with the same indifference or contempt that the cynic, who has married a jilt or a termagant, listens to the rhapsodies of lovers.”

The reason that the Rousseauist often alleges for his attacks on the analytical intellect, the necessary instrument of a Socratic dialectic, is that it destroys unity. His disparagement of analysis may be due, however, even less to his love of unity than to his dislike of effort. It may be that, like Rousseau himself, he is seeking to give to indolence the dignity of a philosophical occupation.⁠[123] If it is a strenuous thing to concentrate imaginatively on the facts of the natural order, the concentration on the facts of the human order that enables one to use one’s terms correctly is even more strenuous. What a monstrous inequality, said Lincoln, to pay an honest laborer seventy cents a day for digging coal and a President seventy dollars a day for digging abstractions! The argument that Lincoln thus puts forth ironically, a follower of Karl Marx would be capable of employing seriously. But if the President does honest work, if he digs his abstractions properly, instead of substituting some art of going through the motions, he must display the utmost contention of spirit. There have been moments in recent years when a President of this kind would have been worth to the country many times seventy dollars a day. Did the idealistic abstractions, one must make bold to ask, that Mr. Woodrow Wilson poured forth so profusely when President, satisfy the Socratic and Confucian test—did they correspond with things? The late Mr. Walter H. Page concluded, after unusual opportunities of observation, that Mr. Wilson was “not a leader, but rather a stubborn phrase-maker.” Fine words, according to the homely adage, butter no parsnips. They may, however, it would seem, put a man in the White House. Mr. Wilson, it should be remembered, was not only an ex-college president himself, but in his main policies he had the eager support of practically the whole corporation of college presidents. If Mr. Page’s estimate of Mr. Wilson should prove to be correct, it would follow that our American remnant—and college presidents should surely belong to the remnant—is not sufficiently critical. The question is one of some gravity, if it be true, as I said at the outset, that democracy will in the long run have to be judged, like any other form of government, by the quality of its leadership, and if it be true, furthermore, that under existing conditions we must get our standards and our leadership along Socratic rather than traditional lines. “What the Americans most urgently require,” said Matthew Arnold, “is a steady exhibition of cool and sane criticism.” That is precisely what they require and what they have never had.

If we had a Socratic remnant one of its chief concerns would be to give a civilized content to the catch-words that finally govern the popular imagination. The sophist and the demagogue flourish in an atmosphere of vague and inaccurate definition. With the aid of the Socratic critic, on the other hand, Demos might have some chance of distinguishing between its friends and its flatterers—something that Demos has hitherto been singularly unable to do. Let one consider those who have posed with some success as the people’s friends from Cleon of Athens to Marat; and from Marat to William Randolph Hearst. It would sometimes seem, indeed, that the people might do very well were it not for its “friends.” The demagogue has been justified only too often in his assumption that men may be led, not by their noses, but by their ears as tenderly as asses are. The records of the past reveal that the multitude has frequently been persuaded by a mirage of words that the ship of state was steering a straight course for Eldorado, when it was in reality drifting on a lee-shore; and the multitude has not been apprized of the peril until it was within the very sound of the breakers.

It is only too evident that we are not coping adequately with this special problem of democracy; that we are, on the contrary, in danger of combining the strength of giants with the critical intelligence of children. Millions of Americans were ready not so very long ago to hail William Jennings Bryan as a “peerless leader.” Other millions are ready apparently to bestow a similar salute on Henry Ford—in spite of the almost incredible exhibition he made of himself with his “Peace Ship.” If our Socratic critics were sufficiently numerous, the followers of such leaders would finally become conscious of something in the air that was keen, crisp, and dangerous; they might finally be forced to ask themselves whether the ideals with which they were being beguiled really mean anything, or at all events anything more than the masking in fine phrases of the desire to get one’s hand into the other citizen’s pocket. The devil, as is well known, is a comparatively harmless person unless he is allowed to disguise himself as an angel of light. An unvarnished materialism is in short less to be feared than sham spirituality. Sham spirituality is especially promoted by the blurring of distinctions, which is itself promoted by a tampering with general terms. A dialectical scrutiny of such terms is therefore indispensable if one is to determine whether what a man takes to be his idealism is merely some windy inflation of the spirit, or whether it has support in the facts of human experience.

I have already made some application of the Socratic method to idealism, a term that has come to be almost synonymous with humanitarianism. I have pointed out, for instance, how the utilitarian has corrupted the word comfort and the sentimentalist the word virtue. The idealist may, indeed, retort that I have myself admitted that certain elements essential to salvation are omitted in the Socratic scheme of things, and that for these elements we need to turn from Socrates to Christ; and he will proceed to identify the gospel of Christ with his own gospel of sympathy and service. Humanitarian idealism unquestionably owes much of its prestige, perhaps its main prestige, to the fact that it has thus associated itself with Christianity. I have sought to show, however, on strictly psychological grounds, that humanitarian service does not involve, in either its utilitarian or its sentimental form, the truths of the inner life and that it cannot therefore be properly derived from Christ. The transformation, indeed, of this great master of the inner life into a master of “uplift” must seem to austere Christians, if there are any left, a sort of second crucifixion. In substituting the love of man for the love of God the humanitarian is working in a vicious circle, for unless man has in him the equivalent of the love of God he is not lovely. Furthermore, it is important that man should not only love but fear the right things. The question was recently raised at Paris why medical men were tending to usurp the influence that formerly belonged to the clergy. The obvious reply is that men once lived in the fear of God, whereas now they live in the fear of microbes. It is difficult to see how one can get on humanitarian lines the equivalent of the truth that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Perhaps there is no better way of dealing with the humanitarian movement than to take one’s point of departure in certain sayings of Jesus and at the same time so to protect them by a Socratic dialectic as to bring out their true meaning. For the present desideratum, it may be, is not to renounce Socrates⁠[124] in favor of Christ, but rather to bring Socrates to the support of Christ.

Three sayings of Jesus would seem especially relevant, if we wish to bring out the contrast between his inspired and imaginative good sense and humanitarianism: (1) “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” (2) “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (3) One should build one’s house upon the rock.

I have already glanced at a violation of the first of these maxims—that, namely, which has taken place in connection with the humanitarian attempt to abolish war even at the expense of justice, and the closely related attempt to convert the prince of peace into a prince of pacifism. Americans often fear that the Roman Catholic Church may use the machinery of democracy to its own ends; and in parts of the country where Catholic voters are in the majority such apprehensions—for example, the apprehension regarding the Catholic domination of the schools—may not be entirely without foundation. It was not, however, a Catholic but a Protestant who recently felt it necessary to recall to his fellow believers that the kingdom of heaven is within us and not at Washington. The Protestant churches seem to be turning more and more to social service, which means that they have been substituting for the truths of the inner life various causes and movements and reforms and crusades. If W. J. Bryan had been born fifty years earlier he would very likely have been a religious revivalist; the religion of the revivalist was still in a fashion a religion of the inner life. Bryan’s protest, however, in connection with his crusade for free silver, against the crucifixion of the people on a cross of gold, not only involves an unusually mawkish mixture of the things of God and the things of Cæsar, but might have led to political action that, so far from being religious, would have been subversive of common honesty.

One should face frankly the question whether the crusading spirit is in any of its manifestations genuinely Christian. The missionary spirit, the purely spiritual appeal from man to man, is unquestionably Christian. By the crusading spirit I mean, on the other hand, the attempt to achieve spiritual ends collectively through the machinery of the secular order. If one takes a long-range view, the question is one that should be of special interest to Frenchmen, for France has been more than any other country the crusading nation. It has been said that the religious crusading of the Middle Ages in which France played the leading part showed that Europe was already sloughing off genuine Christianity. The contrast is striking in any case between the Christianity of this period and that of the first centuries. The more or less legendary account of the Theban Legion that was ready to fight bravely for the Emperor when he kept within the temporal domain, but allowed itself to be martyred to the last man unresistingly rather than worship him as a God, reflects accurately enough the attitude of the early Christian. The ruthless massacre that marked the first entrance of the crusaders into Jerusalem (15 July, 1099) is sufficient proof that they did not maintain any such distinction between the spiritual and the temporal order.⁠[125] It seems hardly necessary to ask which of the two, the crusader or the member of the Theban Legion, was nearer in spirit to the Founder. By his confusion of the things of God with the things of Cæsar the crusader was in danger of substituting a will to power for the will to peace that is at the heart of genuine Christianity.⁠[126] The emergence of the will to power is even more obvious in the humanitarian crusader, as I attempted to show in my study of the Rousseauistic side of the French Revolution. The revolutionary formula, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” is in itself only a portentous patter of words.⁠[127] These words may, no doubt, be so defined both separately and in their relation to one another as to have a genuinely religious meaning. Understood in the fashion of Rousseau, that is, as summing up the supposed results of a return to “nature,” they encouraged one of the most virulent forms of imperialism. The French themselves are growing more and more doubtful about the “idealistic” side of their Revolution (it goes without saying that the Revolution had other sides). They are growing more realistic in temper.⁠[128] The great problem for them as for all of us is, that, on being disillusioned regarding this type of idealism, they should not become merely Machiavellian realists.

At all events, France can no longer be looked upon as the crusading nation. It is becoming the dangerous privilege of the United States to display more of the crusading temper than any other country in both its domestic and its foreign policies. Yet if one may properly question the religious crusading of which the French were once so fond (Gesta Dei per Francos), how much more properly may one question the activities of our “uplifters” (Gesta humanitatis per Americanos). We are being deprived gradually of our liberties on the ground that the sacrifice is necessary to the good of society. If we attend carefully to the psychology of the persons who manifest such an eagerness to serve us, we shall find that they are even more eager to control us. What one discovers, for example, under the altruistic professions of the leaders of a typical organization for humanitarian crusading, like the Anti-Saloon League, is a growing will to power and even an incipient terrorism. Let one consider again Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who, more than any other recent American, sought to extend our idealism beyond our national frontiers. In the pursuit of his scheme for world service, he was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power. If we refused to take his humanitarian crusading seriously we were warned that we should “break the heart of the world.” If the tough old world had ever had a heart in the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago. The truth is that this language, at once abstract and sentimental, reveals a temper at the opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman. He was inflexible and uncompromising in the defence of his “ideal,” the League of Nations, which, as a corrective of the push for power on the national scale, is under the suspicion of being only a humanitarian chimera. At the same time he was only too ready to yield to the push for power of the labor unions (Adamson Act), a form of the instinct of domination so full of menace to free institutions that, rather than submit to it, a genuine statesman would have died in his tracks. One may contrast profitably the way in which Mr. Wilson faced this issue with the way in which Grover Cleveland, perhaps the last of our Presidents who was unmistakably in our great tradition, faced the issue of free silver.

The particular confusion of the things of God and the things of Cæsar promoted by Mr. Wilson and the other “idealists” needs to have brought to bear on it the second of the sayings of Jesus that I have cited (“By their fruits ye shall know them”). The idealists so plainly fail to meet the test of fruits that they are taking refuge more and more, especially since the war, in their good intentions. The cynic might, indeed, complain that they already have hell paved at least twice over with their good intentions. We can no more grant that good intentions are enough in dealing with men than we can grant that they suffice a chemist who is handling high explosives. Under certain conditions, human nature itself may become one of the highest of high explosives. Above all, no person in a position of political responsibility can afford to let any “ideal” come between him and a keen inspection of the facts. It is only too evident that this true vision was found before the war in imperialists of the type of Lord Roberts rather than in liberals of the type of Asquith and Grey. It does not follow that the realism that one should oppose to the “idealists” need be of a merely imperialistic type; it may be a complete moral realism. The moral realist will not allow himself to be whisked off into any cloud-cuckoo-land in the name of the ideal. He will pay no more attention to the fine phrases in which an ideal of this kind is clothed than he would to the whistling of the wind around a corner. The idealist will, therefore, denounce him as “hard.” His hardness is in any case quite unlike that of the Machiavellian realist. If the moral realist seems hard to the idealist, this is because of his refusal to shift, in the name of sympathy or social justice or on any other ground, the struggle between good and evil from the individual to society. If we restore the moral struggle to the individual, we are brought back at once to the assertion in some form or other of the truths of the inner life. The question that may properly be raised at present is not whether this or that cause or movement or reform is breaking down, but whether humanitarian crusading in general as a substitute for the inner life is not breaking down. The failure of humanitarianism might be even more manifest than it is were it not for the survival—and that even in the humanitarians themselves—of habits that derive from an entirely different view of life. The ethos of a community does not disappear in a day, even when the convictions that sustain it have been undermined. This slow decline of an ethos adds to the difficulty of judging any particular doctrine by its fruits. These fruits are often slow to appear. For example, no one has been more successful in breaking down American educational tradition in favor of humanitarian conceptions than President Eliot, who is himself an unusually fine product of the Puritan discipline.⁠[129] He has owed his great influence largely to the fact that many men are sensitive to a dignified and impressive personality, whereas very few men are capable of weighing the ultimate tendencies of ideas. One might have more confidence in the elective system if it could be counted on to produce President Eliots.

Though the traditional habits survive the traditional beliefs, they do not survive them indefinitely. With the progressive weakening, not merely of the Puritan ethos, but of the Christian ethos of the Occident in general, it may become harder and harder to justify humanitarianism experimentally. This movement has from Bacon’s time stood for fruits and, in all that concerns man’s power and material comfort and utility, it has as a matter of fact been superlatively fruitful. But it has also professed to give the fruits of the spirit—for example, peace and brotherhood—and here its failure is so conspicuous as to lead one to suspect some basic unsoundness.

At this point the third saying of Jesus that I have quoted comes into play—the saying as to the importance of building on the rock. The storm has come and it is not clear that our modern house is thus firmly established. The impression one has is rather that of an immense and glittering superstructure on insecure foundations.

The basis on which the whole structure of the new ethics has been reared is, as we have seen, the assumption that the significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society. If we wish once more to build securely, we may have to recover in some form the idea of “the civil war in the cave.” If one admits this “war,” one may admit at the same time the need of the work of the spirit, if one is to bring forth the fruits of the spirit. If one denies this war, one transfers the work to the outer world or substitutes for it a sympathy that involves neither an inner nor an outer working. A main problem of ethics, according to Cicero, is to prevent a divorce between the honorable (honestum) and the useful (utile). If these terms are not sophisticated, he says, the honorable and the useful will be found to be identical. But such a sophistication has taken place as a result of the emphasis on an outer rather than on an inner working about which I have already had so much to say in this volume. The fruitful has thus come to be identified with the useful and finally (in a narrow and doctrinal sense) with the utilitarian. The whole problem has assumed a gravity that it did not have in the time of Cicero because of the way in which we have got ourselves implicated, by our one-sided pursuit of utility, in an immense mass of interlocking machinery.

One needs, however, if one is to recover a firm basis for the spiritual life, to get behind even the word work. The sophistication of this word would not have been possible had it not been for the previous sophistication of the word nature. This word should receive the first attention of any one who is seeking to defend on Socratic lines either humanistic or religious truth. Apply a sufficiently penetrating dialectic to the word nature, one is sometimes tempted to think, and the sophist will be put out of action at the start. The juggling with this word can be traced from the ancient Greek who said that the distinction between the honorable and the shameful has no root in nature, but is merely a matter of convention, to Renan who said that “nature does not care for chastity.” This juggling has always been the main source of an unsound individualism. The contrast between the natural and the artificial that has flourished since the eighteenth century and underlies the romantic movement is especially inadmissible. “Art,” as Burke says, “is man’s nature.” I have already referred to Diderot’s dismissal of the opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members as “artificial,” and have said that the proper reply to such sophistry is not to take refuge in theology, but to insist upon this opposition as one of the “immediate data of consciousness”; that we shall thus get experimentally the basis we require if we are to do the work of the spirit and bring forth its fruits. A confusion like that of Diderot is so serious that the defining of the one word “nature” would justify a dialectical battle along Socratic lines the like of which has never been seen in the history of the world. When it was over, the field of conflict would be covered thick with dead and dying reputations; for there can be no doubt that many of the leaders of the present time have fallen into the naturalistic error.

On one’s definition of work, which itself depends on one’s definition of nature, will depend in turn one’s definition of liberty. One is free to work and not to idle. Only when liberty is properly defined according not merely to the degree, but to the quality of one’s working, is it possible to achieve a sound definition of justice (To every man according to his works). One’s definition of justice again will be found to involve one’s definition of peace in the secular order: for men can live at peace with one another only in so far as they are just. As for religious peace, it is not subject to definition. In the scriptural phrase, it passeth understanding.

Above all, if one is to achieve a sound philosophy of will, there must be no blurring of the distinction between the spiritually inert and the spiritually energetic. The point is one that should be of special interest to Americans. The European has tended in his typical moments, and that from the time of the Greeks, to be an intellectual. There are signs, on the other hand, that if America ever achieves a philosophy of its own, it will be rather a philosophy of will. We have been called the “people of action.” Under the circumstances it is a matter of some moment both for ourselves and for the rest of the world whether we are to be strenuous in a completely human or in a merely Rooseveltian sense.

One may grant, indeed, that in a world like this the Rooseveltian imperialist is a safer guide than the Jeffersonian or Wilsonian “idealist.” But there is no reason why one should accept either horn of this dilemma. The most effective way of dealing with the Jeffersonian idealism is to submit to a Socratic dialectic the theory of natural rights that underlies it. This theory rests on the sophistical contrast between the natural and the artificial of which I have just spoken, a contrast that encourages a total or partial suppression of the true dualism of the spirit and of the special quality of working it involves. With this weakening of the inner life it becomes possible to assert a lazy or, what amounts to the same thing, an anarchical liberty. For true liberty is not liberty to do as one likes, but liberty to adjust oneself, in some sense of that word, to law. “The Abbé Coigniard,” says Anatole France, “would not have signed a line of the declaration of the rights of man because of the excessive and unjust discrimination it establishes between man and the gorilla.” The true objection to the declaration of the rights of man is the exact opposite of the one stated by M. France: it does not establish a sufficiently wide gap between man and the gorilla. This gap can be maintained only if one insists that genuine liberty is the reward of ethical effort; it tends to disappear if one presents liberty as a free gift of “nature.”

It may, indeed, be urged that the theory of natural rights, though false, may yet be justified as a “useful fiction,” that it has often shown itself an effective weapon of attack on the iniquities of the existing social order. One may doubt, however, the utility of the fiction, for what it tends to oppose to the existing order is not a better order but anarchy. No doubt the established order of any particular time and place that the partisan of “rights” would dismiss as conventional and artificial is, compared with true and perfect order, only a shadow; but such as it is, it cannot be lightly abandoned in favor of some “ideal” that, when critically examined, may turn out to be only a mirage on the brink of a precipice. The “unwritten laws of heaven”⁠[130] of which the great humanist Sophocles speaks are felt in their relation to the written law, not as a right, but as a stricter obligation.

The tendency of the doctrine of natural rights to weaken the sense of obligation, and so to undermine genuine liberty, may be studied in connection with its influence on the common law which has prevailed among the English-speaking peoples. The spirit of this law at its best is that of a wholesome moral realism. Under the influence of the school of rights the equity that is often in conflict with strict law was more or less identified with a supposed law of “nature.”⁠[131] This identification encouraged an unsound individualism. The proper remedy for an unsound individualism is a sound individualism, an individualism that starts, not from rights, but from duties. The actual reply to the unrestraint of the individual has been another doctrine of rights, the rights of society, which are sometimes conceived almost as metaphysically as the older doctrine of the rights of man. The representatives of this school of legal thinking tend to identify equity with the principle of social utility. Judges have already appeared who have so solicited the strict letter of the law in favor of what they deemed to be socially expedient as to fall into a veritable confusion of the legislative and judicial functions. Unfortunately those who represent society at any particular moment and who are supposed to overflow with a will to service will be found by the realistic observer (in so far at least as they are mere humanitarian crusaders in whom there is no survival of the traditional controls) to be developing, under cover of their altruism, a will to power. On the pretext of social utility they are ready to deprive the individual of every last scrap and vestige of his freedom and finally to subject him to despotic outer control. No one, as Americans of the present day are only too well aware, is more reckless in his attacks on personal liberty than the apostle of “service.” He is prone in his furtherance of his schemes of “uplift” not only to ascribe unlimited sovereignty to society as against the individual, but to look on himself as endowed with a major portion of it, to develop a temper, in short, that is plainly tyrannical.

We seem, indeed, to be witnessing in a different form the emergency faced by the early Christians. The time may come again, if indeed it has not come already, when men will be justified in asserting true freedom, even, it may be, at the cost of their lives, against the monstrous encroachments of the materialistic state.⁠[132] The collectivistic ideal suffers, often in an exaggerated form, from the underlying error of laisser faire against which it is so largely a protest. It does not reveal an adequate sense of the nature of obligation and of the special type of effort it imposes. As a result of its shallowness in dealing with the idea of work, it is in danger of substituting for real justice the phantasmagoria of social justice. Some of the inequalities that the collectivist attacks are no doubt the result of the unethical competition promoted by laisser faire. But the remedy for these inequalities is surely not the pursuit of such chimeras as social or economic equality, at the risk of sacrificing the one form of equality that is valuable—equality before the law.

Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man’s ordinary will to a higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality and humility. Historically humility has been secured more or less at the expense of the intellect. I have myself been trying to show that it is possible to defend humility, and in general the truths of the inner life, by a critical method and in this sense to put Socrates in the service of Christ. The question of method is, in any case, all-important if one is to heal the feud between the head and the heart that has subsisted in the Occident in various forms from Græco-Roman times. Intellect, though finally subordinate to will, is indispensable in direct ratio to the completeness of one’s break with traditional standards. It is then needed to test from the point of view of reality the unity achieved by the imagination and so to supply new standards with reference to which the higher will may exercise its power of veto on the impulses and expansive desires. When will and intellect and imagination have been brought into right relation with one another, one arrives at last at the problem of the emotions, to which the Rousseauist, in his misplaced thirst of immediacy, gives the first place. To have standards means practically to select and reject; and this again means that one must discipline one’s feelings or affections, to use the older word, to some ethical centre. If the discipline is to be effective, so that a man will like and dislike the right things, it is as a rule necessary that it should become a matter of habit, and that almost from infancy. One cannot wait until the child has reached the so-called age of reason, until, in short, he is in a position to do his own selecting, for in the mean while he may have become the victim of bad habits. This is the true prison house that is in danger of closing on the growing boy. Habit must, therefore, as Aristotle says, precede reason. Certain other ideas closely connected with the idea of habit, need to receive attention at this point. The ethos of a community is derived in fact, as it is etymologically, from habit. If a community is to transmit certain habits to its young, it must normally come to some kind of agreement as to what habits are desirable; it must in the literal meaning of that word achieve a convention. Here is a chief difference between the true and the false liberal. It has been said of our modernists that they have only one convention and that is that there shall be no more conventions. An individualism that is thus purely temperamental is incompatible with the survival of civilization. What is civilized in most people is precisely that part of them which is conventional. It is, to be sure, difficult to have a convention without falling into mere conventionalism, two things that the modernist confounds; but then everything that is worth while is difficult.