X HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS

“We have the naked question to answer: How shall a society, newly shaking itself free from a disguised plutocratic régime, be guided to suffer the persuasion of a natural aristocracy which has none of the insignia of an old prescription to impose its authority? Shall the true justice prevail, which by a right discrimination would confer power and influence in accordance with inner distinction; or shall that so-called justice prevail—for no man acknowledges open injustice—which recommends itself as equality of opportunity, but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age, sex, and character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might makes right, whether that might be the material strength of money or the jealous tyranny of numbers?”—Paul Elmer More in Aristocracy and Justice: Shelburne Essays, Ninth Series.

The educational theories of the New Humanists, I think it must be granted, are thoroughly consonant with the premises of the New Humanism. Education, at least through the college, ought to be dominated by the spirit of conservation. In the university and afterwards, the spirit of change ought to have full opportunity, for by that time presumably the student is safeguarded against that mere “passage from nothing to nothing” which Whitehead tells us happens when there is “change without conservation.” The college is the place for the assimilation of the traditional wisdom, which acts as a check on the wisdom of any particular age. It is the place where today it is most disastrous not to temper liberty with restraint, and it seems to me that the New Humanist has most admirably mediated between pure restraint and pure liberty in his educational program. A contempt for antiquity, Tocqueville sagely remarked, is a chief danger of democracy, and for that reason the study of the classics has a special value in a democratic community—the New Humanist goes with Tocqueville and not with the contemporary poet who has shouted, “The past is a bucket of ashes.”

But how is it with the excursions of the New Humanists into the disputed territory of economics and politics? Are their known views on these subjects the views that must inevitably be adopted if one accepts their primary teaching of a psychological dualism and a discipline based on the law of measure? Or are there several views which might with equal consistency be taken up? Or can we say that they are good Humanists but bad economists? The question has come up at least once before. Referring to historical Humanism, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., has written, “We might say that the humanistic attitude was to seek a fine worldly wisdom through direct study of man in thought and action, such study being powerfully reënforced from those precedents of great living contained in the literature of Greece and Rome—a fresh research balanced and somewhat directed and measured by a great tradition. I can find no stricter formula that seems to fit the case. The attitude adumbrated above seems compatible with many other attitudes, indeed with almost any attitude that is not dogmatic or fanatical, or life-denying. For example, today one might be an agnostic humanist, a Catholic humanist; a royalist humanist, a socialist humanist; a utilitarian humanist, an idealist humanist; conceivably a Mormon humanist or a liberal hard-shell Baptist humanist. That is, a quest of a fine worldly wisdom nurtured by tradition might in theory be compatible with any of these policies, philosophies or faiths. Nor does this divest the notion of humanism of any real meaning if the main thing be the attitude, for the humanistic attitude may be after all simply a leaven which is potent in the most various materials.” In this statement the attitude of Humanism is pretty dilute for our exposition, but in any case the question of strictly relating attitude to views is effectively opened up for discussion. Perhaps Humanism as a creative conception of man does not dictate any one economic or political theory as its logical choice? Perhaps it is the spirit with which More and Babbitt have studied the problems of economics that is criticizable?

The obvious danger of the New Humanist when doubtful matters are debated is to drop into an acceptance of the status quo just because it is the status quo. He is proof against the temptation of the “radical” which is novelty for the sake of novelty, but it is easily possible that where an obdurate social problem exists, he may justify the status quo instead of wholeheartedly throwing himself into the problem. This in effect is what in the chapter on Science and the Modern Man I accused him of doing: it seems to me he adheres to the outmoded Cartesian world-view when he should instead plunge into the problem of reconstructing a world-view. And I am inclined to think that Paul Elmer More, whose views on property and law, aristocracy and justice I shall glance at before taking up Babbitt’s political theory, has fallen into this error of identifying the status quo or commonly accepted position with a truly conservative solution. It is conceivable, I mean, that both the status quo of social organization and the current schemes for reforming it might be equally objectionable to a profoundly conservative mind.

More has not the type of mind that functions happily in economics and politics. His absorbing interest has been in Man Psychologic and he has had little traffic with Man Economic or Man Political. But the rise of Socialism in the United States and the Bull Moose Progressive movement challenged his mind around 1912, and in Aristocracy and Justice, the ninth volume of the Shelburne Essays, he answered, or rather defied, the new tendencies. By his conclusions in this volume on man as an economic and political animal, he probably incurred more hostility than any of his other books has provoked. For Aristocracy and Justice came out in 1915, the very time that the social revolt movement in the United States was fairly getting off the ground for a dizzy if brief flight: the dominant concerns of the generation of thinkers younger than More were precisely his subordinate concerns, economics and politics. Naturally, the new generation dropped bombs on Aristocracy and Justice, and with a ferocity partly accounted for by More’s sharp tone in writing it. The result was that the strongest side of More, his continuous reflection on Man Psychologic, was avoided or made light of, and his weakest side, his thought about Man Economic and Man Political, was bombarded to fragments.

To begin with, More made the mistake of not arguing out economic questions on the basis of economics, but instead made a direct appeal to intelligent members of the propertied class to stiffen their morale. “I am not here concerned,” he declared, “with Utopian visions, nor, as I have said, am I arguing with those who are honestly persuaded that a socialistic régime is, in our day, or any day, economically or psychologically feasible. My desire is rather to confirm in the dictates of their own reason those who believe that the private ownership of property, including its production and distribution, is, with very limited reservation, essential to the material stability and progress of society. We who have this conviction need very much today to strengthen ourselves against the insidious charms of a misapplied idealism; we need to remind ourselves that laws which would render capital insecure and, by a heavy income tax or other discrimination in favor of labor, would deprive property of its power of easy self-perpetuation, though they speak loudly in the name of humanity, will in the end be subversive of those conditions under which alone any true value of human life can be realized.” Do you wonder at the vehement accusations that More was simply rationalizing class prejudice?

We need one more statement to catch the drift of More’s views: it is likewise an uncompromising one. “In simple truth, property may rightly be called the cause of civilization, but, strictly speaking, it is only the occasion of injustice: injustice is inherent in the imperfection of man, and the development of the means of living merely brings into greater prominence what is an unavoidable feature of existence, not for man only but for the whole range of creation, in this puzzling world of ours.”

What More did then was to commit himself in advance to capitalist economics, a system which may most briefly be defined as production for the sake of profits or in one word profiteering. Can it be denied that the main motive on which it relies is the desire for gain? And this motivation, as economists admit, introduces an ethical contradiction into the practices of the State. Nevertheless, many people claim that there is nothing wrong with the theory of capitalism, and towards the ethical defect it introduces they adopt two views: one, that the defect may be remedied by education, the other, that it is inherent in human nature. More adopts the latter view.

Now if capitalism is supported by a perfect theory, then from the standpoint of economics there is nothing more to say, no matter how horribly the thing might work in practice. For economics as the science of production abstracts from the human as much as possible and regards our feelings as irrelevant. But does capitalism operate on a sound theory? This, in a thinker of Paul Elmer More’s eminence, is the first question we should expect him to answer, the more so as it is often charged that the theory of capitalism is only improvised. But as we have seen, he does not. He proceeds almost at once to declare that “the security of property is the first and all-essential duty of a civilized community”; shortly afterwards he says, “To the civilized man the rights of property are more important than the right to life.”⁠[7]⁠

These statements pass if capitalism is correct in theory. But, once again, is it? In the briefest possible space, I shall give the theoretical objections. It is well understood, of course, that by capitalist economics there are said to be three factors of production, Land, Capital and Labor. Land and Capital, however, have become practically indistinguishable: they are alike tools of production. But is Labor also a tool of production? It is, according to capitalist economics; Land, Capital and Labor exhaust the tools of production, and the user of them is the Capitalist, that is, the owner of the tools of Land and Capital.

But this theory, as every one knows, has been long and brilliantly criticized in the realm of pure thought, precisely the realm in which More should have debated the moot point. For there is a moot point: is Labor a factor of production? No, say the critics, Labor is not congruous with the factors of Land and Capital. Labor is a mere abstraction that hides Laborers. Laborers (i.e., Labor) are the tool-users, the producers themselves, and at bottom economics reduces not to three terms but to just two, Laborers and Tools or Workmen and Stuff. Hence the new industrial synthesis, it is said, must substitute the Laborer for the Capitalist, the real user of the real tools of production for the mere owner of them. Therefore, when More speaks of the rights of property, we need to concretize the word property: what he speaks of is the rights of property- or tool-owners or capitalists, and it is precisely those “rights” that now require defence in the region of pure theory.

Proceed one step further, and we shall run up against More’s argument for the rights of property-owners as the basis of civilization. Economics, we must remember, is separated from its soul: what is more, it legitimately cuts itself off. Where is its soul? “The soul of economics,” writes A. R. Orage in An Alphabet of Economics, “is politics, and it is to politics that economics delegates the control of questions such as what shall be produced, by whom, and how the results shall be distributed.... To satisfy all our needs and desires without work is really the aim of economic man. It is his object, in fact, to reverse the curse upon Adam.... Instead of requiring the improvements in economics to be shared equitably, politics insists upon dividing them inequitably, so that one small class is enabled practically to lift from itself the curse of Adam (that is, it can live without working), while the large class of laborers are permitted to incur a double curse—they work, that is, without living. Economists of the baser sort or who have no political sense pretend that this distribution of the product is itself economic in that it enables the few to secrete Capital (that is to save) and to foster arts and science requiring a long, leisured, and assumed future. Better knowledge, however, convinces us that it is not safe to depend upon a social class for an economic function.” How the author of Aristocracy and Justice would answer this, I cannot conceive, for no inkling is given.

We have crossed from economics to politics, and in the latter one of the greatest themes is justice. Naturally, More as a Platonist does not minimize this theme. Justice “is the act of right distribution,” he begins by way of definition, “the giving to each man his due.” This, please note, is a capitalist-political definition, and we may place beside it for comparison the well-known formula: from each according to his means, to each according to his needs. Social justice, More continues, “is such a distribution of power and privilege, and of property as the symbol and instrument of these, as at once will satisfy the distinctions of reason among the superior, and will not outrage the feelings of the inferior.” But how, one may well ask, can social justice ever be expected to take place when the principle of distribution is the principle of—the pig trough? For economic power in our society precedes and determines the distribution of commodities; the man with the dollars feeds and sometimes gorges and the man without dollars does not; and this does not satisfy the reason and it does outrage the feelings. More himself says we must steel ourselves to a certain extent when viewing this method of distribution. “The first and hardest lesson for each right-minded man in these days is to discipline the heart to accept with equanimity the fatal fact that social justice must include a considerable amount of that disposition of Nature in dealing with her own which we, judging by the standard of the individual soul, are so ready to call injustice. The first step towards the equipoise of a soul just within itself is to recognize the necessity of a measure of injustice in the relation of man with man and with the world.”

I postpone comment on that in order to complete in this place the outline of More’s political thought. Guided by the reflections of Edmund Burke, the key idea for him is the formation of “a natural aristocracy without which there is no nation,” according to Burke. “The cure of democracy,” says More, “is not more democracy, but better democracy.” And better democracy will come when we develop more men who might fit into Burke’s celebrated portrait of the men of light and leading: “Men who are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

This is assuredly a humanistic ideal of a natural aristocracy, but under present economic-political conditions have we any chance of reaching it? We may get the natural aristocrats, but will they be anywhere near the centers of political power? When we get to the bottom, we are all likely to accept the definition of the political power of the individual as being his power of self-direction; but obviously the individual’s power of self-direction presupposes the power of keeping himself alive. That is, the condition of political power is economic power. To continue: voting is a process whereby individuals empower an executive. They increase their powers of self-direction by concentrating them upon the executive who acts in their behalf. But when the voters are of unequal economic power, their votes are necessarily unequal. In fact, the votes of many of them, who have no power of keeping themselves alive but are correctly termed wage-slaves, have no meaning at all: they can guarantee nothing. The executive therefore quite naturally listens only to those whose votes do mean economic power, because these are the only votes coming from individuals who have power of self-direction. It seems to me that this consideration has a very corrosive effect on any dream of a natural aristocracy arising in our plutocratic community.

Because the discussion of More’s economics and politics has been rather compact up to this point, a restatement is offered. More, as one of the leaders of the New Humanists, has not dealt with the purely theoretical analyses of capitalism. I do not say he is unable to, or unfamiliar with the arguments: the fact is that he has omitted a theoretical justification. To those who believe that the critique of capitalism has been a devastating one, this is an inexcusable omission. Secondly, to many people, including a considerable number who are not humanitarians, capitalism is an inhumane system. They would criticize More’s sentiment of justice, which seems to me in this particular to be weak, though it is possible he represses his feelings from dislike of the humanitarian gushing on the topic of social justice. There is, all the same, a love of all men which can, which must, in fact, enter into our sentiment of justice to temper the rigor of it, and this love of all men to which I refer has nothing of the humanitarian “universal embrace” about it. Without love there is in truth no justice. But the difference between humanistic love and humanitarian love I should define as a difference in what in man is loved. Humanism, I quoted Julien Benda as saying in an earlier chapter, holds in honor the abstract quality of what is human, and this permits us to love all men, for there is equality in the abstract. Joseph Proudhon (to whom Benda objected) does, I think, express the humane sentiment of justice perfectly without spilling over into humanitarian sentimentality. I mean he singles out that in all men which is worthy of love and toward which one is irresistibly drawn to be just if one loves it. “There is a tendency in every man to develop and force the acceptance of that which is essentially himself—which is, in fact, his own dignity. It results from this that the essential in man being identical and one for all humanity, each of us is aware of himself at the same time as individual and as species; and that an insult is felt by a third party and by the offender himself as well as by the injured person, that in consequence the protest is common. This precisely is what is meant by Justice.” It is evident that Proudhon has an idea of Justice, which is crystal-clear and crystal-hard, and that he feels this idea intensely. The presence of a burning emotion for the idea of Justice I cannot detect in More as a social thinker: his idea seems a mental skeleton wired and strung up by class feelings.

In the third place, I tried to point out that a Burkean aristocracy will have a most difficult time coming into being in a democracy which Georges Sorel defined as the paradise unscrupulous financiers dream of. In short, present-day economics in its effect on politics is all against it.

But if the system of production for profit is untenable intellectually and is inhumane and therefore untenable emotionally, it may still be the best that can be put in practice, granting that human nature is radically imperfect. It may be good enough for man because man is not good enough for a more perfect system. The one fatal objection to certain revolutionary schemes in the end may be that they are too perfect for man as he is, that they will not work in practice as they work on paper, unless man himself is first transformed. More made that objection, and it is possibly his soundest argument. But it will be interesting now to speculate on the possibility that a radical program of economic reform might conceivably fit in with the basic ideas and sentiments of the New Humanists. The Soviet Union I shall leave pretty much out of account, for there you have a fact to study and make up your mind about. And possibly that fact in its present degree of unfoldment demands not so much an intellectual and moral decision as suspended judgment from the individual American. Furthermore, I agree with T. S. Eliot that Russian communism like Italian fascism seems to have died as a political theory in becoming a political fact. Our present purpose which is to determine how flexible the Humanist attitude may be in economics and politics is better served by reference to a single extraordinary revolutionary (our example will be Sorel) than it would be by an attempt in too short a space to analyze a complicated fact that contains so many peculiarly Russian ingredients to be subtracted before it is really instructive to us.

Perhaps the most fascinating of all the theorists of the social revolution (but who reads him in America?) is Georges Sorel (1847–1922), whose Reflections on Violence was translated into English by T. E. Hulme. Karl Marx had plotted out the acts of the Capitalist tragedy, but by planting the idea of a class struggle so prominently into the minds of men, by making men more conscious of the opposition of capitalist and proletarian, Marx also introduced an unforeseen factor working not for class war but for social peace. Clearly understanding by the aid of Marx that society was in a state of internal war, the peacemakers arose in mass. There was a general amelioration of working conditions, there were concessions from the capitalists, there grew up a pronounced tendency to blur and soften the issues, to make everything a parliamentarian question. Sorel determined to combat this movement toward pacifying the proletariat, and the means he chose to throw into relief again the essential struggle of the classes was to concentrate on the depiction of the last act of a tragedy that might conceivably play on for centuries. He concentrated on the vision of the general strike, the vast social cataclysm that was to overthrow the capitalist régime. By means of this vision he hoped to counteract the parliamentarian socialists and the philanthropic capitalists, and thus preserve the purity of the class struggle.

The results were curious. Mussolini has told of his youthful fervor for Sorel’s doctrine, and Sorel wrote an apology for Bolshevism. The best thinker that French syndicalism has had, Sorel was nevertheless saluted with enthusiasm by Frenchmen of the extreme right: he was hailed by the Action Française! Pierre Lasserre, the anti-Rousseauist, has written a book about him, Georges Sorel: Théoricien de l’Impérialisme, and many Marxists have been indignant because Sorel considered himself a true follower of Marx. Evidently a paradoxical thinker. But he was not. He was miscomprehended by many for the sole reason that he was a revolutionary classicist, which is not a paradoxical combination.

What Sorel did was to separate the working class movement from the democratic or liberal-romantic or humanitarian ideology with which it is habitually associated. He demonstrated forcefully that there was no inevitable connection between them. They were not Siamese twins, not even twins, but strangers who by an accident of history had been chained together for three score years. Sorel’s intellect filed through the chains and showed that one could be revolutionary in economics and classical in ethics—to the astonishment of everybody.

As he has had practically no vogue in American revolutionary circles, it is excusable to say a few words about his personal development before singling out some aspects of his classical ethics. Proudhon had tried to combine the classical ideal with socialism, and Sorel seems to have taken his first direction from Proudhon. Marx blinded him with light for a time, but it was characteristic of Sorel that he always recovered his sight and eventually saw things with his own eyes. Nietzsche was another master whose teachings he divided into the valuable ideas and the rubbish. Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche—there were lesser masters he carefully sifted: Bergson, Vico. He read widely, profoundly. In his first book he maintained—a Nietzschean idea—that Socrates represented the decadence of Athenian life, the charge being that Socrates introduced expediency and calculation into ethics. He wrote a study of Renan and a study entitled Illusions du Progrès which the anti-revolutionary Maritain has commended for its thorough destruction of the middle-class notion of progress. The Dreyfus case completely disillusioned Sorel with democracy and he plunged into the anti-patriotic extreme revolutionary movement on whose behalf he fought Jaurès and the other parliamentarian socialists with all the withering scorn of a bold thinker and a bold man.

I have said that he severed the ties between the revolutionary workers’ movement and the romantic-humanitarian ideology. He did this by scathing criticism of the sham religiosity of the romantic movement, by excoriating the doctrine of progress, by exposing the middle class conception of science. The last is worth quoting for the benefit of the numerous Baconians to be found in our own liberal and revolutionary groups. “The history of scientific superstitions,” Sorel asserts, “is of the deepest interest to philosophers who wish to understand Socialism. During the nineteenth century there existed an incredible scientific ingenuousness which was the direct outcome of the illusions that had aroused so much excitement towards the end of the eighteenth century. Because astronomers had managed to calculate the tables of the moon, it was believed that the aim of all science was to forecast the future with accuracy; because Le Verrier had been able to indicate the probable position of the planet Neptune—which had never been seen, and which accounted for the disturbances of observable planets—it was believed that science could remedy the defects of society, and indicate what measures should be taken to bring about the disappearance of the unpleasant things in the world. It may be said that this was the middle-class conception of science: it certainly corresponds very closely to the mental attitude of those capitalists, who, ignorant of the perfected appliances of their workshops, yet direct industry, and always find ingenious inventors to get them out of difficulties. For the middle-class science is a mill which produces solutions to all the problems we are faced with: science is no longer considered as a perfected means to knowledge, but only as a recipe for procuring certain advantages.”

There is a great deal, too, in Sorel that might be advantageously perused by our social reformers. For the benefit of humanitarians, I shall transcribe Sorel’s deep objection to optimists in the ranks of reform. “The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even dangerous man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of their own, which tends to bring about their realization all the more easily as they are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest results. He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political constitution, and, above all, in the personnel of government, will be sufficient to direct social development in such a way as to mitigate those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares that it is necessary to let things alone for a little, not to hurry too much, and to learn how to be content with whatever their own benevolent intentions prompt them to do. It is not always self-interest that suggests these expressions of satisfaction, as people have often believed; self-interest is strongly aided by vanity and by the illusions of philosophy. The optimist passes with remarkable facility from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous social pacificism.

“If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds himself armed with a great power, permitting him to realize the ideal he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had the most sympathy with human wretchedness: optimists, idealists, and sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the more inexorable they showed themselves.”

Obviously this side of Sorel is quite in accord with the reiterations of More and Babbitt. Humanitarianism, they repeat, is a menace because in its fatuous hope of a brotherhood of man without a prior discipline of man’s egoistic impulses, it leads directly to the shambles and the rise of a bloodstained dictator. Making light of the obstacles in its path, humanitarianism, when the obstacles will not vanish at the outflowing of sympathy, loses its head and massacres. But it is not in the least implied that Sorel, the enemy of Rousseauism, was on his positive side humanistic. Quite the reverse: he rejected the method of the golden mean, and for reasons that have some weight. The following paragraph will serve as his criticism of American Humanism, prepared years in advance of its full emergence.

“The ideas held by modern ethical writers are drawn mainly from those of Greece in its time of decadence; Aristotle, living in a period of transition, combined ancient values with values that, as time went on, were to prevail; war and production had ceased to occupy the attention of the most distinguished men of the towns, who sought, on the contrary, to secure an easy existence for themselves; the most important thing was the establishment of friendly relations between the better educated men of the community, and the fundamental maxim was that of the golden mean. The new morality was to be acquired principally by means of the habits which the young Greek would pick up in mixing with cultivated people. It may be said here we are on the level of an ethic adapted to consumers; it is not astonishing then that Catholic theologians still find Aristotle’s ethics an excellent one, for they themselves take the consumer’s point of view.”

Sorel, as a matter of fact, had a vestige of the classical religious spirit and not the humanistic temper at all. He was an absolutist in ethics. He was a pessimist, convinced of social determinism, which he compared to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and convinced of the wretchedness of man, or one might say, original sin. The march to deliverance he said was narrowly conditioned by these two: the iron laws of social determinism and the weakness of man. Yet he believed in “a secret virtue which assures the continued progress of the world” and defined it as “this striving towards perfection which manifests itself, in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate, and proportional reward.”

Thus, he tried to root the syndicalist movement in a classical pessimistic conception of man and to identify the growth of the movement with the regeneration of the world. His finest stroke was his method for rousing the group of sentiments necessary for the regeneration: the sentiments of disinterestedness, heroism, glory, and even sublimity. It was the method of the myth, from which incidentally the New Humanists might learn something, it seems to me, which would give a real driving emotional power to their campaign. What that something is has already been suggested in the chapter on The Classical Revival Abroad.

Sorel advocated the myth of the general strike. Just as the early Christians had looked forward to an Apocalypse, had prepared themselves rigorously for it, had shown the most heroic qualities in enduring persecution, so, Sorel argued, the proletariat should look forward always to a decisive Napoleonic battle, a social catastrophe for which every least action was a preparation, and they should understand what the function of violence is, namely, to keep perfectly clear the grandiose outline of the class struggle. Into the criticism of this we need not venture. It should be noted, however, that Sorel explained carefully that “myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of determinations to act.” And finally, mention should be made of his view that the bourgeoisie must keep up its warlike morale. He felt it essential for the future success of civilization that the proletariat should take over a vigorous, and not a decadent, system of capitalist production. No doubt this idea was one of the factors of his popularity with the group around Charles Maurras.

My treatment of Sorel, I am aware, is too scanty to serve as an introduction to his ideas, and at the same time perhaps too long for the purpose now, which is simply to suggest by referring to Sorel that the good man of Rousseau and the Marxian revolutionist are not inseparable companions. Sorel made a new coupling, the Homeric hero and the social revolutionist, a combination that I happen to think would bode better for the future.

Reverting to our proper topic, the question is: can Humanism and the revolutionary movement join hands? Extremely unlikely, of course, and yet I can conceive of a Humanist revolutionary. He would have convinced himself that in the clash on first principles of political economy (between first principles there can be no mediation) the revolutionaries were right, and he would therefore oppose the forces of capitalism as strongly as More opposes socialism. But in any revolutionary party he joined, he would have an Augean stable of illusions to clear out before he could satisfy himself that the revolutionists could really fulfil their pledges of a better society. He would have to persuade his comrades to throw out the accumulated rubbish of humanitarianism, the naïve notions of the goodness at heart of the proletarian, the intellectual fallacies, the spilth of feeling that you will find rampant in a writer like Upton Sinclair. This clearing away of sloppy sentiment and fuzzy ideas would be of enormous advantage to the revolutionary movement, but, as I say, it is extremely unlikely that a Humanist Hercules will rise to perform it. Sooner or later the technique of mediation would, in all probability, be put to such a strain that it would be relegated to a secondary place, and our hypothetical humanistic revolutionist would make foremost the method of the myth or some other disciplinary conception. When that happened, he might retain humanistic elements in his life, but he would cease to be a Humanist in the Babbittean sense.

There is, however, much of a medicinal nature that the best minds among our social revolutionaries can absorb from their opponents, More and Babbitt, without undergoing conversion to conservatism. Let us hope that the bitter taste will not deter them. For they will be better off in respect to background, values and psychological interpretation of man than before.

After all, Sorelism in the United States is a matter of academic interest. Extremists of the left constitute a negligible and senseless group, and the moderate socialists are pitifully weak. The liberals? Bankrupt in ideas; seemingly ineffective in political action; decadent in morale if one may judge by the slackness of the men being groomed to follow the generation of Croly, Lovett, Villard and Alvin Johnson. As for the labor movement in general, is it not the despair of Communist, Socialist and Liberal alike? Inaccessible to ideas, unrebellious, shortsighted, what can be hoped from the American Federation of Labor other than a perpetual seesaw battle for higher wages and shorter hours? The Wandering Jew, Daniel Halévy told Sorel, may be taken as a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, condemned as he is to march for ever without knowing rest. But there is naught of the Wandering Jew about the groups just mentioned, and a Sorelist among them would wear his heart out in the attempt to convey a sublime vision of future ethics.

For contrast, we may turn to Babbitt’s political theorizing in Democracy and Leadership, which has been called without exaggeration perhaps the weightiest book in its field written by an American. “When studied with any degree of thoroughness,” writes Babbitt in his introduction, “the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.” The order is correct. But although Babbitt thinks more coolly and, I suspect, with greater ease on politics and economics than More, he too is least satisfactory in economics: his treatment of that science is almost incidental and certainly slighting. In the opinion of many, this will not do.

Let us unearth what there is of Babbitt’s thought on the economic problem. He rightly criticizes unorthodox political economy for its purely quantitative view of work. True enough, as he notes, orthodox political economy prepared the way for this view: Locke practically identified work with physical effort and made it the sole legitimate source of property, and Adam Smith tended to a similar conception of work in relation to property. But the Marxist, according to Babbitt, fell into the deeper fallacy of identifying work with value. Babbitt then proceeds to discriminate among physical work, mental working on the material order, and ethical work on oneself.

The discrimination is valid, but in making it Babbitt seems to accept the interpretations of orthodox political economy. Value, he appears to hold, is largely determined by the law of supply and demand and by competition. He notes that “as a result of the concentrated mental effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed either in invention or else in organization and management, the common laborer may today enjoy comforts that were out of the reach even of the opulent only two or three generations ago,” and he adds the laborer “should be the first to recognize that exceptional capacity should receive exceptional rewards.” Quite a point is made of competition. “Above all, social justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression of competition. Without competition it is impossible that the ends of true justice should be fulfilled, namely, that every man should receive according to his works.... The remedy for the evils of competition is found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and successful, and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the under dog.”

But surely Babbitt knows the arguments against each of these points, and my regret is that he did not, while making his defence of the established economic order, deal closely with the specific arguments against it. Let me cite some of these which seem to necessitate refutation if one is to defend with a good intellectual conscience the existing system. The Law of Supply and Demand (or L. S. D. for short) has absolutely no weight outside the market: it is concerned only with the relations of Sellers and Buyers, Supply being the abstraction of all the Sellers and Demand the abstraction of all the Buyers. Outside the market what happens? “In all transactions between friends, between members of the same family, between Governments and their servants, in public services, and in all institutions run socially or by gentlemen, L. S. D. is kicked out of doors and the Rule of Supply and Need takes its place,” says Orage in An Alphabet of Economics. Again, I should say Babbitt does not separate Capitalists and Management as he ought to, when he speaks of the gifted minority to whom the workman owes his increase in comfort (by the way, is increased comfort a relevant argument?). Laborers are responsible to Management and must always be. Management today is responsible to the Capitalist, but must it always be? That is the question of moment to those who speculate about a new industrial synthesis. As for the competition extolled by Babbitt, that has to do with the price system which, it is a commonplace, is superimposed on the productive system. We may profitably hear from Orage again. “Production concerns values; competition concerns prices. From production to competition is a transition from value-creating to price-fixing; and the competitive system is one in which prices are left to be decided by the play of the market.... Essentially Competition is sale by auction, and usually without reserve.” A reserve price being impossible for perishable commodities, “Competition is thus all in favor of nonperishable commodities (Capital in particular); but it is all against perishable commodities, and Labor in particular.” Under those conditions one may have a feeling for the under dog whose energy and skill are perishable that cannot fairly be described as sickly sentimentality. That in his plight the under dog should have to hear so much about the bracing effects of keen competition for him in industrial society—this is adding mockery to injury.

My own view is that capitalism cannot be whitewashed, and for the reason that it is founded on only a comparatively narrow portion of human psychology. It is a function of Practical Man or Instinctive Man: it enormously stimulates greed and virtually debars the entrance of any generous motive. It is guaranteed to make men acquisitive but not magnanimous. For my life, I cannot see how it can admit within itself any forces of regeneration. Unsound in theory, tending always to be swindling and ruthless, it manages to work, but only after a fashion that can satisfy no one but a very small class of profiteers. There are plenty to make emotional protests against this state of economic affairs but we ought to supplement them with hard practical criticism. For that let us go to a quarter not tinged with Bolshevik or anti-capitalist sentiment: let us resort to the advocates of the highly interesting Douglas Social Credit Plan in England. They point out that the purpose of an economic system is to produce as much as possible and to get the things produced into the hands of consumers. If we are producing at our maximum, and there is not enough to go around, that is, if only a proportion of the potential consumers can be satisfied, then there is nothing more to say from the economic viewpoint. Suffering from unsatisfied need is irrelevant to the economist if maximum production can provide for only fifty per cent, let us say, of our population. But the fact is that we produce nowhere near our maximum, not even in wartime when production speeds up enormously. Limited or falling production, say the Douglas people, is only a specter: nothing more. Hence, it follows that the present system is criticized in the most damaging way by two undoubted facts: (1) the presence of poverty on a large scale, that is the presence of hordes of potential consumers who cannot acquire commodities, and (2) by unemployment, which as I write is estimated at from three millions to eight millions in our country, unemployment meaning unused producing ability. We can produce more, immensely more than we do: witness the fact of unemployment. We can consume far more: witness the fact of poverty. Understand this, and you have some idea of the sheer inefficiency of the established system. One important qualification must be added: the Social Credit people find the source of the trouble not in private ownership of the tools of production or in unequal distribution but in the money industry, in the financial system, which is what they propose to reform.

I have gone into details of criticism in order to show that the New Humanists are fairly caught on the capital charge of failing to recognize the economic problem. However sensitive they may be to the “excesses” of capitalism, they accept it and the financial system with it as the defensible status quo, and with no great marshalling of reasons either. I would urge on them, not any one of the proposed solutions current, but the adoption of the mood and temper appropriate to a baffling problem whose dimensions cannot be ignored. The case as I diagnose it is similar to that in which the modern man finds himself put in respect to science. The case calls for an awakened curiosity, earnest search for solutions, the keenest criticism of both the status quo and new theories, the cultivation of impartiality. I should like to see the New Humanists with their background of ideas, their equipment for criticism, their breadth of vision, convert themselves into eager, impartial students of our common economic problems. I find them to be not free-ranging students in this field, but tied uncritically to the existing industrial order, an order furthermore that has had a comparatively brief historical existence. But why should they not become our best critics of economic questions, uniting general culture to familiarity with the special science of production?

What we need stands out with absolute clarity: a livelier research into the alternatives to or revisions of capitalism and a livelier criticism of these alternatives or revisions. Many American intellectuals at the present moment, discouraged with democracy, think of only two alternative possibilities, Bolshevism and Fascism, each, I may say, being abhorrent to the New Humanist. For the American Humanist appears to commit himself completely to the democratic experiment, and to have more respect for the old ideas of democracy than you usually encounter nowadays in our disillusioned intelligentsia. But what vitiates democracy so terribly that it becomes a pretended thing? Profiteer economics. On the other hand, in the case of Bolshevism as in the case of Fascism, democracy disappears; individualism goes down to defeat before the dictatorship. If we would retain democracy then, the fact not the pretence, we must revise the economics associated with it, and that perhaps is possible. At any rate, we have not exhausted all the alternatives even in speculating about revision. We have not even assembled all of them before us for study and discussion.

The proof of this is our ignorance of the dazzling Social Credit Plan of Major C. H. Douglas, which I mentioned above. Agitated for in England ever since the Great War, it has yet failed to cross the Atlantic, or rather one has to use a high-powered microscope to see the few American students of it. This is easily explainable, however, since with justice Major Douglas has been called the Einstein of economics, and a considerable amount of free brain, of unmortgaged intellectual energy, must be expended to grasp his novel and yet non-revolutionary, non-confiscatory scheme of reform. Although I know it is impossible to understand his proposal from the germ, I yet will give the germ-proposition on the chance that it will pique the curiosity of those rare readers who can detect even in the germ the presence of a new principle that promises to be worth study. The gist of his proposal is simply to regulate prices by productivity, by relation, that is, to supply. I will add that the Douglas criticism of Marxian economics is that it confuses ownership with control. We must look, not to ownership, but to the financial system for the real control that is exercised today over industry. Has Major Douglas, as it is claimed, reached the bottom of economics?

I think the New Humanists should be interested in the question, and if they should, they would certainly steal a march on that portion of intellectual America which prides itself on its vigilance for new ideas, but which to some of us often appears a little sluggish in living up to its boast. Perhaps in the Social Credit Plan the Humanists would discover not only the key economic theory, but a theory which when applied would make their politics entirely feasible. For the Plan alters nothing but the financial system.

We have all seen what one writer calls the degeneration of government from a plane of democratic idealism and tolerable administration to a plane of control by political machines, ward-bosses and racketeers, and seeing it a great many intellectuals have given up hope of democracy, have ceased to be even interested in it. But this writer, Jean Toomer, goes on to speak for a larger mass of our citizens when he notes that “there is still enough idealism left in us, there is still active in us a sense of decency sufficiently strong to make us feel unhappy about this trend. We cannot laugh at it or shrug our shoulders and play the game ... there still exists in most of us a fairly strong wish to see the American political experiment turn out well; and for this reason we ask of a political writer that he show a degree of resistance to political rottenness, a degree of insistence on decency, ability, and intelligence in politics.” Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership, the supreme Humanist treatise on American political thought, was written not for futilitarians or cynics but precisely for the mass of intelligent citizens described by Toomer who wish to see democracy turn out well. The baldest of summaries must here suffice for a work that should have given rise to a whole literature of commentary.

Democracy and Leadership studies types of political thinking from Aristotle to Woodrow Wilson, with special attention given to the naturalistic imperialism of Machiavelli, the idyllic imagination of Rousseau when it dreams on politics, and the moral imagination of Edmund Burke. Like More, Babbitt leans heavily upon Burke’s ideas of a natural aristocracy, the power of example, and the imaginative justification of privileges.

One of the strongest features of the book is its study of the humility of Asia expressed in Buddhism and Confucianism. The West learned sufficiently the lesson of self-reliance in the Renascence, but it has not learned the lesson of humility, and from the Babbittean standpoint this is essential.

A very brief description of Babbitt as a political thinker would note first that he is an anti-imperialist as well as an anti-Bolshevist. He is in fact an old-fashioned democrat who thinks that whatever the quantitative achievements of the United States have been, qualitatively we have thus far failed. He opposes the Jeffersonian tradition and regrets the victory of Andrew Jackson. His tradition is strongly unionist. Washington, John Marshall, Lincoln, the last viewed as a unionist rather than an emancipator—these are the principal figures in his democratic tradition. It is perhaps not too much to say that Babbitt considers the Declaration of Independence a Rousseauistic document and the Constitution a humanistic document. At any rate, he makes much of the Supreme Court as a check on the spontaneous popular will and stands firmly for constitutional democracy as against direct democracy.

His program? The formation of a Socratic remnant. We need a movement, he says, in our political life which will be Socratic, Aristotelian and Christian, a movement, that is, that will stress definition, habit and humility. The beginning is to subject our catchwords—the political terms that sway our imaginations and actions—to a Socratic dichotomy, and in this book Babbitt himself performs some masterly dichotomizing of such infectious words as “service,” “liberty” and “imagination.” The Aristotelian phase of the program is education along the lines we observed in our last chapter. The Christian phase has to do with the recovery of humility.

It is evident, I think, even from the bare outline how Babbitt runs the political problem into the philosophical and religious problems. Where one boggles is at the very beginning, the economic problem as it merges into the political. That is, Babbitt’s politics has to compete with his economics, and at the present time economics in practice is the determinant. As in the case of More, Babbitt is most convincing in dealing with Man Psychologic, least convincing in handling Man Economic. His enemies, I may add, are most persuasive about Man Economic and least equipped to study Man Psychologic.

The economics of commercial men (the science, that is, of production for profit, not the science of production for use) puts the whole question of right relations between man and man far up in the air. We can theorize about these relations as much as we like but when we drop to earth again, present economic habits spoil the theories. There is, for instance, nothing in the least degree Utopian about Babbitt’s politics. He is thoroughly realistic in his political vein, but all the time he is working in that vein he presupposes not a reform of the economics of commercial men but an amenability on the part of this black economics to his theory of democracy.

In this chapter I have deliberately tried to keep the problem of relations between men (politics and government) in the air, as in an earlier chapter I deliberately endeavored to raise man’s concern with the physical universe up into the air. That is where I think such topics should be now: they should be open questions toward which the best attitude is an open attitude. Therefore I used a writer like Georges Sorel as a wedge to break apart our fixed ideas about classicism, romanticism and revolution.

To conclude the chapter, I shall now give several social attitudes which I think are, in our time of dissolving answers and new-formed questions, compatible with American Humanism as a basis. They are a policy of detachment, the religious view of Cæsar and his things, liberalism (yes, liberalism, but a special kind!) and anarchism (also a special kind). And although in discussing these attitudes, I shall refer them to the American Humanist, please understand that in this connection I am identifying the intelligent skeptical modern man with the Humanist. What, in short, should be the rôle of the civilized man toward practical affairs? He should adopt a policy of detachment, urges Julien Benda in his recent widely debated book, The Treason of the Intellectuals.

In this work Benda deplores the entrance into practical life of European intellectuals. For, he says, there are two moralities, a worldly practical morality and a disinterested “clerical” morality, and the two should not mingle to their confusion. They have existed parallel throughout civilization, the “clerk” or intellectual guiding himself by one set of values, the layman by a totally different set. But today, charges Benda, the “clerk” forsakes his disinterestedness, enters the practical world and promotes the growth of national, class, race and party passions and hatreds. This is the treason to the intellectual order committed by such diverse men as Kipling, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Péguy and Maurras. Fidelity to the intellectual order is detachment from political and class activities: it is setting the example of pure devotion to the values of culture and to those alone. Thus the intellectuals affect life, not by throwing themselves into its partizanships and justifying them, but by removing from them and setting up an example whereby men may know their own lay morality for what it is.

This clearly is not the view of More and Babbitt. Their natural aristocracy is not conceived as aloof but as exerting pressure directly on lay affairs, as seeking to control them by its superior wisdom and morality. But should the New Humanists gain in numbers, I would expect to see among them before long adherents of Benda’s thesis, for personal predilections will always lead some men toward such a standpoint.

Benda, it should be observed, does not quite take the religious view of market and state affairs. “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” specifies the clear vision of two orders of things, but is actually the code of a very paradoxical and rare type of person, the unworldly man of the world. The things of Cæsar are to be known for what they are and conformed to for what they are: they are not, however, to be justified. In this way the religious person is in the world, but it is not his home, he is not of it because his estimate of it differs from the estimates of the men around him. Consider Socrates’ outward conformity to the customs of Athenian life and his inward non-conformity. Why this paradox in the religious person? Is it that he sees simultaneously the world’s need for reform and the impossibility of reform? Does he see that things in the main must be as they are, and only individual salvation is possible? What makes him render unto Cæsar, but with such perfect lucidity and no laudation, the things that belong to him?

The nut in these days of remoteness from religious inspiration is too hard for us to crack. We can only wonder at the early Christian secret of accommodating oneself to the world and yet placing oneself above its customs and grandeurs. So though Benda approaches the religious conception of two moralities to be adjusted to, he actually counsels withdrawal from the first, the practical world, and a resolute turning to the world of ideals. More and Babbitt, on the other hand, as I have tried to show, actually do a little justifying of the economics of Cæsar. They would have the civilized man do more than put up with a necessary evil: they would have him defend it. All in all, we are not likely to see much evidence in our era of a genuinely early Christian view toward the market place and the legislative hall.

But can we imagine the undogmatic liberal lamb and the dogmatic humanistic lion lying down together in the breast of one individual? Not long ago I dismissed the liberals, perhaps too airily, for their bankruptcy in ideas and their impotence in action. Not to speak of the betrayal of liberal hopes by the Treaty of Versailles, impotent the liberals had to confess themselves to be after the failure of their concerted effort to secure a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti. Do their best, they could not avert that tragic stain of suspicion on Massachusetts justice that will never wear off. Again in the Smith-Hoover presidential election, they were as ineffective as their enemies could wish. But one does not mock the defeated, one only asks that such bitter lessons as defeat gives should be patiently conned. Has American liberalism shown in the last two years any disposition to revise itself, or to seize on a new idea, or to adopt a new set of tactics, or to overcome its defects? Apparently only two liberals have really tried to overhaul their policies and they are Walter Lippmann and the late Herbert Croly. Of the two, Croly in my estimation went deeper in his fragmentary writings in the New Republic than did Lippmann in A Preface to Morals. From 1924 until his illness in 1928 Croly appeared to be, in Arnold’s language, “turning a stream of fresh and free thought” upon his previous stock notions and habits, and in 1927 and 1928 the results began to be excitingly visible in his editorials and occasional articles. In particular, the defeat of the agitation for Sacco and Vanzetti seems to have deepened his sense that some all-important element was missing from American Liberalism. Liberalism must transform itself into a discipline of self-liberation was his conclusion, and he hit on the term, Socratic Liberalism, to distinguish the new conception from the old faith in legislative action and environmental improvements. “What liberals need is not a new concrete political or social program,” he concluded. “They need a new evaluation of all programs, a new attitude towards them and a new method of giving reality to them.”

Liberals have always been short on two things: skepticism and a full realization of the inner life. They have been long on curiosity, on tolerance, on human kindness, on a sense of the plasticity of man, on optimism. They have put their faith in what Arnold called machinery, that is, in programs of social and economic engineering, many of which have turned out to be both available and realistic plans of action. Generally speaking, the American liberal believes or hopes that the ethical defect which capitalist economy introduces into the practices of the State can be overcome by education, a belief that contrasts with the pessimistic view of More, which we noted, namely, that the defect is inherent in human nature. Croly’s radical proposal was simply to marry liberal curiosity and sentiment to skepticism. “Although,” he wrote in an important editorial entitled Realistic Liberalism (New Republic, November 23, 1927), “liberalism was fundamentally an attempt to give increasing dignity, enlightenment and fulfilment to human life, it has moved towards its goal almost entirely by trying to improve the political and economic environment of modern men and women. Its program called for the services of expert political or social engineers and invoked the legislative power of the State to put the program, which might be either negative or positive, into effect. But in all its efforts, it assumed that an improvement of the conditions in which people lived would liberate a corresponding moral and intellectual energy in the people themselves. From this point of view, liberalism was a well intentioned but inconsiderate attempt to redeem human nature without asking human beings to participate in their own redemption, except by devising social programs, winning elections, passing laws, inventing more machines and increasing individual and social capital. They were never asked to revolutionize and reform the inside of their own minds or to ponder what, if any, the relation might be between political self-government and individual self-government. They have rarely asked the question whether a liberated society, in which there was little or no oppression, no privation and no monopoly of power, wealth and comfort, might, nevertheless, be composed of extremely cheap individuals.”

It is commonly thought that skepticism of the machinery of social reform puts a blight on one’s desires for material improvements. But it does not necessarily do that, certainly not in Croly’s case. Skepticism does blight opportunism and the exaggerated faith attached to projects of external betterment, but the desire to experiment remains: only the experimenter realizes he must not be cocksure of himself, he must be humble and admit the need of a rigorous self-culture prior to social experiment. Skepticism is in fact a great reviver of the inner life, and Croly became in his last articles a preacher on the neglected text, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.” Like Arnold, he declared in substance that culture is a condition of internal working. “Liberals are invited, consequently, to repent of their dependence on mechanism and to practice on themselves the faith in enlightenment which has always been their stock-in-trade.... The only realistic policy for liberals is to start methodically to stretch and intensify their consciousness in the hope that it will become eventually a more adequate instrument for the watching, the understanding, the unfolding, the harmonizing and the deliverance of their personal lives.”

To Croly, then, the important thing was that liberalism should be more than a doctrine or a program: it should be a discipline of self-liberation, for only the self-liberated are qualified to become liberators of others. Anybody, of course, can mouth generalities about self-emancipation, internal development, and so on, and anybody does. The rare person—the person who really means to do what he says—goes a step further and inquires and speculates about a method of self-liberation, about some definite means of converting rhetoric into facts. This, in such editorials as Socratic Liberalism (New Republic, December 28, 1927) and in such articles as The Human Potential in the Pacific, Christians, Beware, and Consciousness and the Religious Life Croly proceeded to do. He wanted a scientific method for self-study and self-development, and he actually proposed one summed up in this sentence: “So the hypothetical separation by the individual of himself as an observer from the accidents and the compulsions of his actualized personality, and his systematic effort to be aware of how this personality behaves, may prove to be the indispensable route to liberated and reunited consciousness of self.”

This, as you see, sets up a working dualism in human psychology. But the interesting thing is that Croly’s effort to introduce at the back of liberal sentiments and liberal intellectual interests the two elements of skepticism and a practical concern with one’s own psychology was completely abortive. Not even the editors of Croly’s own paper have picked up his revolutionary proposals and carried them forward in the slightest way.⁠[8] The most profound liberal in America thoroughly failed when it came to lifting liberalism out of its groove. But unless I am very wrong, some kind of entente could be worked out between a Socratic Liberal and a Socratic Conservative or Humanist. They would at least find a ground for basic agreement and differ, when they differed, on opinions as to the passing trends of the time.

Finally, we come to that special brand of anarchism which I anticipate will be acceptable to some Humanists in the future. The New Humanists have been freely upbraided by many people anxious as they say “to do good to others.” What! these well intentioned persons have said, bother with self-reform when there are so many ills of the world to be alleviated! Play with definitions, heed the Inner Check, talk about discipline when social abuses abound! “And what,” says one of the epigoni of the New Republic, “has Humanism to do with the scene outside my window: with the jobless men who saunter in the dusk, or the dying village, or the paper mill abandoned across the river—this mill whose owners have gone South where labor is cheap?”

A lengthy reply to that has been in print for seventy-six years in the whole final section of Thoreau’s first chapter in Walden. “As for Doing-Good, that is one of the professions which are full ... Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming to become of more worth and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star, of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good.... There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.... Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”

This is the twofold defence of the individualist: he confesses his doubt that men’s knowledge and powers as they are can do more than merely meddle and muddle in social relations and he insists upon the regeneration of oneself as being in the long run beneficial to those around one. It is the very essence of the social criticism of the American Humanists and conceivably to some temperaments among them it might lead, as it did in Thoreau’s case, to personal secession from the United States! The social anarchist like Thoreau is not heartless: he is convinced of being helpless—like the man who has not learned to swim and sees some one offshore drowning. The humanitarian plunges to the rescue, but as he cannot swim, the only result is he drowns too. The Humanist suffers from the spectacle of drowning souls, but he may sensibly conclude with Thoreau that nothing can be effected toward saving them until one has oneself learned to swim.

If American Humanism spreads, my prediction is that we shall eventually see its adherents manifest as rich a variety stemming from certain conventions of thought, feeling and discipline as we perceive in Renascence Humanism. We shall see humanistic disciples of Thoreau doggedly resisting the pleas of the Doing-Good professors, liberal Humanists annoying by their socratic tendencies the orthodox liberals, detached Humanists accused of defeatism and retreating to ivory towers of thought, Socratic Conservatives like More and Babbitt, and perhaps even a few Humanists tinged with the religious view of politics and government. But we shall hardly see any measure of popularity attach itself to any of the positions I have adumbrated.