Those who take city children out into the country for a day's airing can tell you one story after another about how squirrels and rabbits are classed as cats, cattle as horses, sheep as woolly dogs, how green things are just grass, a tree merely a tree. They will tell you that this is the tragedy of urban civilization,? to rear children who live in a half-noticed, carelessly classified universe, as dumb to them as the stony pavements that serve as their playgrounds.
And yet city children are far from being especially dull-witted. They are simply dull to an environment which really does not concern them. A country boy may go fearlessly among restless animals or find a trail through the woods, but a street-urchin will play baseball in the midst of traffic. Yet we feel a pathetic difference between them, for one is competent amidst enduring things, the other is quick about artificial complications.
The city-dweller never meets as a personal problem the elements that have ordered human life, plants and animals, the tides and the winds, forest and hill. He may work at some abstract part of a complicated manufacture, or spend his time in an office where he deals the day long with papers and telephones, the symbols and shadows of events. He has practically no sense of how he is fed, clothed, or housed, has seen no spinning and weaving, mining or reaping. He has witnessed the milking of one cow with mixed astonishment, has forgotten that steaks come from cattle, and mutton chops from sheep, knows that clover occasionally appears with four leaves and signifies good luck, and spring to him means not sowing time, and the opening of streams, but open cars and straw hats.
This uprooted person is the despair of all those who love the flavor of words, for his language has gone stale and abstract in a miserly telegraphic speech. That is why literary men are forever hunting up folk songs and seeking out backward peasants in Galway or Cornwall. Among country people words still taste of actual things: contact with sun and rain and earth and harvest turns the simple prose of the day's work into poetry for the starved imaginations of city-bred people. There has been, to be sure, a brave attempt in recent years to admire slang. But one insuperable difficulty stands in the way: city slang has risen out of the interests that meet the thwarted instincts of a restless population, from the bleachers, the poker table, and the saloon. Slang is often vivid but it is too deeply sundered from the older sources of our happiness. It is not set in the spectacle of earth and sky, as the speech of peasants, and it is for the most part trivial, strained, and raucous. Even the slang of lust is feeble, reflected out of halted fantasy and filtered through commercialism. The obscenity of a smoking-room is little more than the sneaking indulgence of peeping Toms, witty at times because it comes as a relief from the seductive wrappings of a finicky culture. But even lust has become elaborate and second-hand.
For the slow movement of the seasons we have substituted the flicker of fashions. The older world changed, but it repeated itself. Birth and youth and age, summer and winter changed the world and left it unaltered. You could think of eternal ideas, for there was beneath the change some permanence. But in our day change is not an illusion but a fact: we do actually move toward novelty, there is invention, and what has never been is created each day.
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
And so we are literally an eccentric people, our emotional life is disorganized, our passions are out-of-kilter. Those who call themselves radical float helplessly upon a stream amidst the wreckage of old creeds and abortive new ones, and they are inclined to mistake the motion which carries them for their own will. Those who make no pretensions to much theory are twisted about by fashions, 'crazes,’ at the mercy of milliners and dressmakers, theatrical producers, advertising campaigns and the premeditated gossip of the newspapers.
We live in great cities without knowing our neighbors, the loyalties of place have broken down, and our associations are stretched over large territories, cemented by very little direct contact. But this impersonal quality is intolerable: people don't like to deal with abstractions. And so you find an overwhelming demand upon the press for human interest stories, for personal details opened to the vast public. Gossip is organized; and we do by telegraph what was done in the village store.
Institutions have developed a thousand inconsistencies. Our schools, churches, courts, governments were not built for the kind of civilization they are expected to serve. In former times you could make some effort to teach people what they needed to know. It was done badly, but at least it could be attempted. Men knew the kind of problems their children would have to face. But to-day education means a radically different thing. We have to prepare children to meet the unexpected, for their problems will not be the same as their fathers'. To prepare them for the unexpected means to train them in method instead of filling them with facts and rules. They will have to find their own facts and make their own rules, and if schools can't give them that power then schools no longer' educate for the modern world.
The churches face a dilemma which is a matter of life and death to them. They come down to us with a tradition that the great things are permanent, and they meet a population that needs above all to understand the meaning and the direction of change. No wonder their influence has declined, no wonder that men fight against the influence they have. Ministers are as bewildered as the rest of us, perhaps a little more so. For they are expected to stand up every week and interpret human life in a way that will vitalize feeling and conduct. And for this work of interpretation they have the simple rules of a village civilization, the injunctions of a pastoral people. Of course they can't interpret life on Sunday so that the interpretation will mean something on Monday. Even supposing that the average minister understood the scientific spirit, had studied sociology, and knew what are the forces which agitate men, even under those circumstances, interpretation would be an almost impossible task. For the least hampered minds, the most imaginative and experienced men, can only stumble through to partial explanations. To ask the clergy to find adequate meaning in this era is to expect each minister to be an inspired thinker. If the churches really could interpret life they would be unable to make room for the congregations; if men felt that they could draw anything like wisdom from them, they would be besieged by bewildered and inquiring people. Think of the lectures people flock to, the political meetings they throng, the dull books they work their way through. It isn't indifference to the great problems that leaves the churches empty; it is the sheer intellectual failure of the churches to meet a sudden change.
The courts have not been able to adjust themselves either. But while people can ignore the churches, they have to fight the courts. They fight blindly without any clear notion as to what they would like the courts to do. They are irritated and constrained by a legal system that was developed in a different civilization, and they find the courts, as Prof. Roscoe Pound says, 'doing nothing and obstructing everything.’ They find that whenever a legislature makes an effort to fit law to the new facts of life, a court is there to nullify the work. They find the courts masters of our political system, and yet these masters will not really take the initiative. They have enormous power, but they refuse the responsibility that goes with it. The courts are making law all the time, of course. Now if they made law that met the new situations, there would be no revolt against the judiciary. The American voters are not doctrinaires. They don't care in any academic way whether Congress, the President, or the courts, frame legislation. They form their opinions almost entirely by the results. If the President can legislate better than Congress, as Roosevelt and Wilson could, the people will support the President no matter how many lawyers shout that the rights of Congress are being usurped. If the courts made law that dealt with modern necessities, the people would, I believe, never question their power, it is the bad sociology of judges and their class prejudices that are destroying the prestige of the bench. That bad sociology and those prejudices are in the main due to the fact that judges have not been trained for the modern world, have never learned how to understand its temper.
And of course, when you come to the political structure of our government you find that it has only the faintest relation to actual conditions. Our political constituencies are to American life what the skeleton of a two-humped camel would be to an elephant. One is not made to fit the other's necessities. Take the City of New York for example. For all practical purposes the metropolitan district extends up into Connecticut and across into New Jersey. By 'practical purposes’ I mean that as a health problem, a transportation problem, a housing problem, a food problem, a police problem, the city which sprawls across three states ought to be treated as one unit. Or take New England: for any decent solution of its transportation difficulties or for any scientific use of its natural resources its state lines are a nuisance. On the other hand, it mustn't be imagined that the old political units are always too small. Far from it: thus many of the vital functions of New York City are managed by the State legislature. The political system which comes down to us from a totally different civilization is sometimes too large in its unit—sometimes too small, but in a thousand bewildering ways its does not fit. Every statesman is hampered by conflicts of jurisdiction, by divided responsibility, by the fact that when he tries to use the government for some public purpose, the government is a clumsy instrument.
The regulation of the trusts is made immensely difficult by the fact that the states are too small, and the nation is often too large. There are natural sections of the country, like the Pacific Coast, the Ohio, the Mississippi valley, and New England which ought for many purposes to act as a unit. No sane person, I suppose, wishes to centralize at Washington all the power that is needed to control business, and yet everyone knows that if you leave that control to the states, there will be no control.
But the fitting of government to the facts of the modern world is sure to be a very difficult task. In the past governments have been organized as territorial units, but with the development of transportation the importance of geography has declined. Men are bound together to-day by common interests far more than by living in the same place. It is the union, the trade association, the grange, the club and the party that command allegiance rather than the county or the state. To anyone who is not fooled by charters and forms, it is evident that functions of government are being developed in these groups which are not mentioned in theoretical discussions of government. Labor unions legislate, Boards of Trade legislate, cooperative societies are governments in a very real sense. They make rules under which people live, often much more compelling ones than those of some official legislature. Now in the Eighteenth Century there was a strong sentiment against any minor sovereignty within the political state. In France, for example, by a law of 1791 all associations were forbidden. Our common law looked upon them with extreme disfavor, and the Sherman Act is an expression of that same feeling. Theorists like ex-President Eliot in our own day are against unions because they establish little governments within the state. But the facts are against the ideas of the Eighteenth Century. The world is so complex that no official government can be devised to deal with it, and men have had to organize associations of all kinds in order to create some order in the world. They will develop more of them, I believe, for these voluntary groupings based on common interests are the only way yet proposed by which a complicated society can be governed. But of course, unofficial sovereignties within the nation create very perplexing problems. They all tend to be imperious, to reach out and absorb more and more. And the attempt to adjust them to each other is a task for which political science is not prepared.
I hate merely touched on some of the difficulties which arise in our domestic affairs because the anatomy of our politics does not correspond to the anatomy of our life. When you come to international affairs confusion is compounded. As I write, we are in the midst of the Mexican problem? No one knows how much authority anyone has in that country. There are all sorts of conflicting interests and all sorts of conflicting governments.
Does the fact that Englishmen invest in Mexico entitle the British Empire to some authority in Mexican affairs? Are we the guardians of Mexico, and if so where does our authority end? The new imperialism is no simple affair: it has innumerable gradations of power. As Prof. Beard says: 'This newer imperialism does not rest primarily upon the desire for more territory, but rather upon the necessity for markets in which to sell manufactured goods and for opportunities to invest surplus accumulations of capital. It begins in a search for trade, advances to intervention on behalf of the interests involved, thence to protectorates, and finally to annexation.’ Diplomacy now talks about 'effective occupation,’ 'hinterland,’ 'sphere of influence’ and 'Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.’
One of the curious ironies of history is that after many generations of effort to establish popular government in a few countries, the real interests of the world have overflowed frontiers and eluded democracy. We are just about to establish a democratic State, and we find that capitalism has become international. It seems as if we were always a little too late for the facts. We are now engaged in building up for the world a few of the primitive devices of internal affairs. A code of law, a few half hearted, impotent courts, treaties, and a little international policing. But all these things, many of which express the fondest hopes of sensible men, are very little more than arrangements between antagonistic nations. Anything like a worldwide cooperative democracy is as yet no part of the expectation of any unsentimental person.
Now anyone who has talked as much about the industrial problem as I have in these chapters is, of course, expected to present a 'solution.'' But as a matter of fact there can be no such thing as 'solution’ in the sense which most people understand the word. When you solve a puzzle, you're done with it, but the industrial puzzle has no single key. Nor is there such a thing for it as a remedy or a cure. You have in a very literal sense to educate the industrial situation, to draw out its promise, discipline and strengthen it.
It means that you have to do a great variety of things to industry, invent new ones to do, and keep on doing them. You have to make a survey of the natural resources of the country. On the basis of that survey you must draw up a national plan for their development. You must eliminate waste in mining, you must conserve the forests so that their fertility is not impaired, so that stream flow is regulated, and the waterpower of the country made available. You must bring to the farmer a knowledge of scientific agriculture, help him to organize cooperatively, use the taxing power to prevent land speculation and force land to the best use, coordinate markets, build up rural credits, and create in the country a life that shall really be interesting.
You have the intricate problem of how to make the railroads serve the national development of our resources. That means the fixing of rates so that railroads become available where they are most needed. Wastes and grafts have to be cut out, and the control of transportation made part of a national economic policy. You have to see to it that technical schools produce men trained for such work; you have to establish institutes of research, that shall stimulate the economic world not only with physical inventions, but with administrative proposals.
You have to go about deliberately to create a large class of professional business men. You have to enlarge the scope and the vision of the efficiency expert so that he can begin to take out of industry the deadening effects of machine production. You have to find vast sums of money for experiment in methods of humanizing labor.
For each industry you must discover the most satisfactory unit, and you must encourage these units to cooperate so that every industry shall be conducted with a minimum of friction. You must devise a banking system so that the nation's capital shall be available, that it shall be there for use at the lowest possible cost.
You have to find ways of making the worker an integral part of his industry. That means allowing him to develop his unions, and supplying the unions with every incentive by which they can increase their responsibility. You have to create an industrial education by which the worker shall be turned, not into an intelligent machine, but into an understanding, directing partner of business. You have to encourage the long process of self-education in democracy through which unions can develop representative government and adequate leadership. You have to support them in their desire to turn themselves from wage-earners into a corporate body that participates in industrial progress.
You have to devise and try out a great variety of consumers' controls. For some industries you may have to use public ownership, for others the cooperative society may be more effective, for others the regulating commission. You will not be able to come out plump for one method as against all the others. It will depend on the nature of the industry which instrument is the most effective. And back of all these methods, there is the need for industrial citizenship, for creating in the consumer a knowledge of what he wants, and of the different ways there are of getting it. Back of that there is the still subtler problem of making the consumer discriminating, of educating his taste and civilizing his desires.
All this is only a little of what has to be done. It has to be done not by some wise and superior being but by the American people themselves. No one man, no one group can possibly do it all. It is an immense collaboration. It will have to be carried out against the active opposition of class interests and sectional prejudices. At every step there will be a clash with old rights and old habits. There will be the cries of the beaten, the protest of the discarded. For men cling passionately to their routines.
But you cannot institute a better industrial order by decree. It is of necessity an educational process, a work of invention, of coopera-tive training, of battles against vested rights not only in property but in acquired skill as well, a process that is sure to be intricate, and therefore confusing.
But that is the way democracies move: they have in literal truth to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Those who have some simpler method than the one I have sketched are, it seems to me, either unaware of the nature of the problem, interested only in some one phase of it, or unconsciously impatient with the limitations of democracy. In the next chapter, I shall make an attempt to describe some of the current philosophies which try to shirk the full force of the problem. They are all excuses for trusting to luck, for relying upon something but ourselves. They are all substitutes for the difficulties of self-government, concessions to the drift of our natures.
Here I want only to reach a sense of the complexity of the task, its variety and its challenge. I have skimmed the surface, nothing more. There is no mention of the fearful obstacles of race prejudice in the South, no mention of the threat that recent immigration brings with it, the threat of an alien and defenseless class of servile labor. And there is, of course, always the distracting possibility of a foreign war, of vast responsibilities in the other Americas.
Certainly democracy has a load to carry. It has arisen in the midst of a civilization for which men are utterly unready, a civilization so complex that their minds cannot grasp it, so unexpected that each man is compelled to be something of a prophet. Its future is so uncertain that no one can feel any assurance in the face of it. Precedent has been wrecked because we have to act upon really new facts. Anything like a central authority to guide us has become impossible because no authority is wise enough, because self-government has become a really effective desire. The old shibboleths of conduct are for the most part meaningless: they don't work when they are tried.
Through it all our souls have become disorganized, for they have lost the ties which bound them. In the very period when man most needs a whole-hearted concentration on external affairs, he is disrupted internally by a revolution in the intimacies of his life. He has lost his place in an eternal scheme, he is losing the ancient sanctions of love, and his sexual nature is chaotic through the immense change that has come into the relations of parent and child, husband and wife. Those changes distract him so deeply that the more 'advanced’ he is, the more he flounders in the bogs of his own soul.
It seems as if the most obvious way of reacting toward evil were to consider it a lapse from grace. The New Freedom, we are told, is 'only the old revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America.’ Everywhere you hear it: that the people have been 'deprived’ of ancient rights, and legislation is framed on the notion that we can recover the alleged democracy of early America.
I once read in a learned magazine an essay on 'The Oblivescence of the Disagreeable.’ As I remember it, the writer was trying to demonstrate what he regarded as a very hopeful truth —that men tend to forget pain more easily than pleasure. That is -no doubt a comfortable faculty, but it plays havoc with history.
For in regard to those early days of the Republic, most of our notions are marked by a well-nigh total oblivescence of the disagreeable. We find it very difficult to remember that there were sharp class divisions in the young Republic, that suffrage was severely restricted, that the Fathers were a very conscious upper class determined to maintain their privileges. Nations make their histories to fit their illusions. That is why reformers are so anxious to return to early America. What they know of it comes to them filtered through the golden lies of school-books and hallowed by the generous loyalty of their childhood.
Men generally find in the past what they miss in the present. During the Paterson strike ot 1913, I heard a very drastic I.W.W. agitator tell a meeting of silk-weavers that they had fallen low since the days of the great Chief Justice Marshall. In those days there were no rich and poor, and the Constitution had not yet been abrogated by an impudent Chief of Police! Yet in the days of Marshall even the most peaceful trade union was outlawed, and as for the doctrines of the I.W.W.,— imagine the sentiments of Alexander Hamilton. A few years ago I was living in Boston when an old gentleman, unhappy over the trend of democracy, published a book to glorify the American Tories. It consisted largely of intimate details from the private lives of the revolutionary heroes. Boston wouldn't have the book, true or untrue. So the old gentleman was denounced and his book forgotten.
For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. The modern puritan locates it in the period of the most famous ancestors from whom he can claim descent. That ancestor regretted the loss of Eden. Rousseau's millennial dream was a 'state of nature.’ Hard-headed Adam Smith had his 'original state’ which was all that England wasn't. I know literary men who lament the passing of the eighteenth century coffee house, and New York is full of artists who dream of Parisian cafés. Zionists go back to David and Solomon; Celtic revivalists worry about Kathleen ni Houlihan; Chesterton dreams of Merrie England; scholars yearn for Fifth Century Athens; there is a considerable vogue to-day for certain of the earlier Egyptian dynasties, and some people, more radical than others, regard civilization itself as a disease.
The prototype of all revivals is each man's wistful sense of his own childhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in the way we persist in recalling what is by its very nature irrevocable. Perhaps each of us is touched by unuttered disappointments, and life has not the taste we anticipated. The weary man sinks back into the past, like a frightened child into its mother's arms. He glorifies what is gone when he fears what is to come. That is why discontented husbands have a way of admiring the cakes that mother used to bake. Beaten nations live in the exploits of their ancestors, and all exiles lament by the waters of Babylon. The curse of Ireland, of Poland, of Alsace is that they cannot forget what they were. There are no people who cling so ardently to a family tree as do those who have come down in the world. The men who were beaten by the trusts will never see the promise of the trusts.
Whenever the future is menacing and unfamiliar, whenever the day's work seems insurmountable, men seek some comfort in the warmth of memory. Only those who are really at home in their world find life more interesting as they mature. Experience for them not an awful chance, but a prize they can win and embrace. They need no romance to make life tolerable. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. They will falter before their problems, will deal with them half-heartedly and with diffidence. Their allegiance is not to the world. And they will never give themselves entirely to the task of making for themselves on this earth and in their age an adequate and civilized home.
The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism, in which the 'natural’ humanity in each man is adored as the savior of society. You meet this faith throughout the thousand and one communistic experiments and new religions in which America is so abundant. 'If only you let men alone, they'll be good,’ a typical American reformer said to me the other day. He believed, as most Americans do, in the unsophisticated man, in his basic kindliness and his instinctive practical sense. A critical outlook seemed to the reformer an inhuman one; he distrusted, as Bryan does, the appearance of the expert; he believed that whatever faults the common man might show were due to some kind of Machiavellian corruption.
He had the American dream, which may be summed up, I think, the statement that the undisciplined man is the salt of the Earth. So when the trusts appeared, when the free land was gone, and America had been congested into a nation, the only philosophy with any weight of tradition behind it was a belief in the virtues of he spontaneous, enterprising, untrained and unsocialized man. Trust promoters cried: Let us alone. The little business men cried: We're the natural men, so let us alone. And the public cried: We're the most natural of all, so please do stop interfering with us. Muckraking gave an utterance to the small business men and to the larger public, who dominated reform politics. What did they do? They tried by all the machinery and power they could muster to restore a business world in which each man could again be left to his own will—a world that needed no cooperative intelligence. In the Sherman Act is symbolized this deliberate attempt to recreate an undeliberate society. No group of people, except the socialists, wished to take up the enormous task of disciplining business to popular need. For the real American was dreaming of the Golden Age in which he could drift with impunity.
But there has arisen in our time a large group of people who look to the future. They talk a great deal about their ultimate goal. Many of them do not differ in any essential way from those who dream of a glorious past. They put Paradise before them instead of behind them. They are going to be so rich, so great, and so happy some day that any concern about to-morrow seems a bit sordid. They didn't fall from Heaven, as the reactionaries say, but they are going to Heaven with the radicals. Now this habit of reposing in the sun of a brilliant future is very enervating. It opens a chasm between fact and fancy, and the whole fine dream is detached from the living zone of the present. At the only point where effort and intelligence are needed, that point where to-day is turning into tomorrow, there these people are not found. At the point where human direction counts most they do not direct. So they are like most anarchists, wild in their dreams and unimportant in their deed. They cultivate a castle in Spain and a fiat in Harlem; a princess in the air and a drudge in the kitchen.
Then too there are the darlings of evolution. They are quite certain that evolution, as they put it, is ever onward and upward. For them all things conspire to achieve that well-known, though unmentioned far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves. They seem to imply as Moody suggested:
I, I, last product of the toiling ages,
Goal of heroic feet that never lagged, ?though
A little thing in trousers, slightly jagged.
How the conservative goes to work with the idea of evolution has been ably exposed by William English Walling. First, assume 'progress’ by calling it inevitable: this obviates the necessity for any practical change just now. Then assert the indubitable fact that real progress is very slow: and infer that wisdom consists in deprecating haste. Now when you have called progress inevitable and imperceptible, you have done about all that philosophy could do to justify impotence.
The radical view of evolution is more optimistic, but not more intelligent. In fact, it is generally all optimism and little else. For though it doesn't quite dare to say that whatever is, is right, it does assume that whatever is going to be, is going to be right. I believe that G. K. Chesterton once called this sort of thing progressivism by the calendar. There is complete confidence that whatever is later in time is better in fact, that the next phase is the desirable one, that all change is 'upward,’ that God and Nature are collaborating in our blithe ascent to the Superman. Such an outlook undermines judgment and initiative, deliberate effort, invention, plan, and sets you adrift on the currents of time, hoping for impossible harbors.
In a constructive social movement the harm done is immeasurable. The most vivid illustration is that of the old-fashioned, fatalistic Marxian socialists. They have an implicit faith that human destiny is merely the unfolding of an original plan, some of the sketches of which are in their possession, thanks to the labors of Karl Marx. Strictly speaking, these men are not revolutionists as they believe themselves to be; they are the interested pedants of destiny. They are God's audience, and they know the plot so well that occasionally they prompt Him. In their system all that education, unions, leadership and thought can do is to push along what by the theory needs no pushing. These socialists are like the clown Marceline at the Hippodrome, who is always very busy assisting in labor that would be done whether he were there or not. They face the ancient dilemma of fatalism: whatever they do is right, and nothing they do matters. Go to almost any socialist meeting and you'll hear it said that socialism would come if the Socialist Party had never been heard from. Perhaps so. But why organize a Socialist Party?
Of course, socialists don't act upon their theory. They are too deeply impressed with the evil that exists, too eager for the future that they see, to trust entirely in the logic of events. They do try to shape that future. But their old fatalism hampers them enormously the moment any kind of action is proposed. They are out of sympathy with conservative trade unionism, but they are still more hostile to the I.W.W. In politics they despise the reformer, but when they themselves obtain office they do nothing that a hundred 'bourgeois’ reformers haven't done before them. The Socialist Party in this country has failed to develop a practical program for labor or a practical program for politics. It claims to have a different philosophy from that of trade unionists or reformers, but when you try to judge the difference by its concrete results, it is imperceptible.
The theory and the temper of orthodox socialism are fatalistic, and no fatalist can really give advice. Theory and practice are widely sundered in the American socialist movement. There is a stumbling revolt which lives from hand to mouth, a catch-as-catch-can struggle, and then far removed from it, standing in majesty, a great citadel of dogma almost impervious to new ideas. For in the real world, destiny is one of the aliases of drift.
Closely related in essence, though outwardly quite different, is what might be called the panacea habit of mind. Beginning very often in some penetrating insight or successful analysis, this sort of mind soon becomes incapable of seeing anything besides that portion of reality which sustains the insight and is subject to the analysis. A good idea, in short, becomes a fixed idea. One group of American socialists can see only the advantage of strikes, another of ballots. One reformer sees the advantages of the direct primaries in Wisconsin: they become the universal solvent of political evil. You find engineers who don't see why you can't build society on the analogy of a steam engine; you find lawyers, like Taft, who see in the courts an intimation of heaven; sanitation experts who wish to treat the whole world as one vast sanitarium; lovers who wish to treat it as one vast happy family; education enthusiasts who wish to treat it as one vast nursery. No one who undertook to be the Balzac of reform by writing its Human Comedy could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life. The most amazing of all are people who deal with the currency question. Somehow or other, long meditation seems to produce in them a feeling that they are dealing with the crux of human difficulties.
Then there is the panacea most frequently propounded by voluble millionaires: the high cost of living is the cost of high living, and thrift is the queen of the virtues. Sobriety is another virtue, highly commended, — in fact there are thousands of people who seriously regard it as the supreme social virtue. To those of us who are sober and still discontented, the effort to found a political party on a colossal Don't is not very inspiring. After thrift and sobriety, there is always efficiency, a word which covers a multitude of confusions. No one in his senses denies the importance of efficient action, just as no one denies thrift and sober living. It is only when these virtues become the prime duty of man that we rejoice in the poet who has the courage to glorify the vagabond, preach a saving indolence, and glorify Dionysus. Be not righteous overmuch is merely a terse way of saying that virtue can defeat its own ends. Certainly, whenever a negative command like sobriety absorbs too much attention, and morality is obstinate and awkward, then living men have become cluttered in what was meant to serve them.
There are thousands to-day who, out of patience with almost everything, believe passionately that some one change will set everything right. In the first rank stand the suffragettes who believe that votes for women will make men chaste. I have just read a book by a college professor which announces that the short ballot will be as deep a revolution as the abolition of slavery. There are innumerable Americans who believe that a democratic constitution would create a democracy. Of course, there are single taxers so single-minded that they believe a happy civilization would result from the socialization of land values. Everything else that seems to be needed would follow spontaneously if only the land monopoly were abolished.
The syndicalists suffer from this habit of mind in an acute form. They refuse to consider any scheme for the reorganization of industry. All that will follow, they say, if only you can produce a General Strike. But obviously you might paralyze society, you might make the proletariat supreme, and still leave the proletariat without the slightest idea of what to do with the power it had won.
What happens is that men gain some insight into society and concentrate their energy upon it. Then when the facts rise up in their relentless complexity, the only way to escape them is to say: Never mind, do what I advocate, and all these other things shall be added unto you.
There is still another way of reacting toward a too complicated world. That way is to see so much good in every reform that you can't make up your mind where to apply your own magnificent talents. The result is that you don't apply your talents at all.
Reform produces its Don Quixotes who never deal with reality; it produces its Brands who are single-minded to the brink of ruin; and it produces its Hamlets and its Rudins who can never make up their minds. What is common to them all is a failure to deal with the real world in the light of its possibilities. To try to follow all the aliases of drift is like attacking the hydra by cutting off its heads. The few examples given here of how men shirk self-government might be extended indefinitely. They are as common to radicals as to conservatives. You can find them flourishing in an orthodox church and among the most rebellious socialists.
Men will do almost anything but govern themselves. They don't want the responsibility. In the main, they are looking for some benevolent guardian, be it a 'good man in office’ or a perfect constitution, or the evolution of nature. They want to be taken in charge. If they have to think for themselves they turn either to the past or to a distant future: but they manage to escape the real effort of the imagination which is to weave a dream into the turning present. They trust to destiny, a quick one or a slow one, and the whole task of judging events is avoided. They turn to automatic devices: human initiative can be ignored. They forbid evil, and then they feel better. They settle on a particular analogy, or a particular virtue, or a particular policy, and trust to luck that everything else will take care of itself.
But no one of these substitutes for self-government is really satisfactory, and the result is that a state of chronic rebellion appears. That is our present situation. The most hopeful thing about it is that through the confusion we can come to some closer understanding of why the modern man lacks stability, why his soul is scattered. We may, perhaps, be able to see a little better just what self-government implies.
The chronic rebellion is evident enough. I have a friend who after the Lawrence strike was a great admirer of the I.W.W. He told me about it one day with tears in his eyes. Two months later I met him, and he was cursing: 'They're so successful that they're getting ready to throw So-and-So out of the I.W.W. for heresy.’ It one of the ironies of the labor movement that it preaches solidarity, and seems to propagate by fission. For there is large truth in the saying that the only thing anarchists hate more than tyrants is an anarchist who differs with them. Indeed the bitterness between the 'red’ and the 'yellow’ unions is at least as great as the bitterness between the unions and the employers. The I.W.W. hates the American Federation of Labor and many political socialists with a vindictiveness that makes no distinction between them and the ost tyrannical boss: Revolt within the world of revolt is an institution. If any capitalist thinks he is the object of abuse, he ought to come and hear a debate between the Detroit I.W.W. and the Chicago I.W.W., between believers in 'direct’ and in 'political’ action, between 'State Socialists’ and Syndicalists.
The sects of the rebellious are like the variety of the Protestant lurches, and they are due to a similar cause. Once the churches ad cut off from the deeply-rooted central tradition of Rome, they continued to cut off from each other. Now Protestantism was an effort at a little democracy in religion, and its history is amazingly like that of all the other revolts from the old absolutisms. For once men had broken loose from the cohesion and obedience of the older life, the floundering of democracy began. It was not so easy to become self-governing as it was to bowl over a tyrant. And the long history of schisms is really the story of how men set up a substitute for authority, and had to revolt against it. To a man standing on the firm foundation of an ancient faith, the instability of self-government is its just punishment, and no doubt he smiles at the folly of men who give up security and peace for a mess of revolt.
After Protestantism, the Romantic movement and the birth of political democracy. It is hardly necessary to recall what troubled spirits the romanticists were, how terrible the disillusionments. Their histories were with few exceptions tragic: and the 'unending pursuit of the ever-fleeting object of desire’ led many of them back into the arms of the Catholic Church. One has only to read the lives of the men whose names stand out in the nineteenth century to realize that the epoch of revolt produced tortured and driven spirits. Whatever their virtues, and they are many, they never attained that inner harmony whose outward sign is a cordial human life.
No one has felt this more poignantly than the modern artist. Lost in the clamor of commercialism, many painters seem to insist that if they can't make themselves admired they will at least make themselves heard. And of course, if you live in a world of studios, drawing-rooms and cards, amidst idle people in little cliques, you have to draw attention to yourself from the outside world in some other way than by decorating or interpreting human life. The modern artist can secure attention, but he can't hold it. For the world is so complex that he can't find common experiences and common aspirations to deal with. And because he can't do this, he can't become artist to a nation. He has to be satisfied with a cult. So he specializes on some aspect of form, exaggerates some quality of line, and produces art that only a few people would miss if it disappeared. Then he denounces the philistine public.
But in his heart he is unsatisfied with his work, and so he too develops a habit of chronic rebellion: a school is no sooner founded when there is a secession. The usual manifesto is published (they all say about the same thing): authority and classicism are denounced in the name of youth and adventure. 'All I want,’ said a friend of mine who paints, 'is to bewilder and fascinate’ ...'All we need is wiggle,’ said another. 'To be alive is to rebel,’ said a third. But I venture to suggest that what the rebels are rebelling against is not a classical authority: none exists to-day that has any compelling force. They are in rebellion against something within themselves; there are conflicts in their souls for which they have found no solution; and their revolt is the endless pursuit of what their own disharmony will never let them find.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
This certitude for which Matthew Arnold cries, where has it gone?
Classicists, like Prof. Babbitt of Harvard, or Mr. Paul Elmore More, say that it has gone with the shattering of external authority in the debacle of Romanticism and the French Revolution. Their remedy for the chaos and ineptitude of modern life is a return to what they describe as eternal forms of justice and moderation. They would revive authority with its dominating critics like Boileau. Romanticism for them is a lapse from grace, full of sweet sin, and they hope to return to the Golden Age of the classics.
I don't see how this dream can succeed. Their solution is built on a wild impossibility, for in order to realize it they will have to abolish machinery and communication, newspapers and popular books. They will have to call upon some fairy to wipe out the memory of the last hundred years, and they will have to find a magician who can conjure up a church and a monarchy that men will obey. They can't do any of these things, though they can bewail the fact and display their grief by unremitting hostility to the modern world.
But though their remedy is, I believe, altogether academic, their diagnosis does locate the spiritual problem. We have lost authority. We are 'emancipated’ from an ordered world. We drift.
The loss of something outside ourselves which we can obey is a revolutionary break with our habits. Never before have we had to rely so completely upon ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heart-breaking perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface. We are homeless in a jungle of machines and untamed powers that haunt and lure the imagination. Of course, our culture is confused, our thinking spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born into the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they knew their way from birth through all eternity: we are puzzled about the day after to-morrow.
What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts didn't free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.
I happened to be in Dublin some time ago during what was undoubtedly a crisis in Irish history: Home Rule in sight, Ulster arming itself for rebellion, Dublin torn by a bitter strike. No one felt any assurance as to the outcome. Before nationalism could prevail a long controversy seemed inevitable with the Presbyterian and industrial North. And even if Ireland became a nation it seemed as if it would have to face at once a sharp class struggle.
Then Mr. Hilaire Belloc arrived from England one evening to lecture before a Catholic Society. There seemed to be no doubts in Mr. Belloc’s mind. He announced that his Church was the heir of all the arts and the guardian of all tradition. But the Catholic employers of Dublin, who were breaking up the workers' union with unparalleled bitterness, must have been somewhat puzzled by Mr. Belloc's statement. For in an issue of his paper two or three weeks before he had said with resounding conviction that the European tradition of Christendom always supported the rebellions of labor.
The same absolutism gave Mr. Belloc and the employers untroubled conviction, but the two convictions happened to be diametrically opposed. Neither side suffered from the malady of doubt, the employers being ready to defy the temporal law by locking up the men's leaders; the men ready to defy the laws of property by throwing packing-cases into the river Liffey.
Now this is the peculiar fact about an absolute faith: that while it makes a man feel sure of himself, it doesn't enable him to be sure. Mr. Belloc in his untroubled way felt certain about events that in plain fact were full of uncertainty. It was all very well to say in cocksure fashion that Christian tradition was this-and-that. Christian employers, Christian priests, Christian newspapers made it something else. But human beings seem to be made in such a way that they cling passionately to the emotion of certainty. If only they can retain the feeling that God and Nature and history are with them, they go about with every appearance of conviction and practical power. They have far less bother about their souls than the modern man lost in a fog of introspection. For the believer in an absolute system has projected upon the world that certainty and harmony which he needs. His difficulties after that are merely matters of detail. The massive structure of his faith will dwarf the puny evidence of fact. And so, freed from doubts as to the eternal principles of truth and righteousness, he can give undivided attention to ordinary events. Do not wonder then at the practical efficiency of mystics, the executive genius of priests and cardinals, and the shrewdness of those who profess an unworldly religion. If the genuine interests of man lie beyond this earth, why exhibit such marvelous competence about the things which the moths eat and the dust corrupts? That's a good question for a debater, but not for a student of men. Belief does not live by logic, but by the need it fills, and absolutism quiets the uncertainties of the soul, finds answers to unsatisfied desire, and endows men with the sense that they are part of something greater than themselves. In the worldly power of the Roman Church, of Christian Science, of the Salvation Army, or the Mormons, you come to see what a colossal, practical power there is in an untroubled faith. But in liberal thought there is chaos, for it lacks the foundations of certainty.
Now when a man is looking for something really trustworthy he is likely to think of something solid, like a rock. Gibraltar has always been an excellent symbol of the qualities a man hopes to find in his insurance companies. And those qualities, you can rest assured, are the ones with which he would like to insure his destiny. For real comfort, give a man a world that will stand still, that will be the same to-morrow as it was yesterday, so that no matter how much he is buffeted about, there will be one place he can go and not be surprised. The mother is such a refuge to a bewildered child, and Mother Church has been that to her bewildered children. We are none of us progressives when we are worried or tired; few of us are revolutionists in a personal crisis. We have to be very healthy to love variety. We have to be exuberant and conquering to rejoice in change. And that I imagine is why man has always attached such high emotional value to the One, the All Embracing, the Permanent. There are people who flatly refuse to regard Pluralism as a philosophy of life. William James recognized that and spent a large amount of time trying to show that a disorderly world full of variety and spontaneous creation might still give religious satisfaction. I doubt whether he succeeded. The only people who can stomach a pluralistic philosophy are those who in some way or another have grown strong enough to do without an absolute faith.
It has often been said that the Catholic Church is the greatest piece of constructive psychology that the world has ever seen. Certainly it would be hard to duplicate the ingenious answers it has found to human need: the cavernous mysteries of its cathedrals converging upon the enduring altar, the knowledge of an Eternal Family that survives the human one, the confessional where sin could be expressed and therefore purged, the vicarious atonement by which the consequences of human weakness were lifted off men's shoulders, the obliteration of death, the sense that wisdom was there inexhaustible and infallible. Those aren't idle dogmas, as foolish critics have imagined, but endlessly ingenious responses to the everyday wants of men and women. And then the invariable presence of the Church at every important crisis in human life— at birth, at puberty, at marriage, on the battlefield, at the death-bed,? wherever men were troubled and in need of help, there the Church was to be found. So men might forget the Church in their prosperity but in sorrow they returned to it. Of course, the Church was no aid to the inventor or to anyone who was really extending the bounds of human power. Of course, it was hostile to democracy and to every force that tended to make people self-sufficient.
In fact, the Church was not content to meet needs and compensate weakness. It tried to make weakness permanent. In other words, the Church used all its tremendous power over men to keep them wanting that which the Church could give. 'What is your age? Is it twenty, thirty, forty, or are you still older? ...Death will take from you the future, as it took from you the past, with the rapidity of lightning ...To die ...is to go ...where you will become the prey of corruption and the food of the most hideous reptiles.’ This is from the 'First Exercise on Death’ in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Take this from the Third Exercise: 'Consider—l. A few moments after your death. Your body laid on a funeral bed, wrapped in a shroud, a veil thrown over your face, beside you the crucifix, the holy water, friends, relatives, a priest kneeling by your sad remains, and reciting the holy prayers, 'De profundis clamvi ad te, Domine'; the public officer who writes in the register of the dead all the particulars of your decease.’
In the lovely little book from which I am quoting this kind of thing is recommended for daily contemplation, a capital way, it seems to me, of poisoning the human will. It was this that Nietzsche had in mind when he said that 'belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will— the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for one who commands sternly,—a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience.’
Yet a stern commander is just what this age lacks. Liberalism suffuses our lives and the outstanding fact is the decay of authority. But this doesn't mean for one minute that we are able to command ourselves. In fact, if a man dare attempt to sum up the spiritual condition of his time, he might say of ours that it has lost authority and retained the need of it. We are freer than we are strong. We have more responsibility than we have capacity. And if we wish to state what the future sets for us, we might say, I think, that we must find within ourselves the certainty which the external world has lost.
It is not fair to claim that we who attack absolutism are robbing life of its guarantees. It is far truer to say that the enlargement and ferment of the modern world have robbed absolutism of its excuse. To the business man who believes sincerely in the old sanctities of private property, the industrial situation must seem like a mine of explosives. The legalist gasps in panic. And as for these new aspirations of women, this push of the working-class towards an industrial democracy, this faculty of the young for taking an interest in life uncensored, what lamp-post is there that a man can embrace in a giddy and reeling universe? None. It was possible to talk about eternal principles of conduct in an old-world village where the son replaced the father generation after generation, where the only immigrants were babies and the only emigrants the dead. But in the new world, where fifty races meet, and a continent is exploited, ten years is an enormous change, a generation is a revolution.
Life has overflowed the little systems of eternity. Thought has become humbler because its task is greater. We can invoke no monumental creeds, because facts smile ironically upon them. And so in a changing world, men have to cast aside the old thickset forms of their thinking for suppler experimental ones. They think oftener. They think more lavishly, and they don't hang their hope of immortality on the issue of their thoughts. It is not so comfortable. It gives none of that harmony outside which men desire. The challenge is endless, to finer perceptions and sharper insights. Such thinking is more accurate than settled principles can ever be; the restless modern world has made such thinking necessary. But gone are the repose and the sublimity and the shelter of larger creeds. Our thought is homely, of the earth, and not awe-inspiring. No profound homage can go out to ideas that an honest man may have to scrap to-morrow. There is nothing of Gibraltar about to-day's hypothesis.
The most dramatic revelation of this crisis is among the newer immigrants in an American city. They come suddenly from the fixed traditions of peasant life into the distracting variety of a strange civilization. America for them is not only a foreign country where they have to find a living in ways to which they are unaccustomed; America is a place where their creeds do not work, where what at home seemed big and emphatic as the mountains is almost unnoticed. It is a commonplace to say that the tide of emigration has shifted from the Northwest to the Southeast of Europe, and that America to-day is receiving a radically different stock than it did twenty years ago. That is undoubtedly true. But the difference is not only in the immigrants. America itself is different. Those who are coming to-day have to bridge a much greater gap than did those who entered this country when it was a nation of villages.
They come to a country which shatters cynically the whole structure of their emotional life. There is a brave attempt to preserve it in ghettos. But with no great success, and the second generation is drawn unprotected into the new world. Parents and children often hardly understand each others' speech, let alone each others' desires.
In Queenstown harbor I once talked to an Irish boy who was about to embark for America. His home was in the West of Ireland, in a small village where his sister and he helped their father till a meager farm. They had saved enough for a passage to America, and they were abandoning their home. I asked the boy whether he knew anyone in America. He didn't, but his parish priest at home did. He was going to write to Father Riley every week. Would he ever return to Ireland? 'Yes,’ said this boy of eighteen, 'I'm going to die in Ireland.’ Where was he going to in America? To a place called New Haven. He was, in short, going from one epoch into another, and for guidance he had the parish priest at home and perhaps the ward boss in New Haven. His gentleness and trust in the slums of New Haven, assaulted by din and glare, hedged in by ugliness and cynical push,— if there is any adventure comparable to his, I have not heard of it. At the very moment when he needed a faith, he was cutting loose from it. If he becomes brutal, greedy, vulgar, will it be so surprising? If he fails to measure up to the requirements of citizenship in a world reconstruction, is there anything strange about it?
Well, he was an immigrant in the literal sense. All of us are immigrants spiritually. We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche. As a nation we have all the vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern man is not yet settled in his world. It is strange to him, terrifying, alluring, and incomprehensibly big. The evidence is everywhere: the amusements of the city; the jokes that pass for jokes; the blare that stands for beauty, the folksongs of Broadway, the feeble and apologetic pulpits, the cruel standards of success, raucous purity. We make love to ragtime and we die to it. We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do. Is it a wild mistake to say that the absence of central authority has disorganized our souls, that our souls are like Peer Gynt's onion, in that they lack a kernel?