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.