Part 6
We may trace this reverent attitude of mind upward through the acts and activities of the spirit, and it makes no difference whether we regard religion as the source and origin of them all or as the summary of them all.
In Shakespeare’s plays we see a cycle of human beings, the most living that we have ever met with, and the absence of mystical or emotional religion from many of the plays is one of the wonders of nature. There is no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; we are not offended. The reason may be that the element has been employed in the act of creation. Religion has been consumed in the development of character. It is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to the characters. It is here seen as artistic perfection. The same is true of the Greek statues and of the Sistine Sibyls, and of other work left by those two periods, the only other periods in which the individual attained completion.
Observe that in all this philosophy there is no dogma anywhere, no term whose definition you have to learn, no term which makes the lying claim that it can be used twice with the same connotation. Froebel had the instinct of a poet and knew his language was figurative. It was this that freed him from the Middle Ages and gave him to the future. He took theology as lightly as he took metaphysics. He did not impose them, he evoked them. He lived and thought in the spirit.
If you turn from Froebel’s analysis of human nature to Goethe’s, there seem to be a thousand years between them. The one is scientific, the other is mediæval. The one has freed himself from the influences of the revival of learning, the other has not. The one is open, the other is closed. The one is free, the other is self-conscious. But Froebel has not yet set free the rest of the race, and of course the literature and practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas. The terms of Froebel are a snare to those whose interest in childhood came later than their interest in education and whose attention is fixed upon the terms rather than upon the child. He is easy reading to the other sort.
But more important than Froebel’s formulation of these great truths was his formulation of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his labored systems, but his practical suggestions born of experience as to how to help another person to develop. It was these methods, this attitude of the teacher towards the child, of the individual towards his fellow, that came at me in my own house unexpectedly, emanating from some unknown mind, which seemed so great as practically to include Christianity.
“Do not imagine,” he says at every moment, “that you can do anything for this creature except by getting it to move spontaneously. You have not begun till you have done this, and remember that anything else you do is just so much harm.”
He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The following passage gives in a few words the answer to the most important practical question in life: how we ought to approach another human being. The thing is said so simply, it seems almost commonplace, yet it comes from one greater than Kant.
“Between educator and pupil, between request and obedience, there should invisibly rule a third something to which educator and pupil are equally subject. This third something is the _right_, the _best_, necessarily conditioned and expressed without arbitrariness in the circumstances. The calm recognition, the clear knowledge, and the serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of this third something, is the particular feature that should be constantly and clearly manifest in the bearing and the conduct of the educator and teacher, and often firmly and sternly emphasized by him.”
Beneath this statement there lies a law of reaction. The human organism responds in kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and he sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to convince him that you are right, concede that from his point of view he is right, then move the point and he follows. If you keep your temper in teaching a child, you teach him to keep his temper, and this is more important than his lesson.
The difficulty we find is to resist the reaction in ourselves to some one else’s initiative. The affair is outside the province of reason, and results from a transfer of force by means which we do not understand. The command to “turn the other cheek” is a picturesque figure for the attitude which will enable you to prevail the quickest and by the highest means, and which Froebel enables us to see in its scientific aspect.
But it is unnecessary to illustrate further what any one who comes in contact with a kindergarten will, through all the mists of dogma and ignorance which overspread the place, discover for himself. We have a science founded upon human nature, applied to education. Mr. Hughes in his closing paragraph uses the language of theology, but he makes no overstatement:--
“When Froebel’s ethical teaching has wrought its perfect work in the homes, the schools, and the churches, then his complete ideal, which is the gospel ideal in practice, will be the greatest controlling and uplifting force in the world.”
One word more about the relation between Froebel’s thought and current science.
The view of man as an active animal, a struggler, alive and happy only in activity, falls in naturally with what we know of the animal kingdom. The philosophers are at war over science and religion, over the origin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By an external consideration of the animal hierarchy they have come to certain conclusions which they strive to apply to the highest animal, man. There is great boggling over him; because these non-self-regarding instincts, which are not very apparent from the outside, seem to conflict with certain generalizations relative to the conservation of species. The scientists look into a drop of water and see animals eating each other up. What they have not seen is that all this ferocity goes forward, subject to customs as rigid as a military code, and that it is this code which conserves the species. The “struggle for existence” as it is commonly conceived would exterminate in short order any species that indulged in it.
Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other end of the scale and studying life from the inside, has established certain facts, certain laws, which have as great a weight, and deserve as much to be carried downward in the scale, as the generalizations of the naturalists (very likely imperfect) have to be carried upward.
The animal man is unselfish. It is impossible to make his organism vibrate as a unity except by some emotion which can be shown to be non-self-regarding. At what point in the scale of nature does this quality begin to manifest itself? Is the dog happy when he is selfish; do the laws of psychology outlined by Froebel apply, and to what extent do they apply, to the horse or the monkey? These things must be patiently studied, and the corrections must be made. In the mean time, in dealing with man himself, we are obliged to rely upon the latest scientific report of him, however imperfect, and until Froebel’s laws are destroyed, we need not attempt to adjust our ideas of man to the dogmas developed by the study of the lower animals.
DEMOCRACY
IV
DEMOCRACY
The system of choosing public officials by popular vote is properly enough called Democracy. The terms of tenure and nomenclature, etc., are matters of detail. If we are to seek any test as to what constitutes a Democracy, we may as well take as a test the formal setting up at a particular time of some scheme of government by the popular will. England has been a democracy since the Act of Settlement, and if it be said that universal suffrage was not then known, the answer is that it is not known now, and never can be known. The exclusions of women and non-naturalized residents or even of criminals and lunatics are matters of convenience. It is a question of degree.
Again, it is impossible that all the officials should be elected, and the assignment to the elected officials of the power to appoint the others is a matter of convenience. The very simple expedients adopted by the framers of the United States Constitution were the result of English experience and French theory. The intellect of France had, during the eighteenth century, put into portable form the ideas that had been at work in England’s institutions. The theoretical part of it, the division of government into three departments, had been worked out from European experience going back to Greek times. The written constitution was a mere expansion of the Bill of Rights. Our Framers were men who had had personal experience in governing under the English system in force in the colonies, where the power of practical self-government had been developed by isolation. They received from the French a scientific view of that system. They had learned by experience that a confederacy was not a government, and they proceeded to bind the country together by the grant of that power which defines government, the power to tax. The extension to a large territory of a system which was in practical operation in all its parts, was in one sense a miracle of intelligence, in another sense it was the only conceivable solution of the problem of unity. Philosophers speak of Democracy as if it were the outcome of choice. It has been the outcome of events. No other system would have endured, and every formula of government that did not embody an old usage would have been transformed in ten years by the popular will into something that did.
The reason the Constitution of the United States is the most remarkable document in existence is that it contained so little of novelty. The election of some officers and the appointment of the rest, that was what the people were used to. That is democracy. There is of course no such thing as a pure democracy, or a pure monarchy. Every government is in practice the outcome of forces of which a very small fraction are expressed in its constitution and laws.
A constitution is a profession of faith, a summary written on a bulletin board, and so far good. The United States had this advantage in starting upon her career, that the bulletin was a very accurate summary of existing customs, and was in itself an inspiring proof of the virtue of the people. We are driven into admiring the Colonists as among the most enlightened of their kind. It is true that the revolution was conducted, and the Constitution adopted by the activity of a small minority. But this is true of all revolutions. The point is that the leaders represented sense and virtue. The people followed.
The moment the scheme was launched it became the sport of the elements. In the North a trading bourgeoisie grew up under it. In the South a slave-holding oligarchy, a society so fantastically out of touch with the modern world that it seems like something left over from the times before Christ, found no difficulty in making use of the forms of Democracy. During the half century that followed, these two societies became so hostile to each other that conflict was inevitable, and there ensued a death-grapple in four years of war, a war to extinction. At the end of the war no trace of the oligarchy remained upon the face of the earth. And yet these forms of government survived and began to operate immediately, under new auspices of course, deflected by new passions, showing new shapes of distortion, yet ideally the same. The only common element between the north and the south was the reverence for these forms of government.
Meanwhile civilization had been creeping westward in a margin of frontier life, conducted under these forms. Behind this moved a belt of farming and village life, at war with the backwoods ideals, but using the same forms of government. Then arose the railroad era and tore millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything, ruled everybody--still under these forms.
Let us examine them.
The problem of government is to protect the individuals in a community against each other, and to protect them all against the rest of the world. The power to interfere and the power to represent must be lodged somewhere, and the question is how to arrange it so that this power shall not be turned against the people. Democracy solves it by election. Let the people choose their rulers. Instantly every man is turned into a custodian, a part of him is dedicated to the public. He is prevented by fundamental theory of law from being absolutely selfish. Corrupt him how you will, deflect him, play upon him, degrade, deceive him, you cannot shut him off from this influence. The framework of government makes continuous appeal to the highest within him. It draws him as the moon draws the sea. This appeal is one to which the organic nature of man responds, as we have seen. For man is an unselfish animal. The law of his nature is expressed in the framework of government. The arrangement shows a wisdom so profound that all historical philosophy grows cheap before it.
If you jump from the study of psychology straight into the theory of democracy, you see why it was that the allegiance to the ideas of the United States Constitution endured through slavery, through the carpetbag era, through the Tweed ring. It was not the letter, but the spirit which was inextinguishable.
It has taken a century of pamphlets to break down the distinctions between men based upon orders of nobility, property, creed, etc. Fifteen minutes of psychology would have levelled men and set them upon the same footing as that upon which they walk into a hospital.
The creature man is by this system dealt with so simply as he had not been dealt with since the birth of Christ. It must be conceded that the thing could not even have been tried, except with a people familiar with the distinctions between legislative, executive, and judicial power, criminal and civil law, etc. Altruistic impulse would not have sufficed to execute itself. But the divisions and forms of thought expressive of that altruism already existed, and were in operation, as we have seen.
It is thought that the peculiar merit of Democracy lies in this: that it gives to every man a chance to pursue his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow men. This is by the law of his being his only chance for happiness. You cannot find a man who does not know this. If you examine the consciousness of any typical minion of success, you will find that his source of inward content lies in a belief that his success has benefited somebody--his kindred, his townsfolk--mankind.
The concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger and not the safety of Democracy; for Democracy contemplates that every man shall think first of the State and next of himself. This is its only justification. In so far as it is operated by men who are thinking first of their own interests and then of the State, its operation is distorted.
Democracy assumes perfection in human nature. In so far as an official or a voter is corrupt, you will have bad government. Or to put the same thing in another way, all corruption is shown up as a loss of the power of self-government. The framework of government lies there exposed in all its parts like a vast and complex dial, recording with the nicety of a scientific instrument every departure from virtue of the human beings whose lives, whose standards, whose very thoughts are registered against it. When selfishness reaches a certain point, the machine stops. Government by force comes in. We have had railroad riots and iron foundry riots. In Denver not many months ago thirty thousand people, or about one-fifth of the population, engaged in a carnival of destruction and raided a picnic given by the Cattle Association. These ebullitions, which look like mania, are nothing but an acute form of blind selfishness, due to the education of a period in which everything has been settled by an appeal to the self-interest of the individual. The Bryanism, with which we must all sympathize, is nothing but a revolt on the part of the poorer classes against the exploitation of the country by the capitalist, due to pension laws, tariffs, trusts, etc. “Something must now be done for me,” says the laboring man, and the mine owner says “Silver.” The appeal is by a little manipulation worked up into a craze, with the result that property is unsafe. The craze is a craze of mistaken selfishness. One of the weapons with which the richer classes fought it was corruption. They fed the element which was devouring them. There is talk of bayonets, and it is true that either bayonets or public spirit must in such cases be the issue. We cannot have property at the mercy of a mob, and if any single state like Colorado were separated from the rest, and the spirit of unreason should possess it utterly, government by force would ensue. Elections would be superseded, and property would improvise some mode of practical government which every intelligent man would back. The danger of an episode of this sort is that it interrupts the course of things. It is revolution. It is the breakdown of democracy, and tends to perpetuate the conditions of incompetence out of which the crisis arises. Fortunately the country is so large that one State holds up the next. No community would tolerate a state of siege for more than six months, and the State would return to educational methods, weaker but alive.
A military imposition of order is then the extreme case. But the Boss system is the halfway house in the breakdown of free government. In the Boss system we have seen a lack of virtue in the people show itself in the shape of a government, in fact autocratic, but in form republican. Here again the loss in the power of self-government is apparent.
But there is no departure from civic virtue which can get by unnoticed. Take the case of a voter who submits to having his street kept dirty because he fears that a protest would make him disagreeably conspicuous. Here also the loss of power of self-government is traceably recorded. So much selfishness--so much filth.
If we now recur for a moment to the state of things described in the essay on politics, we see that our government in all its branches has reflected the occupation and spiritual state of the people very perfectly. But outside of the recurrent and regular political activity of the country, there has grown up during the past few years a sort of guerilla warfare of reform. This represents the conservative morality of the community, the instinct of right government which resents the treason to our institutions seen in their operation for private gain. The reformers’ methods of work are necessarily democratic, and it is here that the most delicate tests of self-seeking are to be found. These reformers desire to increase the unselfishness in the world, yet the moment they attempt a practical reform they are told that any appeal to an unselfish motive in politics means sure failure. They accordingly make every variety of endeavor to use the selfishness of some one as a lever to increase the unselfishness of somebody else. The thing is worked out in daylight time after time, year after year, and the results are recorded in millegrams. No obscurity is possible because every man stands on the same footing. Our minds are not obscured by thinking that A must be sincere because he is a bishop, or need not be sincere because he is a lord.
There is no landlord class with prejudices, no socialist class with theories. There are no interests except money interests, and against money the fight is made. If a man is a traitor it is because he has been bought. The results, stated in terms of ethical theory, are simply startling.
A reform movement employs a paid secretary. In so far as he gets the place because of his reform principles he represents an appeal to selfishness. This is instantly reflected in his associates, it colors the movement. He himself is attracted partly by the pay. By an operation as impossible to avoid as the law of gravity he enlists others who are also partially self-seeking.
A Good Government Club is formed by X, and every member is called upon for dues and work. It thrives. Another is founded by Y and supported by him because of his belief that reform cannot support itself but must be subsidized. Inside of three weeks the existence of X’s Club is threatened, because its members hear that Y’s Club is charitably supported and they themselves wish relief. They are turned from workers into strikers by the mere report that there is money somewhere. Spend $100 on the Club, and Tammany will be able to buy it when the need arises. So frightfully accurate is the record of an appeal to self-interest made in the course of reform, that no one who watches such an attempt can ever thereafter hope to do evil that good may come.
The system lays bare the operation of forces hitherto merely suspected. Democracy makes the bold cut across every man and divides him into a public man and a private man. It is a man-ometer. You could by means of it stand up in line every man in New York, grading them according to the ratio of principle and self-interest in each.
In England a man takes office as the pay for services to the government. In America he does the same. It is part of their system, part of our corruption. This may seem a small point, but it will work out large. An absolute standard is imposed. That our most pronounced reformers are far from understanding their duties gives proof of the degradation of the times, but it exalts the plan of government. These men will lead a reform for four weeks, as a great favor, a great sacrifice, under protest, apologizing to business. They say public duties come first only in war time. They give, out of conscience and with the left hand, what remains after a feast for themselves. And these are the saints. Tell one of them that he has not set an honorable standard of living for his contemporaries unless, having his wants supplied, he makes public activity his first aim in life, and he will reply he wishes he could do so. He hopes later to devote himself to such things. He will give you a subscription. This man lives in a Democracy but he denies its claims. He too is recorded.