Part 4

There are singular eddies in the main current both ways. For instance, the exigencies and sufferings of war produce a reaction toward narrower, orthodox forms of religion and a harsher spirit of nationalism; while in fields of action apart from the struggle, freedom and even license may increase, as in sex-relations. Nevertheless these cross-currents, while they may obscure, do not alter the main tendencies, which move swiftly and increasingly toward the essential conflict.

Even before our actual entrance into the War, its profound influence upon both our thinking and our conduct and institutions was evident. Now that we are in the conflict that influence is multiplied. We are aroused to new seriousness of thought. The frivolity and selfish pleasure-seeking that have marked our life for recent decades are decreasing. We may reasonably hope that the literature of superficial cleverness and smart cynicism, which has been in vogue for the last period, will have had its day, that the perpetrators of such literature will be, measurably speaking, without audience at the conclusion of the War.

The philosophy of complacency, at least, will be at an end, and the world will face with new earnestness the problem of life. This generation will be tired, perhaps exhausted, by the titanic struggle; but youth comes on, fresh and eager, with exhaustless vital energy, and the generations to come will take the heritage and work out the new philosophy. As Nature quickly and quietly covers the worst scars we make in her breast, so Man has a power of recovery, beyond all that we could dream. It is to that we must look, across the time of demoniac destruction.

We may even dare to hope that the next half-century will see a great development of noble literature in our own land. War for liberty, justice and humanity always tends to create such a productive period in literature and the other fine arts. The struggle with Persia was behind the Periclean age in Athens. It was the conflict of England with the overshadowing might of Spain that so vitalized the Elizabethan period. The Revolution was behind the one important school of literature our own country has produced hitherto.

Since this War is waged on a scale far more colossal than any other in human history, and since liberty and democracy are at stake, not only in one land, but throughout the world and for the entire future of humanity, it is reasonable to expect that the stimulation to the creation of art and literature will be far greater than that following any previous struggle. Where the sacrifice for high aims has been greatest, the inspiration should be greatest, as in France. The literature currently produced, as in the books of Loti, Maeterlinck and Rolland, is scrappy and disappointing, it is true; but that is to be expected when the whole nation is strained to its last energy and gasping for breath, under the titanic struggle, and is no test of what will be. In spite of the destruction of so large a fraction of her manhood, France will surely rise from the ashes of this world conflagration regenerated and reinspired. The pessimism of her late decades will be gone. The literature and other art she will produce will be instinct with new earnestness and exalted vision, and she may excel even her own great past.

We too are awakening. Since the War began, all over the United States, men and women have been thinking more earnestly and have been more willing to listen to the expression of serious thought than ever before for the last quarter century. Now that the hour of sacrifice has struck, this earnestness must greatly deepen. Perhaps we, too, may have our golden age of art.

The same inspiration carries naturally into the religious life. It is true, as we have seen, that there is a cross-current of reversion to narrower orthodoxy, caused by the War. The Gods of War are all national and tribal divinities. While they rule, the face of the God of Humanity is veiled. The Kaiser's possessive attitude toward the Divine is but the extreme case of what War does to the religious life. Even among ourselves the tendency shows in such phenomena as the current popular evangelism--an eloquent, if artfully calculated and vulgarized preaching of the purely personal virtues, with an ignorance that there is a social problem in modern civilization, profound as that displayed by a mediaeval churchman. The evangelist's list of inmates, whom he relegates to the kingdom of the lost, makes the place singularly attractive to the lover of good intellectual society.

Nevertheless, the reversion to narrower creeds but indicates the newly awakened hunger of the religious life. Men who sacrifice live with graver earnestness than those who are carelessly prosperous. Cynicism and pessimism are children of idleness and frivolity, never of heroic sacrifice and nobly accepted pain. These latter foster faith in life and its infinite and eternal meaning. Thus, with all the tragic submerging of our spiritual heritage the War involves, we may hope that it will cause a revival, not of emotional hysteria, but of deepened faith in the spirit, in the supreme worth of life, until at last we may see the dawn of the religion of humanity.

XI

THE WAR AND EDUCATION

Equally far-reaching are the changes the War must produce in our education. Temporarily, our higher institutions will be crippled by the drawing off of the youth of the land for war. This is one of the unfortunate sacrifices such a struggle involves. We must see to it that it is not carried too far. One still hears old men in the South pathetically say, "I missed my education because of the Civil War." Let us strive to keep open our educational institutions and continue all our cultural activities, in spite of the drain and strain of the War. For never was intellectual guidance and leadership more needed than in the present crisis.

The paramount effect of the War on education is, however, in the multiplied demand for efficiency. This is the cry all across the country to-day, and, in the main, it is just. Our education has been too academic, too much molded by tradition. It must be more closely related to life and to the changed conditions of industry and commerce. Each boy and girl, youth and maiden, must leave the school able to take hold somewhere and make a significant contribution to the society of which he or she is an integral part. Vocational training must be greatly increased. The problems of the school must be increasingly practical problems, and thought and judgment must be trained to the solution of those problems. This is all a part of that socialization of democracy which must be achieved if democracy is to survive in the new world following the War.

There is, nevertheless, an element of emotional hysteria in the demand for efficiency and only efficiency. Efficiency is too narrow a standard by which to estimate anything concerning human conduct and character. In the effort to meet and conquer Germany, let us beware of the mistake of Germany. One of the world tragedies of this epoch is the way in which Germany has sacrificed her spiritual heritage, first for economic, then for purely military efficiency. When we recall that spiritual heritage, as previously described, when we think of Schiller, Herder and Goethe, Froebel, Herbart and Richter, Tauler, Luther and Schleiermacher, Kant, Fichte and Schopenhauer, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, we stand aghast at the way in which she has plunged it all into the abyss,--for what? Shall it profit a people, more than a man, if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul?

In such a time, then, all of us who believe in the spirit must hold high the torch of humanistic culture. Education is for life and not merely for efficiency. Of what worth is life, if one is only a cog-wheel in the economic machine? It is to save the spiritual heritage of humanity that we are fighting, and it is that heritage that education must bring to every child and youth, if it fulfills its supreme trust. Education for the purposes of autocratic imperialism seeks to make a people a perfect economically productive and militarily aggressive machine. Education for democracy means the development of each individual to the most intelligent, self-directed and governed, unselfish and devoted, sane, balanced and effective humanity.

XII

SOCIALISM AND THE WAR

One of the surprises of the War was the complete breakdown of international socialism. Not only socialists, but those of us who had been thoughtfully watching the movement from without, had come to believe that the measure of consciousness of international brotherhood it had developed in the artisan groups of many lands, would be a powerful lever against war. We were wrong: the superficial international sympathy evaporated like mist under the rays of a revived nationalism. The socialists fell in line, almost as completely as any other group, with the purely nationalist aims in each land.

This must have gratified certain despots; for one cause of the War, not the cause, was undoubtedly the preference on the part of various autocrats, to face an external war rather than the rising tide of democracy within the nation. Temporarily, they have been successful, but surely only for a brief time. The victory of democracy will vastly accelerate the growth of the spirit of brotherhood throughout the world.

The terrible waste of the War must of itself produce a reaction of the people on kings and castes in all lands. The suffering that will follow the War, in the period of economic readjustment, will accentuate this. Surely the _people_, in England, France, America, Italy, Russia, and among the neutral nations, will strive that no such war may come again. Even in Germany, when the people find out what they have paid and why, inevitably they must struggle so to reform their institutions that no ruler or class may again plunge them into such disaster for the selfish benefit or ambitions of that ruler or class. How our hearts have warmed to Liebknecht!

The realignment of nations must work to the same end. War, like politics, makes strange bed-fellows. Germany and Austria, for centuries rivals, and, at times, enemies, we behold united so completely that it is difficult to imagine them disentangled after the War.

France and England, long regarding each other as natural enemies, are fused heart and soul. Strangest of all, we have seen England struggling to win for Russia that prize of Constantinople, which for generations it has been a main object of British diplomacy to keep from Russian grasp. Most impressive of all, has been the new consciousness of unity and common cause among the nations of the earth, and the groups within all nations, standing for democracy.

Thus the tide, checked for a time, will inevitably break forth with renewed force. It is probable that the next fifty years will be a period of great change--even of revolutions, peaceful or otherwise, throughout the earth.

To understand the effect on the whole socialist movement, one must distinguish clearly the two contrasting types of socialism. It is the curse of the orthodox, or Marxian, type of socialism, that it was "made in Germany." Its economic state is modeled directly on the Prussian bureaucratic and paternalistic state. Its dream realized, would mean Prussian efficiency carried to the _nth_ power, in a society of as merciless slavery as that prevailing among the ants and the bees. It is doubtless this characteristic that has made so many bureaucratic or orthodox socialists instinctively Pro-German in sentiment and sympathy during the War.

The contrasting type of socialism is that which is really the full development of democracy, its movement from a narrow individualism to ever wider voluntary co-operation. It moves, not toward government ownership, but toward ownership by the people, of natural monopolies. It means, not the turning over to a bureaucratic government, of plants and instruments of production, but the progressive cooperative ownership of them by the workers themselves. It will end, not in the overthrow of the capitalist regime, but in all workers becoming co-operative capitalists, and all capitalists, productive workers, since no idle rich--or poor, will be tolerated. Such socialism, if it be so called, will depend upon the highest individual initiative, the most voluntary co-operation and will include the individualism which is the cherished boon of democracy. It is significant that those who represent this type of socialism and who think for themselves, are breaking away from the orthodox party, under the courageous leadership and example of John Spargo, in increasing numbers, since our entrance into the War. They are as instinctively American and democratic in sympathy, as those of the opposite type are Pro-German.

Even in the most democratic countries, however, the War has caused a vast increase of the undesirable type of socialism: that is one of its temporary penalties. To carry on such a war successfully, it is necessary to multiply the authority of the central government. That has been the experience of England, now being repeated here. Men, who were _citizens_ of a democracy, become, as soldiers, and in part as workers, _subjects_ of the government in war. To some extent we are forced to imitate the tendencies we deplore and seek to overthrow in Germany, to be able to meet and defeat Germany.

Even so, the difference is profound. The subordination to the government is, for the people as a whole, voluntary, achieved through laws passed by chosen representatives of the people, and not by the arbitrary will of a kaiser and ruling caste. Thus the freedom, voluntarily relinquished for a time, can be quickly regained when the crisis is past. Subjects will become citizens again, when soldiers return to civil life.

Nevertheless, there will be no return to the old, selfishly individualistic regime. The lesson of organized action will have been learned, and a vast increase of voluntary co-operation, that is, of the socialism that is true democracy may be anticipated as a beneficent result of the War. This will be one of the great compensations for the waste of our heritage, spiritual and material, through the War. _The voluntary socialization of previously individualistic democracy will be the next great forward movement of the human spirit_.

XIII

THE WAR AND FEMINISM

Of all consequences of the War, perhaps none is more significant than its effect upon the position of women. Militarism and feminism are counter currents in the tide of history. All recrudescence of brute force carries the subjugation of women. In the degree to which professional militarism prevails in any society, women are forced into hard industrial activities, despised because fulfilled by women. On the other hand, a group of carefully protected women is held apart as a fine adornment of life. Both ways militarism accentuates the property idea in reference to women: the one type, useful, the other, adorning, property. The one shows in marriage by purchase, the other in the dowry system. It is hard to say which is more dishonoring to women. It would, perhaps, seem preferable and less offensive to be bought as useful, rather than accepted with a money payment, as an adorning but expensive possession, where, as with the automobile, "it is the upkeep that counts." Surely, however, either attitude is degrading enough.

The accentuation, in the present War, of the notion of women as property, is evident in more brutal form in the horrors of rape, in the deliberate and organized use of women as breeders, with the same efficiency with which Germany breeds her swine.

Nevertheless, here, too, strong counter currents are at work. As this is a war of nations, not of armies, it is the whole people that, in each instance, has had to be mobilized and organized. In all the democracies women have voluntarily risen to this need, just as citizens have voluntarily become soldiers. Thus women, by the legion, are working in munition factories, on the farms, in productive plants of every kind, in public service and commerce organizations. The noble way in which women have accepted the double burden has created a wave of reverent admiration throughout the world. Thus where professional militarism tends to despise the industrial activities into which it forces women, war for defense and justice causes reverence for the same socially necessary activities and for the women who so courageously undertake them for the sake of all.

Moreover, the increased freedom of action for women will outlast its temporary cause. Once so admitted to new fields of industrial, business and professional activity, women can never be generally excluded from them again. Thus when the soldiers become citizens, many of the women will remain producers, working beside men under new conditions of equality.

The result, with the general stimulation of radical thinking that the War involves, will be a profound acceleration of the feminist movement throughout, at least, the democracies of the world. Already it is being recognized that all valid principles of democracy apply to women equally with men. Regenerated, if chaotic, Russia takes for granted the farthest reaches of feminism. The regime in England, that bitterly opposed suffrage for women, is now voluntarily granting it before the close of the War.

Thus the victory of the allied nations will mean the fruition of much of the feminism that is a phase of humanism. It will mean freeing women from outgrown custom and tradition, from unjust limitations in industrial, social and political life. It will mean men and women working together, on a plane of moral equality, with free initiative and voluntary co-operation, for the fruition of democracy. Just as that fruition will see the end of idle rich and poor, so there will be no more women slaves or parasites, none regarded or possessed as property, but only free human beings, each self-directed and self-controlled, and responsible for his or her own personality and conduct.

XIV

THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY

The nineteenth century was the period of rapid growth in adhesion to those ideals of democracy for which the War is being fought. It is not so well recognized that during the same hundred years democracy was so transformed as to be to-day a new thing under the sun.

Up to the time of the French and American revolutions democracy rested largely upon certain abstract ideas of human nature. Rousseau could argue that in primitive times men sat down together to form a state, each giving up a part of his natural right to a central authority, and thus justifying it. We now know that nothing of the kind ever happened, that society had undergone a long process of development before men began to think about it at all. We continue to repeat the splendid at all. I refer, of course, to the women of antiquity. Where respectable, these were the head of the household slaves, scarcely removed from the condition of the latter. The few women who did achieve freedom of thought and action, and became the companions of cultivated men--the Aspasias of antiquity--bought their freedom at a sad price.

So Rome is called a republic, and it is true that, during the first half of her long history, freedom gradually broadened down from the patrician class to the plebeian multitude. When Rome reached out, however, to the mastery of the most impressive empire the world has seen, she never dreamed of extending that freedom to the conquered populations. If she did grant Roman citizenship to an occasional community, to enjoy the rights and exercise the privileges of that citizenship, it was necessary to journey to Rome. It was the city and the world: the city ruling the world as subject.

The same principle holds with the republics developing at the close of the middle age, in Italy, in the towns of the Hanseatic League and elsewhere. Always the freedom achieved was for a city, a group or a class, never for all the people. Our dream, on the contrary, is to take all the men and women in the land, ultimately in the world, and help them, through the free and cooperative activity of each with all the rest, on toward life, liberty, happiness, intelligence--all the ends of life that are worth while. If we demand life for ourselves, we ask it only in harmony with the best life for all. We want no special privilege, no benefit apart, bought at the price of the best welfare of humanity. "We," unfortunately, does not yet mean all of us, but it does signify an increasing multitude, rallying to this that is the standard of to-morrow.

A third transformation, at least equally important with these, is in the invention, for it is no less, of representative government. Political thinkers, such as John Fiske, have tried to make us understand what this invention means: we do not yet realize it. The development of representative government is the cause, first of all, of the tremendous expansion of the area over which we apply democracy. Plato, in the _Laws_, limits the size of the ideal state--the one realizable in this world--to 5040 citizens. Why? Well, the exact number has a certain mystical significance, but the main reason is, Plato could not imagine a much larger body of citizens than 5000 meeting together in public assembly and fulfilling the functions of citizenship.

We have extended democracy over a hundred millions of population, dwelling on the larger part of a continent; and if one travels North, South, East, West, to-day, one is impressed that, in spite of unassimilated elements, everywhere men and women are proud, first of all, of being American citizens, and only in subordinate ways devoted to the section or community to which they belong. This has been made possible by the invention and development of representative government.

That is not all: it is representative government that takes the sting out of all the older criticisms of democracy. Plato devotes one of the saddest portions of his _Republic_ to showing how in a brief time, democracy must inevitably fall and be replaced by tyranny. With the democracy Plato knew this was true. It was impossible for Athens to protect and make permanent her constitution. She might pass a law declaring the penalty of death on any one proposing a change in the constitution. It did no good. Let some demagogue arise, sure of the suffrage of a majority of the citizens: he could call them into public assembly, cause a repeal of the law, and make any change in the constitution he desired. There was no way to prevent it.

It is the invention and development of representative government that has changed all that. We chafe under the slow-moving character of our democracy--over the time it takes to get laws enacted and the longer time to get them executed. We may well be patient: this slow-moving character of democracy is the other side of its greatest safe-guard. It is because we cannot immediately express in action the popular will and opinion, but must think two, three, many times, working through chosen and responsible representatives of the people, that our democracy is not subject to the perils and criticisms of those of antiquity.

The voice of the people in the day and hour, under the impulse of sudden caprice or passion, is anything but the voice of God: it is much more apt to be the voice of all the powers of darkness. It is common thought, sifted through uncommon thought, that approaches as near the voice of God as we can hope to get in this world. It is not the surface whim of public opinion, it is its _greatest common denominator_ that approximates the truth.