Chapter 11
We do, now and then, confess that legislation is as a whole foolish, frivolous and opportunist; that administration is wasteful, incompetent and frequently venal; that the governmental personnel, legislative, administrative and executive, is of a low order in point of character, intelligence and culture--and tending lower each day. We admit this, for the evidence is so conspicuous that to deny it would be hypocrisy, but something holds us back from recognizing the nexus between effect and cause. Unrestricted immigration, universal suffrage, rotation in office, the subjection of many offices and measures to popular vote, the parliamentary system, government by political parties--all these customs and habits into which we have fallen have arrived at failure which presages disaster. They have failed because the character of the people that functioned through these various engines had failed, diluted by the low mentality and character-content of millions of immigrants and their offspring, degraded by the false values and vicious standards imposed by industrial civilization, foot-loose from all binding and control of a vital and potent religious impulse or religious organism.
It is the old, vicious circle; spiritual energy declines or is diverted into wrong channels; thereupon the physical forms, social, industrial, political, slip a degree or two lower out of sympathy with the failing energy, and these in their turn exert a degrading influence on the waning spiritual force, which declines still further only to be pulled lower still by the material agencies which continue their progressive declension. Theories, no matter how high-minded and altruistic, cannot stand before a condition such as this, for self-protection decrees otherwise even if the higher motive of doing right things and getting right things just because they _are_ right, does not come into effective operation. The evil results of the institutions I have catalogued above are not to be denied, and the institutions themselves must be reformed or altogether abandoned, in the face of the loud-mouthed exhortations of those who now make them their means of livelihood, and even at the expense of the honest upholders of theories and doctrines that do credit to their humanitarianism but have been weighed and found wanting.
I am anxious not to put this plan for the reform, in root and branch, of our political institutions, on the low level of mere caution and self-defense. The motive power of this is fear, and fear is only second to hate in its present position as a controlling force in society. We should have good government not because it is economical and ensures what are known as "good business conditions," and promises a peaceful continuance of society, but because it is as worthy an object of creative endeavour as noble art or a great literature or a just and merciful economic system, or a life that is full of joy and beauty and wholesome labour. The political organism is in a sense the microcosm of life itself, and it should be society lifted up to a level of dignity, majesty and nobility. The doctrine that in a democracy the government must exactly express the numerical preponderance in the social synthesis, and that, if this happens to be ignorant, mannerless and corrupt, then the government must be after the same fashion, is a low and a cowardly doctrine. Government should be better than the majority; better than the minority if this has advantage over the other. It should be of the best that man can compass, resting above him as in some sort an ideal; the visible expression of his better self, and the better self of the society of which he is a part. If a political system, any political system, produces any other result; if it has issue in a representation of the lowest and basest in society, or even of the general average, then it is a bad system and it must be redeemed or it will bring an end that is couched in terms of catastrophe.
Reform is difficult, perhaps even impossible of attainment under the existing system where universal, unlimited suffrage and the party system are firmly intrenched as opponents of vital reform, and where representation and legislation take their indelible colour from these unfortunate institutions. It must freely be admitted that there is no chance of eliminating or recasting either one or the other by the recognized methods of platform support and mass action through the ballot. It comes in the end to a change of viewpoint and of heart on the part of the individual. No party, no political leader would for a moment endorse any one of the principles or methods I have suggested, for this would be a suicidal act. The newspaper, irresponsible, anonymous, directed by its advertizing interests or by those more sinister still, yet for all that the factor that controls the opinions of those who hold the balance of power in the community as it is now constituted, would reject them with derision, while in themselves they are radically opposed to the personal interests of the majority. The only hope of lifting government to the level of dignity and capacity it should hold, lies in the individual. It is necessary that we should see things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, and think through to the end. We do not do this. We admit, in a dull sort of way, that matters are not as they should be, that legislation is generally silly and oppressive, that taxation is excessive, that administration is wasteful and reckless and incompetent, for we know these things by experience. We accept them, however, with our national good-nature and easy tolerance, assuming that they are inseparable from democratic government--as indeed they are, but not for a moment does any large number think of questioning the principle, or even the system, that must take the responsibility. When disgust and indifference reach a certain point we stop voting, that is all. At the last presidential election less than one half the qualified voters took the trouble to cast their ballots, while in Boston (which is no exception) it generally happens that at a municipal elections the ballots cast are less than one-third the total electorate. I wonder how many there are here today who have ever been to a ward meeting, or have sat through a legislative session of a city government, as of Boston for example, or have listened to the debates in a state house of representatives, or analyzed the annual grist of legislative bills, or have sat for an hour or two in the Senate or House at Washington. Such an experience is, I assure you, illuminating, for it shows exactly why popular government is what it is, while it forms an admirable basis for a constructive revision of judgment as to the soundness of accepted principles and the validity of accepted methods.
Our political attitude today is based on an inherited and automatic acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae. We neither see things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition through to the end: we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan "slogans" and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous. Let us see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be. Is there any one who would confess that character and intelligence are now a helpless minority in this nation? Such an admission would be almost constructive treason. The instinct of the majority is right, but it is defective in will and it is subservient to base leadership, while its power for good is negatived by the persistence of a mass of formulae that, under radically changed conditions, have ceased to be beneficient, or even true, and have become a clog and a stumbling block.
I may not have indicated better ideals or sounder methods of operation, but the true ideals exist and it is not beyond our ability to discover a better working system. Partisanship cannot reveal either one or the other, nor are they the fruit of organization or the attribute of political leadership. They belong to the common citizen, to you, to the individual, and if once superstition is cast out and we fall back on right reason and the eternal principles of the Christian ethic and the Christian ideal, we shall not find them difficult of attainment; and once attained they can be put in practice, for the ill thing exists only on sufferance, the right thing establishes itself by force of its very quality of right.
VI
THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART
When, as on occasion happens, some hostile criticism is leveled against the civilization of modernism, or against some one of its many details, the reply is ready, and the faultfinder is told that the defect, if it exists, will in the end be obviated by the processes of popular education. Pressed for more explicit details as to just what may be the nature of this omnipotent and sovereign "education," the many champions give various answer, depending more or less on the point of view and the peculiar predilections of each, but the general principles are the same. Education, they say, consist of two things; the formal practice and training of the schools, and the experience that comes through the use of certain public rights and privileges, such as the ballot, the holding of office, service on juries, and through various experiences of the practice of life, as the reading of newspapers (and perhaps books), the activities of work, business and the professions, and personal association with other men in social, craft, and professional clubs and other organizations.
With the second category of education through experience we need not deal at this time; it is a question by itself and of no mean quality; the matter I would consider is the more formal and narrow one of scholastic training in so far as it bears on the Great Peace that, though perhaps after many days, must follow the Great War and the little peace.
Answering along this line, the protagonists of salvation through education pretty well agree that the thing itself means the widest possible extension of our public school system, with free state universities and technical schools, and the extension of the educational period, with laws so rigid, and enforcement so pervasive and impartial, that no child between the ages of six and sixteen can possibly escape. This free, compulsory and universal education is assumed to be scrupulously secular and hedged about with every safeguard against the insidious encroachments of religion; it will aim to give a little training in most of the sciences, and much in the practical necessities of business life, as for example, stenography, book-keeping, advertising and business science; it will cover a broad field of manual training leading to "graduate courses" in special technical schools; the "laboratory method" and "field practice" will be increasingly developed and applied; Latin, Greek, logic and ancient history will be minimized or done away with altogether, and modern languages, applied psychology and contemporary history will be correspondingly emphasized. As for the state university, it will allow the widest range of free electives, and as an university it will aim to comprise within itself every possible department of practical activity, such as business administration, journalism, banking and finance, foreign trade, political science, psycho-analysis, mining, sanitary engineering, veterinary surgery, as well as law, medicine, agriculture, and civil and mechanical engineering. I am curious to inquire at this time if education such as this does, as a matter of fact, educate, and how far it my be relied upon as a corrective for present defects in society; or rather, first of all, whether education of this, or of any sort, may be looked on as a sufficient saving force, and whether general education, instead of being extended should not be curtailed, or rather safeguarded and restricted.
I have already tried to indicate, in my lecture on the Social Organism, certain doubts that are now arising as to the prophylactic and regenerative powers of education, whether this is based on the old foundation of the Trivium and Quadrivium under the supreme dominion of Theology, or on the new foundation of utilitarianism and applied science under the dominion of scientific pedagogy. While the active-minded portion of society believed ardently in progressive evolution, in the sufficiency of the intellect, the inerrancy of the scientific method, and the transmission by inheritance of acquired characteristics, this supreme confidence in free, secular, compulsory education as the cure-all of the profuse and pervasive ills of society was not only natural but inevitable. I submit that experience has measurably modified the situation, and that we are bound therefore to reconsider our earlier persuasions in the light of somewhat revealing events.
We may admit that the system of modern education works measurably well so far as intellectual training is concerned; _training_ as distinguished from development. It works measurably well also in preparing youth for participation in the life of applied science and for making money in business and finance. Conscientious hard labour has been given, and is being given, to making it more effective along these lines, and almost every year some new scheme is brought forward enthusiastically, tried out painstakingly, and then cast aside ignominiously for some new and even more ingenious device. The amount of education is enormous; the total of money spent on new foundations, courses, buildings, equipment--on everything but the pay of the teachers--is princely; the devotion of the teachers, themselves, in the face of inadequate wages, is exemplary, and yet, somehow the results are disappointing. The truth is, the development of _character_ is not in proportion to the development of public and private education. The moral standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty, service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling motive, or at least the conscious aspiration, of active men.
This is not to say that these do not exist; the period that has seen the retrogression has recorded also a reaction, and there are now perhaps more who are fired by the ardent passion for active righteousness, than for several generations, but the average is lower, for where, many times in the past, there has been a broad, general average of decency, now the disparity is great between the motives that drive society as a whole, and its methods of operation, and the remnant that finds itself an unimportant minority. Newspapers are perhaps hardly a fair criterion of the moral status of a people--or of anything else for that matter--but what they record, and the way they do it, is at least an indication of a condition, and after every possible allowance has been made, what they record is a very alarming standard of public and private morality, both in the happenings themselves and in the fashion of their publicity.
No one would claim that the responsibility for this weakening of moral standards rests predominantly on the shoulders of the educational system of today; the causes lie far deeper than this, but the point I wish to make is that the process has not been arrested by education, in spite of its prevalence, and that therefore it is unwise to continue our exclusive faith in its remedial offices. The faith was never well founded. Education can do much, but what it does, or can do, is to foster and develop _inherent possibilities,_ whether these are of character, intelligence or aptitude: it cannot put into a boy or man what was not there, _in posse,_ at birth, and humanly speaking, the diversity of potential in any thousand units is limited only by the number itself. Whether our present educational methods are those best calculated to foster and develop these inherent possibilities, so varied in nature and degree, is the question, and it is a question the answer to which depends largely on whether we look on intelligence, capacity or character as the thing of greatest moment. For those who believe that character is the thing of paramount importance--amongst whom I count myself--the answer must be in the negative.
Nor is an affirmative reply entirely assured when the question is asked as to the results in the case of intellect and capacity. There are few who would claim that in either of these directions the general standard is now as high as it was, for example, in the last half of the last century. The Great War brought to the front few personalities of the first class, and the peace that has followed has an even less distinguished record to date. We may say with truth, I think, that the last ten years have provided greater issues, and smaller men to meet them in the capacity of leaders, than any previous crisis of similar moment. The art of leadership, and the fact of leadership, have been lost, and without leadership any society, particularly a democracy, is in danger of extinction.
Here again one cannot charge education with our lack of men of character, intelligence and capacity to lead; as before, the causes lie far deeper, but the almost fatal absence at this time of the personalities of such force and power that they can captain society in its hours of danger from war or peace, must give us some basis for estimating the efficiency of our educational theory and practice, and again raise doubts as to whether here also we shall be well advised if we rely exclusively upon it as the ultimate saviour of society, while we are bound to ask whether its methods, even of developing intelligence and capacity, are the best that can be devised.
Another point worth considering is this. So long as we could lay the flattering unction to our souls that acquired characteristics were heritable, and that therefore if an outcast from Posen, migrating to America, had taken advantage of his new opportunities and so had developed his character-potential, amassed money and acquired a measure of education and culture, he would automatically transmit something of this to his offspring, who would start so much the further forward and would tend normally to still greater advance, and so on _ad infinitum,_ so long we were justified in enforcing the widest measure of education on all and sundry, and in waiting in hope for a future when the cumulative process should have accomplished its perfect work. Now, however, we are told that this hope is vain, that acquired characteristics are not transmitted by heredity, and that the old folk-proverb "it is only three generations between shirtsleeves and shirtsleeves," is perhaps more scientifically exact than the evolutionary dictum of the nineteenth century. Which is what experience and history have been teaching, lo, these many years.
The question then seems to divide itself into three parts; (a) are we justified in pinning our faith in ultimate social salvation to free, secular, and compulsory education carried to the furthest possible limits; (b) if not, then what precisely is the function of formal education; and (c) this being determined, is our present method adequate, and if not how should it be modified?
It is unwise to speak dogmatically along any of these lines, they are too blurred and uncertain. I can only express an individual opinion.
It seems to me that life unvaryingly testifies to the extreme disparity of potential in individuals and in families and in racial strains, though in the two latter the difference is not necessarily absolute and permanent, but variable in point of both time and degree. In individuals the limit of this potentiality is inherent, and it can neither be completely inhibited by adverse education and environment nor measurably extended by favourable education and environment. Characteristics acquired _outside_ inherent limitations are personal and non-heritable, however intimately they may have become a part of the individual himself.
If this is true, then the question of education becomes personal also; that is to say, we educate for the individual, and with an eye to the part he himself is to play in society. We do not look for cumulative results but in a sense deal with each personality in regard to itself alone. I think this has a bearing both on the extent to which education should be enforced and on the quality and method of education itself, and though the contention will receive little but ridicule, I am bound to say that I hold that _general_ education should be reduced in quantity and considerably changed in nature.
If the limit of development is substantially determined in each individual and cannot be extended by human agencies (I say "human" because God in His wisdom and by His power can raise up a prophet or a saint out of the lowest depths, and frequently does so), then the quantity and extent of general education should be determined not by a period of years and the facilities offered by a government liberal in its expenditures, but entirely by the demonstrated or indicated capacity of the individual. Our educational system should, so far as it is free and compulsory, normally end with the high school grade. Free college, university and technical training should not be provided, except for those who had given unmistakable evidences that they could, and probably would, use it to advantage. This would be provided for by non-competitive scholarships, limited in number only by the number of capable candidates, and determination of this capacity would be, not on the basis of test examinations, but on an average record covering a considerable period of time. It is doubtful if even these scholarships should be wholly free; some responsibility should be recognized, for a good half of the value of a thing (perhaps all its value) lies in working for it. A grant without service, a favour accepted without obligations, privilege without function, both cheapen and degrade.
Let us now turn to the second question, i.e., what precisely is the function of formal education. For my own part I can answer this in a sentence. It is primarily the fostering and development of the character-potential inherent in each individual. In this process intellectual training and expansion and the furthering of natural aptitude have a part, but this is secondary to the major object which is the development of character.