« " * -» <^ r*'^ 5°^ ^0^ ^. /^ t ' B DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS JOHN ERSKINE DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS A Definition BY JOHN ERSKINE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AUTHOR OF "the MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT," "tHE SHADOWED HOUR," ETC. NEW HI Mr YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY ©CI.A570482 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA m 26 i3;^o TO ROBERT IRWIN REES IRA LOUIS REEVES CHARLES W. EXTON FRANCIS F. LONGLEY CITIZENS OF THE REPUBLIC PREFACE These chapters, with the exception of the first and the last, were written while I was serving as chair- man of the Army Education Commission with the American forces in France in 1918 and 1919, and as educational director of the American Expeditionary Force University at Beaune, 1919. The first chap- ter, in its present form recently rewritten, was originally prepared as an address before the Asso- ciation of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland, in November, 1917. ** American Character" was delivered as a lecture at Bedford College, London, December 6, 1918, and was published in the Fortnightly Eeview, May, 1919. "French Ideals and American" was delivered as an address before American troops and other American audiences in France during 1918 and 1919, and was published May 20, 1919, as Bulletin 100 of the American Expeditionary Force University at Beaune, ''Society as a University," prepared as an address for the opening of the University at Beaune, was published March 15 as Bulletin 18 of that institution, and was reprinted in the Educa- tional Review for September. ''Universal Training for National Service" was written at Beaune in April, and was published in the Eeview of Reviews for October. "University Leadership" was de- livered on September 24 as the opening address for the winter session of Columbia University. viii PREFACE Though composed at different times and places, these chapters were intended to form one study of the American character and its needs. The first three chapters try to define our condition at the present moment ; the second group of these chapters would make suggestions toward progress and im- provement. I have tried to express here from sev- eral angles a central conviction that we in the United States are detached from the past, and that this detachment is the striking fact in all our prob- lems ; that if in the future we are to become and to remain a nation, we must collaborate for common ends ; that our immediate task is to define those com- mon ends; and that though this task is extremely difficult, the war may have helped us toward its ao- compKshment — toward a definition of our ideals and toward the method by which they are to be realized. If in these pages I speak primarily as an educator, it is not because I would unduly glorify my profes- sion or blind myself to interests outside the school- room and the study. Precisely because we are all concerned nowadays with the general interests of our fellows, I believe that our national problems are problems in education. Our task is to provide equal opportunity for all citizens — which means equal preparation to make use of the opportunity. We must provide also for the sake of democracy enough general knowledge of life — of other lives than our own — to insure in each of us a sjnnpathy with the problems of the community as a whole ; and complete knowledge of life, I have tried to say with emphasis, implies training also for the proper enjoyment of leisure. Because my experiences with our armies in France gave me great hope for what American edu- PREFACE ix cation may yet accomplish at home in times of peace, I have dedicated this book to four friends with whom I worked abroad and who illustrate the type of citizenship that seems to me admirable. Brigadier- General Rees of the 5th Section of the General Staff was in command of all the non-military educational work in the A. E. F. Under him, Colonel Reeves was in command of the American Expeditionary Force University at Beaune, Colonel Exton com- manded the American officers and men who were students at the University of Paris and at other French universities, and Colonel Longley com- manded the American officers and men who studied at British Universities. John Ebskinb. Columbia University, 'April, 1920, CONTENTS I PAOB Democracy and Ideals 15 II American Character 39 III French Ideals and American 68 IV Society as a University 95 V Universal Training for National Service . . . 118 VI University Leadership ." 133 n V DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS I DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS This subject of demooraoy and ideals ouglit to interest us, even if there had been no war, for the ideals of any citizenship which we like to call demo- cratic are formulated chiefly in the hope and in the mood of peace. But it was the war which forced us to take stock of our democracy, to see how much of it we had on hand and how we i^^" \ '^o dispose of it; it was the war which coir ^ile'^ ■• to define, or to try to define, our ideaJs. \ . ^. the task not easy. We had moments of impatie, oe when Prussia challenged us to state our objects in the war, an^ our government did not reply with a facile catai^ We should have liked the government, of course, ta state precisely what we were aiming at, and by the statement to overwhelm the enemy with conscience- stricken confusion. Those of us who are teachei^ and educators, however, ought to have known hoT^r hard it is to define an ideal. When we are asked, ■ 15 ^-f 16 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS as we sometimes are even in times of peace, just what we are trying to achieve in our schools and colleges, our gratitude flows toward any man or woman who can answer for us. There may be rea- sons why a government, acting for a whole country, should hesitate to announce its war-aims, even if it clearly knows them ; but now that peace is restored the obligation returns upon the individual citizen to articulate, at least to himself, what he would make of his own life, and what he desires should be the character of the democracy he lives in. Most of us do not know our own ideals. What is worse, many of us do not understand what an ideal is. However rude may seem this summary of our condition, it is not unjust. The ways of thought which pass for wisdom in education, in politics, in society to-day, make little use of the concept or of the word "ideal"; they are far from the civilization which defined that concept and which gave us that word; they point somewhat exclusively to nature and to various things called natural — to rights, to instincts, to impulses, to emotions ; and consequently they fail to consider what alone makes man humane — his intelligent purposes and his conscious will to pursue them. In current speech whatever is ideal is understood either to be the undesirable opposite of the real, or else to belong to a better world, vainly dreamt of in present conditions. But an ideal, prop- erly d^imed, is both the child and the father of the real; it is both desirable and practicable; it is the solution of a present need which imagination pro- poses — imagination at once directed and subdued by experience, at once fortified and restrained by the jvill. DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS I7j Ideals so defined are the oonunon steps by wMchi the reason marches. The maid setting the table first imagines the table set, and then imitates that vision. The tailor imagines a garment made, and then copies it. The merchant contemplates his business as it should be six months hence, and then makeS his ac- tual affairs adapt themselves to that foresight. In each case the ideal is directed and subdued by ex- perience ; the table is set with reference to the needs of the diners and with reference to the supply of food, the garment depends upon the material and upon the needs of the wearer, and the business will be controlled by the amount of the merchant's capital and by the state of trade. In this sense, then, to have ideals means to have a clear vision of our immediate purposes. In this sense my subject, * ' Democracy and Idealism, ' ' is roughly equivalent to ''Democracy and what it wants." It is not quite enough, however, to know what we want.- An ideal is not genuine, even though it be practicable, until our will is enlisted to achieve it. Unless our ideals are fortified by our determination to accomplish them, by our disposition to master the means necessary for their accomplishment, it is obvious that our ideals will not take living form — will not replace in experience the reality which begot them. And unless our ideals are restrained as well as fortified by the will, unless they are restrained by a resolve to accomplish them in the known condi- tions of life, there is no phantasy so wild that it might not be called an ideal. The second half of our definition, therefore, is so important that I venture to repeat it ; an ideal is the solution which imagina- tion proposes for a present need — imagination at U.8 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ionoe directed and subduefd by experience, at onoe fortified and restrained by the will. With, this definition we ask ourselves what our ideals are. For the purposes of the moment we re- state our subject as a double theme: "What democ- racy wants, and how resolutely it wants it" n If an ideal is a solution to a present need, we must not be surprised that nations and individuals find it hard at short notice to name their ideals. It takes time and reflection to discover what our needs are, or to state them rationally, for to any situation we are likely to react with our whole nature, with emotions much more than with reason. Man, as we are often reminded, is rational only at times, and then usually under compulsion. If the war was for us one of those crises which for^ men to think, we could not expect the thinking to be immediately fruitful or satisfying. Not only is it difficult at all times to know ourselves, but in moments so dis- tressed as those of our entry into the war there is danger always of becoming entangled in words — as in this instance there was danger of believing that our ideals were liberty and democracy, without stopping to reflect that the enemy might also be fighting for the same words but in a quite different sense. There was danger that our ideals, though more than catchwords, might not be completely genuine ; they might be pleasant to contemplate only so long as we need not put them into effect. There DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 19 was danger also of overlooking a fact peculiar to the United States, that our ideals have been re- cruited by inunigration, and that the ideals of many of our citizens are solutions of needs discovered in the old world, but not perhaps existing here. This fact is important to any dear understanding of the United States. "We are a nation of immi- grants, and many of us brought to these shores dreams and desires which sprang naturally out of the conditions we left behind, but which have little to do with conditions here. For this reason such an inventory of our ideals as the war compelled us to make would have discovered, at any point in our history, that not all our ideals were genuine, not all American or democratic, not all quite what we thought they were. -Some of our forefathers came here, we say, for liberty of conscience, an ideal which they had imagined after experience of persecution in Europe. But there is little reason to think that the ideal of religious liberty was at first genuine. In his ironic tale, ^'Endicott and the Red Cross," Hawthorne portrays the pillory and the stocks which the Puritan liberty-lovers set up at once for those whose doctrines did not agree with theirs. If religious liberty is the one ideal which we have most nearly achieved in this country, our will to achieve it has been developed in response to needs discovered here, not remembered from over- seas ; we have learned here that religious toleration is necesary to the well-being of the modem state. A second group of our forefathers came here, we say, for political liberty, for equal political oppor- tunity. Not only have we failed to achieve this liberty, but we do not all of us desire to achieve it; go DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS it is not yet a genuine ideal. On the contrary we wish to retain for ourselves some political oppor- tunities which we withhold from negroes and orientals. We defend ourselves at times by saying that in this problem economic rather than political equality is involved. This defense surprises those people who have thought economic equality one of our ideals. Of course they were wrong to think so. When we talk of economic liberty in the United States, we deceive no one but ourselves, so long as we maintain a tariff, or so long as one group of workers demand exceptionally high wages at the ex- pense of other groups. If all these ideals are some- thing less than genuine, we perhaps hope that at least we have a sincere desire to provide equal op- portunities in education. This ideal might indeed be genuine if we knew what it means, but we have misplaced the word "equal," and we pedagogues most often give our attention to-day to so-called systems which promise, not equal opportunities in education, but identical results. The fashionable variations of the kindergarten will see to it that the children of the rich have the same tactile sensitive- ness as the children of the poor; and the modem school, by abolishing all subjects that are diflScult to teach and therefore often badly taught, will make sure that our ignorance of the best that has been said and thought in the world is distributed evenly. But under all our present and past ideals, whether genuine or not, lies the assumption that America is an Eldorado, a place where life will yield wealth and happiness without corresponding exertion on our part — a place, that is, where ideals are realized DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS Slj •with slight effort of the will. This flattering hope served as motive for those hazardous voyages in the sixteenth century of which Hakluyt preserved the fascinating story; the same hope reappears in so recent a book as *'An American in the Making," Mr. Ravage's illuminating account of the motives which tring immigrants to this country. His fellow- villagers left Roumania and came to New York, he tells us, because a boy who had previously emigrated made a return visit to his native hearth dressed in a long coat and a silk hat, and the popular imagina- tion soon defined New York as a place where all Roumanian villagers have a chance, not of enjoying social and political equality, but of becoming the leading citizen — ^possibly of becoming the mayor. So long as the notion of Eldorado persists, of our coun- try as a land of special privilege, how can the ideal of economic liberty be genuine ? "What we are after is not equality of fortune nor of opportunity, but success for ourselves above our fellows, or else wealth acquired without effort. The thought of America as an Eldorado can be made to illustrate not only the uncertain state of our ideals, but also the brief transition by which they might become genuine. What would it mean to us if we developed this subconscious sense of an El- dorado into a clear and resolute vision ! In natural resources, in climate and in location our country has what we might call aptitudes for being made a land of magic; but it must be made — it will not be so without our effort. The Eldorado which the immigrant thinks of is a wild, an irresponsible dream, the product of his past needs, of his former poverty and discouragement, but not a complete &2 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ideal, since it is not fortified and restrained by the will. Were we determined to bring this dream to pass, were we willing to learn the science and the self-control which must precede this achievement, the old fables of a fortunate land would come true. But to live by habit in the presence of an obvious yet neglected opportunity, may perhaps be tlie most disastrous experience for morals and for ideals; perhaps we have become used to shirking the re- sponsibility which should follow upon a clear sight of needs and purposes. m What were our ideals, while we were in the midst of the war? And what are our ideals, now that peace returns? We should not be troubled if it appears that they are quite new, ideals such as our fore- fathers never dreamt of ; the needs that beset us to- day are also quite new. The danger is not that we should be found inconsistent, not that we should be slow in defining our ideals ; t^e danger was during the war, and still remains, that we should not see our present condition as it really is, and that we should therefore fail to orient our purposes with reference to our true needs. During the war, for example, we were in danger of orienting our purposes, not by the needs of the civilization for which we fought, but by our enmity with Germany. Were we not beginning to define a patriotic school as one in which the German language was not studied? Were we not beginning to define DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 23 a good opera season as one in wliich no modem Ger- man opera was produced? Had the war continued, how long would it have been before we were con- vinced that a good book is any book not written by a German? There was danger, I say, of turning the emotions of a temporary crisis into articulate and fixed purposes. Some of us refuse to accept them as our ideals. Our quarrel with the Germans was deep, and still is; the grounds of it can be stated, and unfortunately the end of it is not yet seen. But with German music or with the German language or with German books when they express the nobler Germany, we have no quarrel. Every nation needs the best that other nations can give it ; we should be infinitely poorer without Beethoven and Wagner, without Grimm's fairy tales, let us say, and in the common sphere of daily life, without the good ex- ample of German industriousness. As for the lan- guage, if there is to be a generation of Americans who neither read nor speak German, and if there is to be, as now seems but too probable, a long period of suspicion between us and the enemy, it is not likely that the Germans will imitate our stupidity so far as to neglect the study of English. They wiU understand what we are thinking and saying, and we shall keep ourselves in even greater ignoraiice of their interests and aspirations than we have hitherto been. The French, by way of contrast, who know better than we do what it is to suffer at the hands of the German, are too wise to cease their study of him, of his language, and of all his works. If ever he shows a disposition to be a good neighbor, they may disembarrass their mind of him, but not till then. 24 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS If we state our ideals in terms of genuine spiritual needs, as we now understand them, we shall make clear those respects in which we would gladly ad- mire Germany, the accomplishments in music and in literature, and the common industriousness, and at the same time we shall define the profound dif- ference between the Germans and ourselves, a dif- ference which the signatures at Versailles could do nothing to heal. From the utterances of modem German philosophers and from the behavior of Ger- many in the war, we understand that the German ideal is to be natural, in a Darwinian sense. Nature is the scene of warfare and struggle, in which the fittest survive. Nature is also the impulse to strive and the energy which sustains us in the struggle. This is the prospect which man sees when he looks upon the life of other animals; it should become, thinks Germany, the pattern of man's own conduct. To survive is to be the fittest, and the means to sur- vive, different in different animals, is whatever na- ture provides. With such a philosophy the worst brutalities of war, the most cynical betrayal of faith, become excusable because they are natural. It is natural for an animal in hunger to be ruthless at sight of food ; the ruthlessness is unmoral, merely an indication of hunger. It is still more natural for fortunate animals to push the less fitted to the wall ; the impulse by itself indicates a masterly spirit, likely to survive. This is what we see in nature, I repeat, and man may if he choose decide that it is best to go with his impulses, to be what his propen- sities would suggest, to do what he would have done had he never become civilized, but to do it more efficiently. DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 25 Over against this decision we set an ideal of lib- erty, a kind of liberty which we might not have de- fined for ourselves had not the war compelled us. Granting that nature seems cruel, rapacious and vindictive, we believe that man enjoys liberty only when he frees himself from these natural tendencies — only when by virtue of his reason and his will he takes control of nature, and directs its tragic caprice to happy uses. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and the leaf blows with the wind ; but man can move against the wind, or stand still, and the more in- telligent he becomes, the more freely can he choose, and the heavier is his responsibility for the choice he makes. If to continue alive be the only ambition for the soul, then the means to life must be had at all costs, even at the cost of other lives ; but reason may decide that rather than pay an inhuman price it is better not to save ourselves, that it is better to die than to make the life-hunger an excuse for cruelty, or even when the question involves no peril of death, that it is better not to succeed than by success to become ignoble. Reason may teach us an ideal of freedom in which the best parts of our old ideals will be summed up and restated — freedom for each one of us to be humane, without constraint of poverty or persecution, and without the more insidious con- straint of an inadequate philosophy. When Ger- many defends the sinking of the "Lusitania," on the ground that war is war, and that a nation which still allows negroes to Tdc lynched is in no position to say what is civilized and what is not, we refuse to debate with her on such grounds, not because her argument is strong, but because we have no premises in common. The Germans sank the "Lusitania"; ^ DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS let it be said that we have allowed negroes to be burned at the stake. The difference between us and Germany is that we wish to live in a mnlization where such actions are considered crimes. This dif- ference was not wiped out by the signing of the armistice nor by the signing of the peace treaty. In the early part of the war the German propaganda tried to obscure the fact that the government at Ber- lin broke its word whenever it seemed convenient; some of us found it hard to believe that there was a whole people who, in the accepted meaniug of the words, had no sense of honor. But during the peace negotiations Germany burned the captured French flags rather than return them. Perhaps it was an irresponsible mob that made the bonfire, and per- haps the German police are too disorganized to con- trol such demonstrations. But did any German ex- press any regret that his country's faith was once more in question? Just before the signing of the peace treaty, the Germans sank their fleet, though in the treaty they were pledged to give up the ves- sels. This was not the action of a mob. It was the deliberate trick of a faithless government, applauded unanimously by a faithless people. If we need fur- ther illustrations of the difference between German ideals and our own, we can find them almost daily in the explanations which former leaders in the Prus- sian government give to account for their defeat. Many grave errors were committed, they say. It was an error to begin the U-boat murders — not be- cause the submarine campaign was dastardly, but because the submarines could not sink as many ships as was expected. It was an error to shoot Captain Frey and Edith Cavell — not because the DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 27 Grennaii apologist reckons even now with the obliga- tions of chivalry, but because those two executions steeled British hearts against Prussia, for this gen- eration and perhaps for centuries. It was an error also, it now seems, to play fast and loose with the United States, not because falsehood and treachery are in themselves embarrassing to the German memory, but becaujse the United States, once in the war, proved more formidable than Germany had expected. In one obvious sense the German ideal was most dangerous for us during the conflict, for at that time the German was putting it into execution, and the logic of it impelled him to annihilate us if he could. But in more subtle ways also the doctrine that man should be natural is laying siege to our character, though seldom under a German name. I refer again to those educational theories and alas ! to those edu- cational practices which would train, or permit, the young to develop their instincts and impulses, rather than free them from the tyranny of those impulses and instincts. The most dangerous form of this surrender to nature is the cult of irresponsibility, of anarchy, which just now spreads fast among us. No ideal is genuine unless the will is enlisted to make it real, and liberty of any kind is but an empty word unless those who shout it and call for it will undertake the responsibility of getting and keeping it. w-Tf we are to remain free, we must obviously as- sume our share in the drudgery of freedom, we must exercise forbearance toward the idiosyncrasies of others, and we must keep our promises, even though it be to our own hurt. In the maintenance of in- tellectual liberty, a liberty maintained by discussion, 28 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS we must tell the whole truth; it is only the whole truth that will make us free. Clearly we are not in the mood nowadays to assume this particular re- sponsibility. We dislike to tell the whole truth about Germany, because if we did, we should have to mention some admirable qualities, and we wish not to admire the enemy. Yet to force our reason into the service of a war emotion, is hardly to enjoy intellectual liberty; rather it is to imitate the Ger- mans at their worst. Similarly we dislike to tell the whole truth of our opponents in political cam- paigns. We do not concede the numerous successes of the administration we wish to supplant ; if we did, there would be nothing left but to point out, as a lame conclusion, the respects in which we think we could do better. It seems more dramatic to charge the other party with complete failure, and to add broad hints or even plain assertions that our op- ponents are crooks. In our academic world, where freedom is essential to the advance of knowledge, we scholars are not always scrupulous to tell the whole truth about those with whom we differ. If we are persuaded that school boards or college trustees fail in this point or that to give scholarship its proper encouragement, we think we strengthen our case if we suppress the fact that school boards and trustees are not complete failures, but have in fact rendered service to education. It seems prudent to many of us, moreover, to suppress the fact that not all teach- ers take their profession nobly or even seriously. By telling only part of the truth, we do succeed in arousing public clamor, but we conceal the points at which intelligent progress might be made. The advantages of liberty are so obvious that we DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 29 pause to ask why men are not careful to tell the whole truth, are not careful to exercise the utmost self-restraint, in order that at least the liberty we have achieved may be handed down to our children. It is this disposition toward anarchy, a more dan- gerous enemy, I repeat, than the German philosophy, which leads us, not to preserve our ideals, but to loot them. Is there some liberty already achieved 1 Then let us seize all we can of it, let us exercise it without responsibility, let us exhaust it as a selfish tenant might exhaust another man's land, and let the other man restore his inheritance as he may. If ideals are attained in this world by self-discipline and by co- operation, there is always a temptation for the mean spirited to seize more than his share, without co- operating at all ; if only he is the first to do this, he is fairly sure that his more conscientious fellows will, for a while at least, try to make good his theft by taking extra responsibilities upon themselves. Un- fortunately, when too many citizens become an- archists, there are not enough of the conscientious to maintain an ideal for the selfish to loot. If the ideal of natural force is connected to-day with the practices of Germany, this ideal of anarchy, of freedom without responsibility*, has in recent years been connected, at least in popular thought, with the events in Eussia. When we know clearly what is going on in Eussia, we shall probably find that other issues are involved than the ideal of anarchy. But for years the doctrine of philosophic anarchism has quite naturally prospered in Eussia, and has quite naturally been imported into the United States. Anarchy as an ideal takes root in countries which have a strong government, whether 80 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS autocratic or democratic. You can neglect your re- sponsibilities only when some one else does the work for you. Of course, if your government shoots or hangs the anarchist, he can hardly be said to loot his ideal ; but if it treats him in any less severe way than by killing him, his philosophy compels the govern- ment to make some provision for his existence, since he makes none for himself. Should the government collapse, however, it is no more possible to continue to be an anarchist than it would be for Robinson Crusoe on his lonely isle. I know the anarchist agrees that when government comes to an end, anarchy, the negation of government, must also end; but you must first be an anarchist before you are willing to describe life in terms of government and governed, rather than in terms of ideals and responsibilities. The fact remains that in a state where no one else assume your responsibilities for you, as on Crusoe's isle, you must assume them your- self or you die. You are back in that state of im- mediate struggle which the German theorists have glorified, and which it is the imhappy fortune of Russia to illustrate to-day. Lx this will to be irresponsible arose in Russia, it has found a kindred ideal to blend with in that American persuasion I spoke of, that life here is and should be an Eldorado, an acquisition of im- eamed wealth and happiness. We are individualists, we say, but in frankness we should describe ourselves more precisely. The Renaissance man was an in- dividualist. He desired to develop to the utmost every talent he had, for the sake of a large career and a lasting fame. "We do not particularly wish to develop our talents nor the resources of our country; DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 31 such a program would involve patience, determina- tion, drudgery. What we wish is to avoid responsi- bility. So strong is our selfishness that even those political philosophies which rest entirely on the ideal of life in common soon disintegrate when imported to our soil. The socialists in America to-day are rapidly becoming anarchists. The ideal of the state's responsibility toward the individual they still cling to, as all anarchists do, but they say noth- ing of the individual's responsibility toward the state. During the war they criticized the govern- ment and they refuse to see an essential difference between the German ideal and ours, but so far as I know they at no time said or did anything which would increase the individual's sense of responsi- bility toward society in that time of need. While the war lasted it was the non-socialist who did the social things, who conserved the food supply, regu- lated prices in the interest of society, organized the relief of the destitute, and brought medical science to bear not only upon the care of wounded soldiers but also upon the improvement of the common health after the war. The professional socialist profited from the carrying out of what were once his pro- fessed ideals, but he did not help to carry them out — or if he did help, he was so out of tune with his organized party that he resigned or was dropped from it. In the confusion of our motives we said that the socialist was spreading a German influence among us, but in so saying we failed to discriminate among our perils. Whatever else Germany was, it was a highly social state, and though it may have been willing for war purposes to see anarchy spread in Russia and in the United States, it always knew 32 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS the danger of anarchy and was as far as possible from entertaining it as an ideal. But in our democ- racy, among a growing number of us, the enjoy- ment of liberty without responsibility is an ideal, and one illustration of its influence is this tendency of the socialist party during the war to let the coun- try take care of itself. But without responsibility, we can have no ideal. A genuine purpose implies the will to realize that purpose. We shall always be individualists, let us hope ; we shall always be ready to stand for the ideal which to the best of our knowledge is the proper answer to our needs; we shall be true to our ideal even though public opinion disagree with us. It is only in the brutal state of nature that all animals of the same kind conform approximately to one pro- gram of conduct; when the mind is free, there will be differences of opinion and increasing differences of character, and there will be occasional martyrs. Unfortunately there are no martyrs in our democ- racy. Martyrdom is an art for which we have no longer the gift. We are willing to preach doctrines that get us into trouble, but we are not willing to abide by the consequences or to sustain the responsi- bilities of our preaching. At the beginning of our part in the war, two boys conected with my own university were arrested for attempting to print a pamphlet which advised opposition to the draft law. Under the guidance of counsel supposed to be ma- ture, and no doubt in conformity with their own impulses, they pleaded that they were indeed re- sponsible for the pamphlet, but that if they had not been arrested for another twenty-four hours they would have changed it so as not to commit a seditious DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 33 act. A graduate of the university said to me shortly afterward that these young men were a disgrace to us. I agreed with him, but added that my reason for thinking them a disgrace to the university was per- haps not the same as his. If they had been genuinely opposed to the draft law, and had felt compelled to preach against it, and had maintained their position before the court, I should still have thought them in the wrong, and I should have felt that any self- respecting government must punish them, but I should not have thought their conduct disgraceful. If they came into a classroom in literature, might not the teacher be holding up for their admiratfon a Milton or a Thoreau or some other honored spirit who with no thought of shirking responsibility to the state, yet in some point felt obliged to stand out against the majority, and who was perhaps in error, yet was staunch to a sincere ideal? To waste the time of the community, however, by preaching a re- volt which you are not willing to suffer for, is to behave no more nobly than the naughty boys on the street comer, who try to annoy the policeman with- out getting caught. IV If it was difficult to know what our ideals were while the war was in progress, it is not easier to name them now that we must reorganize a badly shaken world. To some degree we all think in terms of former intellectual momentum, we say over again the phrases that once expressed genuine ideals but 34 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS whioli have no reference now to our desires nor to our needs. When other nations fall into the same confusion we charge them with insincerity or with an excessive fondness for irresponsible oratory, forget- ting that the weakness is common to the human race. What we now must do, is to examine frankly our present needs, and to give our utmost energy to sat- isfying them. We shall find our ideals as soon as we see the things that cry to be cured. In our American life there has always been danger that we should not think of the country as a whole. Our territory is large ; it is easy for the sections of it to forget each other. Those racial elements also which here forget their past and join hands to make a new world and a new democracy, it is easy for them to fuse only in part, to unite only so far as seems necessary for political coherence, to reserve to themselves some racial inheritance which should become a national asset. Unfortunately we are not yet ready to make of the United States a melting- pot ; like other groups of men who talk much of unity while clinging to different ideals, we are willing to cast into the common treasury only those posses- sions we care least for. We were annoyed to discover that large groups of German-Americans dreamt of implanting throughout the land the seeds of an ex- clusively German culture. There are groups of American citizens of British descent who dream just as sincerely of educating this country in British ways of thought. Other groups with other inheritance have a similar ambition. A few evenings ago I was introduced to a young Yiddish poet, an American citizen, reported to hav^'much talent. I expressed to him my regret not to know his verses, since I DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS S5 could not read Yiddish. ' ' You might leam Yiddish and read my poems," he remarked quite casually. I felt impelled to retort, ''You might learn English and read mine." Our true ideal is not to become the heir of any one race ; we who are of all peoples must become American. We are not ashamed, but proud, that the English we speak is American Eng- lish ; if we are to improve our speech it will not be by recovering a former purity, but by adding to what we already have the best that other languages can teach us. And our speech, so gathered and fused, will be the illustration of our whole culture. But just how are we to build up a national life? What are to be the items of our life in common? We cannot answer these questions until we have studied our common needs. This present volume is an essay toward such a study. In a general way, however, it is not impossible to forecast the method whereby the rich elements that pour in upon us may be seized and united in the spirit of our nation. We have but to remember that nationalism or patri- otism begins in the art of being a good neighbor. We owe it to the community in which we live to share its life; the community owes it to us that we should make our contribution to its life. We shall remain individuals; we shall continue to have our private affairs. But in the things that concern all men, — health, safety, education, art, — all men should act together. I know that the word "nationalism" has terrors for those who fear the crimes and tragic errors sometimes committed in the name of patriot- ism. But if one is to any extent a good neighbor, he will soon feel the urge of conscience toward larger responsibility than the township circumscribei ; ha 36 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS will discover his duty toward the county, the state, the whole nation. If his imagination is sufficiently generous, he will discover the neighborly duties of his country toward other countries. In this sense he will become both national and international. He would belong not to one race but to the human race. At the same time he would belong not to all nations but to one nation. The difference is important. We Americans do not, and can not, believe that one race is necessarily and inherently superior to an- other. We ourselves are to be the component of all races. But our common interests will make us a nation, provided we begin, each in his community, to be good neighbors. Those well-meaning but shal- low dreamers who preach internationalism yet scorn nationalism, are really fascinated by the hope that a benevolent attitude toward mankind in general may relieve us from responsibility toward any hu- man being in particular. Of those ideals that concern us all, so long as we are good neighbors, education is the very first. We desire it for ourselves, and unless selfishness blinds us utterly, we will see that our neighbor has it too. Without a common education we can neither work together nor play together; and without universal education democracy is an unstable venture. Those who have knowledge are, as it were, to that extent in the secret of life, and they own the world. If all men are to own the world, we must all have knowl- edge. Our business belongs to us only if we under- stand it, otherwise it belongs to the manager or the bookkeeper or whoever directs it. The railroads belong to the people only if the people understand railroading — which of course they do not; and the DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 37 railroads therefore belong to those who actually- direct them, whether or not the government is said to control them. We are on the point of realizing, perhaps, that social problems are intellectual and spiritual rather than economic. We begin to see the stupidity of keeping the bricklayer in ignorance of the plans of the building, and the bricklayer himself begins to be uneasy. The workingman in general begins to suspect that some secret, some power, is being kept from him unfairly ; for the most part he thinks the power must be money, and he therefore asks for higher wages, but straightway he finds him- self no better off, no less uneasy. Money is only the crudest form of the power we all seek. The work- man is already beginning to ask for complete knowl- edge of the business or craft to which his skill con- tributes; the bricklayer will lay bricks, but he will think like an architect. And the citizen, let us hope, will ask to be taught the whole business of his gov- ernment. Only in this way shall we have peace of mind or the barest political freedom; for until we share the knowledge that controls our lives, we shall continue to be directed by the same type of man that directs us now — that is, by the men who know more than we do. To be good neighbors and to study life together! This seemed to be for a moment at least the genuine ideal of the two million American citizens who made up our armies abroad. They ^poke in many lan- guages, but they were learning to speak and to un- derstand each other in one. They were of all origins, but they were feeling for a common future. On the soil of France the German blows were forging an American nation. Or so it seemed, at least. If the 38 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS appearance should in the end prove an illusion, the war would indeed be for us, not a crusade ending in a spiritual rescue, but only a slaughter that filled up the world's graveyards. II AMERICAN CHARACTER At some time or other we all boast of the country to which we belong. The American is said to be extremely boastful. To understand him, however, it is well to observe that he boasts of his country, not of his race, and that he is quite aware of the differ- ence between the man who has a country and the man who belongs to a race, and that he believes the difference is in his favor. He knows better than to think of Americans as derived from a common stock, and he prefers not to think of them as conserving their virtues from their fathers. When he boasts of what his fellow-citizens are, or what they can do, he would express his faith that in origin they are but common men, but that being Americans they have had advantages. The raw material of the American character, he believes, is not the refine- ment of one blood nor the blend of many races, but the plain substance of buman nature ; and this raw material, he would say, is brought to perfection by a happy way of life, which usually he does not define beyond his conviction that there is in it much hope, many dreams, and little of the past. Twenty years ago, perhaps, this generalization would not have 39 40 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS been true; perhaps it will not hold for to-morrow; but if you would understand the Americans of the moment, the soldiers who made their appearance in the last act of the war, the citizen army in France and the citizen workers at home, who suddenly, al- most convulsively, realized themselves as a-» nation, you must begin by noting that they did not realize themselves as a race. You must begin with this fact because there the American begins to differ from the Englishman, and let me add, from the German. In his "Address to the Americans," Mr. Chesterton made a striking contrast between the American national ideal and the German. Germans, he said in effect, are all of one race but of many ra«iks ; Americans are of many races, but wish to be of one rank. He was obvi- ously opposing to that hope of democracy which human nature very generally entertains to-day, that other conception of one peculiar race, God-favored, against which human nature has very recently had to arm itself. But if we were to change Mr. Ches- terton's contrast so that it should carry no flavor of condemnation but simply a statement of the dif- ference between neighbors, the Americans would consider it proper to say that the English are of one race ; that they prize the traditions which can come only with race consciousness ; that they think better of the English-born simply because he is born of English blood ; that the typical American, if he were an Englishman — that is, if he had a race tradition — would naturally set a high value upon it, and would think favorably of a new acquaintance who could introduce himself as of the same inheritance; but that the American, having come from aU races, AMERICAN CHARACTER 41 makes it a point of honor not to ask a newcomer of what race he is — ^makes it a point of honor to keep to himself, if he has it, or to suppress as far as possible, the sentiment for traditional things — for the family line, for the inherited language, even for the home in the sense of a fixed hearth. The reason for this American renunciation of race might seem to be primarily what is suggested in Mr. Chesterton's contrast, that we in the United States have come from the ends of the earth, and that in order to live together at all we are obliged to slip lightly over matters of divergence, and are therefore obliged to forget differences of origin, which form our chief divergence. Certainly there is some truth in this explanation. But it was not an American who first spoke of the United States as a '^melting pot," and to one who knows the country the phrase is not a true description. If it were, the race would begin after the melting is done. Such an enforced compromise as characterizes any so- ciety recruited from varied sources is but a tem- porary expedient, and if there were no other reason why Americans think of themselves merely as a country or nation, never as a race, we might expect this explanation to become invalid with time; we might expect that at least the children of those who so compromise would consider their way of life as at last settled and traditional, and their ideals as beginning to be racial. It does not appear, however, that any traditions are growing in the United States, nor does the promise of any show itself even at this moment when the idea of nationality has become with us, as with other people, a living force. The truth is, that if Americans were to let their 42 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS minds dwell on their personal or family history, upon the places in which their family life began, our whole country would be aching with home-sick- ness. The end of most philosophies is to enable men to live happily with the facts that particularly affect them. We have evolved a philosophy which enables us to live cheerfully with the great Amer- ican fact that all of us have left the house, and most of us the city, where we were born. This is obviously true of the immigrant; it is equally true of the New Englanders who have moved West, of the Southerners who have moved North, and of the Westerners who have come to Eastern cities. The American man or woman who at the age of thirty is still living in the house in which he or she was bom is hard indeed to find. The average soldier in the French army to-day may easily have come from a family hearth which has burned continuously for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. Of the Amer- ican army probably no more than two or three per cent were living at the time of their enlistment in the home of their birth. Their families have come recently from Europe or else they have moved about in the United States. The causes of this moving are interesting, but not for the moment important; the important thing is that when an American thinks of his country he does not think of the soil, nor of the homestead, nor of his inherited language, for to do so would be to cultivate retrospect and regret; rather he thinks of the ideals for which his country stands, of the future, of that world of affections in which he instinctively recognizes a career for him- self and a common meeting-place with his fellows. Is the American, then, an idealist? He certainly AMERICAN CHARACTER 4*3 is so in the sense that he lives in the world of pros- pects and hopes. Therefore he is willing to rebuild his cities with that incessant tearing up of streets and remodeling of houses which to the European is a nightmare orgy of change. If he has a vision of any improvement which could be made in his boyhood home, and if he can find the means, the house is probably doomed. Only a few churches in America, and no other buildings, may be warranted safe against this passion for bringing the world up to date. Colleges and universities in the United States perhaps conserve more pious memories than any other kind of public institution, yet some of our large universities have transported themselves bodily to a new site, with the result that the alumni who return to venerate Alma Mater must thereafter do so strictly in the world of imagination, paying homage to an idea, since there remains on the cam- pus neither stick nor stone with power to recall a single minute of their youth. In these removals the motive is a true idealism, an imagining of the university in a large and eternal world, together with the will to realize the dream; the accomplish- ment, however, is perhaps a bit troubling, since a shrine abandoned will send its own petitions after the departing worshipers. The American habit of living in a world of pros- pects and hopes is still more troubling in an indi- vidual who happens to be provincial in culture. Not only will he seem lacking in the humane tradition, as indeed he will be lacking in it, but he will seem perhaps contemptuous of it to a degree which shocks or annoys the European. Of Americanism in this phase Dickens gave a portrait — of the apparently 44 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS boastful, exaggerating, sliallow Americanism. Per- haps Dickens failed to understand the great effort by which citizens of the United States resolve not to think tenderly of the things they or their fathers have put behind them. Americans of British descent have loved Dickens for his portrait of the English life from which they have gone out ; yet even such Americans will rarely permit themselves to speak of Englishmen as their British cousins ahd never of England as their home. So the Italians in the States, or the immigrants of any other nationality, are careful not to speak of their Italian sky or*of the other particular heaven of their boyhood as though they still had a place under it ; such memories they cut off as completely as may be in order to share without reserve in the enterprise of the new world. Of course, since we elect to live in the future, we give the impression of a tendency to boast, but when we speak of the future we are discoursing upon the only part of our history which we all have in common. We are merely expressing with energy the dreams and the hopes which are the fabric of our present moment, and at times we are merely whistling for courage to walk on with so little guid- ance from the customs and habits of our fathers. It took courage to pull up by the roots a family in Denmark or in Italy or in Serbia, let us say, and to transplant it to a new world. Such a family set- tling in central Massachusetts, for example, must repeat several times the equivalent of the first up- rooting; since even though the family itself does not move, its neighbors will, and the Irish settler will be succeeded by the Polish until each original family is once more isolated among people of other AMERICAN CHARACTER 45 backgrounds. Or if the family simply remains, the new generation will surround it with new traits. Many a novel is written on this theme in the United States to-day — stories of the Americanization of this family or that, where the Americanization con- sists largely of breaking away from the elder gen- eration and becoming proportionately optimistic. The change is usually effected by education; it is no wonder that the small schoolhouse is so often a shrine of gratitude — often a gratitude mingled with melancholy, for here the culture of the past has been used, not to recover the past, but to get free of it. To the foreigner, no matter how friendly, our harp- ing upon a brilliant future is perhaps, as we said, a form of boastfulness, but to the American it seems rather a form of prayer, a telling of beads, and we can hear in it, as in American music, a wistful note; we are conscious of caring too much about the future and too little about the past; we should like to know at any moment whether the frail structure of our dreams is settling down to some contact with some foundation, and whether we are at least walk- ing on our own feet on the ground. Our seeming optimism is most blatant when our culture is most defective, but even when the Amer- ican is at home in the older world he will prize it chiefly for its usefulness to him and his fellows, for bringing their dreams to earth. The crowds of Americans who toured Europe in the years before the war had little antiquarian or historical interest in what they saw. They looked upon European architecture only as seeing what they might use at home ; if the Coliseum reappeard in the Yale bowl, and the Gothic cathedrals were freshly translated 46 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS into the Woolworth building, then those ancient monuments justified themselves. The old world be- longed to them, they thought — Westminster Abbey, for illustration, was to them as much American as English. We did not build it ; but then, neither did you. The people who built it are dead. The Abbey is the possession of those who revere it. The same point of view is the secret of Longfellow's charm for his countrymen, and perhaps for other readers as well. When he translated, or even when he gave his original self, he was conveying home for the American the usable parts of European literature. Here best is found an explanation of his currency even among those writers abroad who recognized how much he had copied from their national poetry ; for, accommodating the poems to the American peo- ple, he had substituted in them for the enjoyment of history the American wistfulness, and this sub- stitution gave him originality with the European reader. If we were to seek another example of the discrimination the American temperament makes even when it can appreciate the older culture, we might point to the contrast between our present neglect of Greek language and literature and our present great interest in Greek dancing. With us Greek language and literature have long been taught chiefly if not entirely as vehicles of a tradition. Even if we learned to read Greek, we saw no opportunity for doing anything with that difficult accomplish- ment. Greek dancing, however, gave us an oppor- tunity to dance. You may say if you choose that neither Athenian nor Spartan nor Theban ever danced as does the American who imitates the Greeks ; the average American, however, is by pref- AMERICAN CHARACTER 4)T erence without archeological conscience, and for him the choice is easy between the way he likes to dance and the way the Greeks may be thought to have liked to do so. To say that even the cultured American is inter- ested in culture only for what it will avail him to- morrow, that he does not permit himself the re- trospects of history ; to say that the average Amer- ican uproots himself from the place of his birth and of his boyhood, that he crushes down all race memories and boasts only of his future — ^to say this is, of course, to exaggerate. In certain parts of the United States, in Virginia and Massachusetts, for example, pride of race and pride of the hearth does from time to time become eloquent in the old families. Even those of us who were not born in those states enjoy and encourage such eloquence, as being a somewhat quaint exhibition of our national imagination; but at the same time our instinctive answer to this tendency is to make fun of it. Bos- ton is indeed a city of culture, but since Boston is aware of the fact, its culture is for other Amer- icans a theme of good-natured jest. This defense against an incipient pride of locality or pride of ancestry is not new with us ; we have always made it. Irving wrote his * ' History of Dietrich Knicker- bocker" as comment upon a serious history of the Dutch settlers in New York. Similarly David Ga- mut in Cooper's ''Last of the Mohicans," and Icha- bod Crane in Irving 's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," are notable caricatures of the school teacher who already was becoming a boasted type in New Eng- land. What we might think of heredity, were we an older society, we do not know ; at present, however, 48 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS we are inclmed to judge a man by his future — ^by the record his son is likely to make rather than by the record his father made. This is quite literally true; in small villages and in cities alike the son of a distinguished father is fatally handicapped if he shows any disposition to remember whose son he is, whereas the creditable performance of a ris- ing young man leads the neighbors to observe that he must have been well brought up. We might add that if the American lacks reverence for his elders, he is extremely attentive to children. n Even though this point of view may be exagge- rated, it explains many things which otherwise the foreigner must misunderstand in the American, or must, what is perhaps worse, entirely overlook in him. It explains, for example, the great difference between what an American means when he talks of liberty and what an Englishman or a Frenchman means by the same word. The European who de- sires liberty takes for granted at the same time a tradition which is itself a check upon too great free- dom ; in matters of art and conduct tradition enters his character as an endowment of taste. But when the American speaks of liberty he has no idea of any check placed by any tradition upon his desire to do as he pleases. Liberty, as he conceives of it, is an opportunity to experiment, and his freedom will in the end be limited only by the hard lesson which experience may enforce. It was not by acci- AMERICAN CHARACTER 49 dent that the philosophy of pragmatism evolved it- self in the United States, that philosophy which rele- gates truth itself to an experiment, and in which, for all its cheerfulness, taste is at a discount. Per- haps it is something of a reason for distrusting pragmatism that it is the social expression of a nation which, from force of circumstances, has given up having a past, and to some extent has ceased to be guided by taste. Perhaps it may seem too severe a criticism of any people to charge them with a wholesale lack of taste. Yet taste involves always a sense of chronology, perhaps also a sense of geography ; and these senses are the result of a certain studious respect for what men have done before us, and for the particular ends to which by experience they learned to adapt particular needs. As yet the American fails some- what to reap this profit from the past. The tourist who sees some effect of Moorish architecture and on the same trip to Europe feels the charm of an Eng- lish cottage is not unlikely, provided he has the means, to incorporate his memory of both styles of architecture into his house at home. Some of our most exciting achievements in architecture have been so reached. We cannot argue with the per- petrator of these mixtures, since by his philosophy of life they are not mixtures after all, but simply quotations from one unique source, the past. Nor can we easily teach the young American to feel a nearer interest in Benjamin Franklin, let us say, than in Julius Caesar ; in either case he is overwhelmed with the misfortune the distinguished character suffers^ in being dead. To all Americans, old or young, the past is a great negation, the infinite gulf in which 60 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS dead things are swallowed up, and in eternity all the dead of all the ages are contemporaries. There- fore if the builder of the village house mixes his Moorish and English architecture, he justifies him- self with the conviction that both styles were brought from Europe, and Europe is some place outside of America from which useful things can from time to time be resurrected. Similarly it is easy for the schoolboy, and indeed for the grown man in the United States, to refer quite indiscriminately to George Washington, to Homer, to David, and to Barnum in a juxtaposition which makes the Europe- an gasp ; for these men are alike dead, and the Amer- ican has carefully avoided that meticulous acquaint- ance with the past which makes one sensitive to chronology or to category. It is not the uneducated American of whom I am now speaking. The best illustration of this atti- tude toward the past is the poet-philosopher who perhaps ' is the most American of all our writers, R. W. Emerson. The English reviewers who found themselves somewhat bewildered by his indifference to chronology disposed of his early books with polite amazement or with contempt, according to their individual way of dealing with incomprehensible things. ''Life has no memory," they read in the great essay on "Experience," and in the first lovely book on ' ' Nature ' ' they were told that time is illu- sion, and in almost every page of Emerson they were taught that time is only a method of thought and that man is great as he emancipates himself from respect for other lands or other ages than his own. In almost every page they came upon lists of books or names of cities which seemed purposely AMERICAN CHARACTER 61 disordered for an effect of humor; the inventories for which Walt Whitman has been assailed are only a moderate exaggeration of Emerson's. That Briton of common-sense and not too great imagination, Thomas Hughes, was moved to register his convic- tion that Emerson was a glittering impostor — much as a modern reader might accuse a clever man in our own day of catching the public ear with silly ec- centricities. But Emerson was singularly sincere and as far as possible from desiring to get attention by a trick. He was, however, American, and if we are to decide that indifference to the past is a weak- ness in the American character, then Emerson culti- vated that weakness with all his heart. When he substituted his conception of an oversoul for the orthodox conception of God, he wished to do more than change the name of his deity. He wished to conceive of the soul as breathed through by an eter- nal force, equally wise, equally loving in all ages. Provided this oversoul inspire us, there is no need for study or for previous experience. "The soul circumscribes all things," he said, "it predicts all experience, in like manner it subtends time and space." When we are inspired, we are great men; without that inspiration we are dead, though we know history ever so thoroughly. In other words, Emerson was conceiving of a God who should be a substitute for the past, and who would make a knowl- edge of the past unnecessary. Such a God the He- brew Jehovah was not. We must not seem to give the impression that the Americans of to-day who have the same point of view are necessarily follow- ers of Emerson ; many of them of course neglect to read him. But he is the true expression of his coun- m DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS try's temperament, and is likely to remain so for many a year. At Emerson's old home, Concord, a friend of mine recently found, in an American audience gath- ered to hear him lecture, a curious confirmation of the American detachment from the past. The idea of lecturing at Concord at the home of the philos- opher, of Hawthorne and of Thoreau, almost on the site of the little battle-field which had for the United States such momentous consequences, in- spired my friend to some such feeling of the past as a European would understand. When he faced his audience, however, he realized that most of them must have come to the United States since the Civil War, and that their interest in the old revolutionary skirmish and in the writers who once lived in the village was just about as immediate as their interest in Marathon or in the home of the obelisk-makers. My friend, telling me the story, said like a good American, *' After all, they are quite right. Why live in the past?" I do not know whether he real- ized how near he was to quoting Emerson himself — *'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Wliy should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? . . . Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living genera- tion into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship." The American boys called to AMERICAN CHARACTER 53 France in our armies were few of them studious readers of Emerson, but most of them were of his school of thought. It was only for the sake of the future, after all, that they willingly engaged so deeply in what seemed to them the tragic result of a long past. Finding themselves hailed by friendly English comrades as cousins in blood, they learned as quickly as possible to conceal their astonishment ; to many of them the remark was merely a compul- sion to think for the first time of the stock from which they came — usually not an Anglo-Saxon stock. Arriving in France, they found themselves greeted with an extraordinary gratitude which im- plied something done in the past of which they were not aware. Upon inquiry they found that they were received as America's gift in return for Lafayette. Many of them, with the best disposition to be om courcmt, asked at once, Who was Lafayette I Some of them must have been disappointed to know that he died so long ago. All of them were reaUy more interested in Marshal Foch. The American philosophy which I have been here setting forth may explain also the American atti- tude toward the Germans, which in some respects differs slightly from the French or the British atti- tude. Even if Germany had not forced the United States to fight, the demonstration which Germans gave us in the United States that they had not af- ter all abandoned their own past, would have been a matter of concern for all Americans con- scious of their own philosophy. We had looked upon the Germans, cherishing in our midst their love of old customs, much as we looked upon the Scotch in various communities, as eminently loyal citizens of 54 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS the new world, who yet affectionately retained an antiquarian interest in the country of their origin. We found a certain quaintness in their memory of the old country, simply because the American so rarely exhibits any memory at all of the past; we did not suspect that tradition among the Germans was a thing more real than among those Massachu- setts or Virginia families of which I have spoken, where a good-humored fashion makes something of the ancestors of the house. The early years of the war showed us, however, that the Germans had never given up their past, that they therefore had never become one with the other Americans, and that they had no share in our future. If the other racial ele- ments which have come to our shores should disclose a similar tendency in moments of stress, our great experiment in the new world would be obviously a failure. We feel that the war has proved, for all other racial elements except the Germans, that the experiment is not a failure; as for the Germans, it has proved, we think, that some of them can have no part with us, and that those of them who are American at heart must drop their past alto- gether. in Any study of American character to-day which would arrive at the truth must, I think, face frankly, as I here have tried to do, th^ extent to which the citizen of the United States, at least in the present generation, lives without a sense of the past. What America may become is perhaps suggested by the AMERICAN CHARACTER 55 consciousness which most thoughtful Americans be- gin to have of the shortcomings in the national character — the shortcomings which result from this exclusive emphasis upon the future. More than any other nation that has played an important role in the world, we are without a sense of the soil; we quite literally live in a world of ideas, we quite liter- ally get along somehow without a practical reckon- ing of time and space. We have developed a top- heavy way of life. When we speak of the home, since we have no sense of the local hearth as a Frenchman has, nor of the place from which our ancestors came as the British colonist has, we are forced to think of the world of ideas which are in- cluded in a household. The people for whom we have the household affection make up all that we know of home. To take this attitude toward life may be indeed to take an ideal attitude, but we be- gin to have among us here and there certain lonely philosophers, Professor George Santayana for ex- ample, who remind us that ideals must have roots in natural facts, and that to live merely in sentiments and affections is to follow a thin and perhaps a dan- gerous kind of existence. We wonder from time to time how long it will be before the readjustment which at present seems continuously needed in the United States will bring us to some point of stabil- ity, where our affections may begin to attach them- selves to quite earthly and natural shrines. If the United States were really a melting-pot, we should expect our people, coming as they do from all races, to represent as it were the sum total of what all races might contribute to the common wealth of humanity. We might expect, therefore, to find 56 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS in the United States much art, fine science, and a noble poetry. That has indeed been the expectation of optimistic Americans, and the expectation has furnished the text for much comment from critical foreigners, who upon visiting our shores have mar- veled, perhaps with an inward satisfaction after all, that a country so new and supposedly full of energy should have as yet disclosed so meager an utterance in things of the spirit. The fact is, how- ever, that a nation which has dropped its past has thereby dropped the instruments of expression. Language is but a series of sounds, mere groans and noises if you choose, until the ear has grown accus- tomed after many centuries to detect the significant shades and intonations of the specific groan. No language can be improvised, if the audience is to understand the speaker. The larger fabric of lan- guage, the racial memories to which an old country can always appeal, obviously do not exist in a land where every man is busy forgetting his past, separ- ating himself from the memory of what his fore- fathers felt and said. "Without tradition there can be no taste, and what is worse, there can be little for taste to act upon. We have indeed some ap- proaches, some faint hints and suggestions of a na- tional poetry. The cartoon figure of Uncle Sam, for example, a great poet could perhaps push over into the world of art, but unless the poet soon ar- rives there will be few Americans left who can rec- ognize in that gaunt figure the first Yankee, the keen, witty, audacious, and slightly melancholy type of our countrymen as they first emerged in world history. From among all our great men for the last two AMERICAN CHARACTER 57 hundred years, of whom can we write a story or a poem with any expectation that the reader has heard of the man before — or, to be more gener- ous toward the reader, with any expectation that, having heard of the man, he knows anything in par- ticular about him? Benjamin Frantlin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, are names indeed but little more, to the American whose father reached the United States since 1864. George Washington is connected in some dim way with the story of a cherry tree, but his hatchet activity begins to be mixed up in the national memory with the fact that Lincoln is said to have split rails. Lincoln himself is the only national figure who seems eligible for literary uses, but it sometimes seems that for many of us he is only the representative in later costume of the cartoon figure of Uncle Sam. The attempts which poets have made and are making in the United States to begin a national literature are among the most interesting and pathetic in the history of art — pathetic because few of them remember what must precede art, a good store of legend or history which the poet can draw upon and turn to emotional value. To speak of Trafalgar or of Blenheim to an Eng- lishman is to stir an emotion already prepared", but in America to speak of the ''Merrimac" and the ''Monitor," or of Vicksburg or of Valley Forge is simply to stir memories of the schoolroom in which the children of the newcomer tried to remember many facts of like importance and alike removed from his interest, since they all were imbedded in a past, whether of Egypt or of England or of his own country. We have thought that the present war might indeed mark the beginning of such na- 68 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS tional memories as would make for us a national art. Yet that hope may be frustrated ; for we dreamed of such a beginning after the Civil War, and for a while Northerner and Southerner could understand any reference to Stonewall Jackson or Eobert Lee, and in New England even at the end of the nineteenth century most citizens could ap- preciate the wonderful monument which St. Gau- dens made of Eobert Gould Shaw. To-day, how- ever, so many Bostonians happen to have been born in Italy that the figure of the young officer riding with his negro regiment is likely to suggest almost anything except a common tradition. So far as art is concerned, our task in America is to make the country a true melting-pot, to turn into a com- mon heritage something of what each race brings to us of race memory and of race aptitude for beau- tiful things. We are disturbed to observe that the Italian who arrives among us with a fresh and ap- parently inexhaustible passion for color and design becomes in the second generation a mere American, as poor in language as the rest of us ; that in time the musio-loving Russian forgets his gift, and that our own native Indian dies rapidly, leaving in our culture no trace of his extraordinary sense of rhythm and color and design. All of us, in conceding some- thing for the sake of a common understanding, have conceded so much that we have little left in com- mon to understand. If our lack of a past handicaps us in the matter of art, it handicaps us also in manners, since man- ners are themselves an art. Those societies which have a traditional behavior have manners; other AMERICAN CHARACTER 59 societies must improvise their behavior as they go along. If the American seems impromptu in "his ways, it is really remarkable that he does not seem even more so, since outside of the individual home or the particular part of the given city in which he may reside he is subject to no formulas of behavior, and if he has manners he is likely to suggest to his countrymen that he is imitating the foreigner. You may talk or walk or may conduct a drawing-room conversation in an English way, in a French way, in an Italian way, or in a German way ; but it would be a bold critic who, after knowing America, would say just what is the American way of doing these things, since Americans on the whole do those and other things each as he pleases. There may seem at first sight little reason to object to a spontaneity of manner which has managed to slough off much impedimenta and to have brought to the fore in- stinctive friendliness and unveiled sincerity. But there are other uses of behavior than merely to seem amiable ; manners become at times vitally sig- nificant as language, and it is difficult indeed to speak with manners as with any other form of dis- course unless the hearer is conversant with the par- ticular tongue. In manners then, as in art, the oc- casional American who cares thoughtfully for his country's future, is at this moment considering by what means we may conserve the total contribution of all the races that come to us in one blended language which all of us may speak and under- stand. Aside from the field of art, one might expect that a country which starts fresh, which stands on its own feet, which considers every man equal to every 60 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS other provided lie is honest and sincere and loyal to his neighbor, which reminds itself frequently that the world began when each one of us was born — ^it might be expected that such a country would achieve something clear and original in philosophy. Are not the old countries too much encumbered with prob- lems raised by the fume of dialectic controversy? Would not a group of men beginning with the ma- turity of manhood and yet with the unembarrassed vision of children, see life at least somewhat as it is? This has indeed been our American hope, and our most characteristic philosopher has held it out to us as an ideal, lending much transcendental color to the argument. Professor Santayana, in our own day, the most subtle of our philosophers, has preached it with infinite charm and persuasion. Yet a critic of life so astute as Professor Santayana ob- serves that the citizen of the United States is rather far from seeing life as it is; in fact, he is so busy making himself agreeable to his neighbors by dis- carding traditional prejudices, and incidentally per- haps, traditional inspirations, that his last state is not one of clear vision but of a vague, diffused feel- ing. He is not preeminently an admirer of intelli- gence. He is in love with morality, which he inter- prets as a high state of feeling rather than as a considered course of conduct. There is here a dif- ference between the moral sense of England and that of the United States; in England, if one may judge by the record of a long line of poets and prose writers, it is less in a man's favor that he should be intelligent than that he should be good, but in the United States it seems less in a man's favor that he should act well than that he should feel strongly AMERICAN CHARACTER 61 about good conduct or that others should feel strongly about his conduct. We reduce as many of our problems as possible to this kind of moral question. Our political contests frequently resolve into a debate as to whether the candidate is or is not a good man, and the party which rises to the highest temperature of emotion wins — all this with- out much regard for the particular problem which the good man who is felt to be good by a majority of his countrymen will thereafter be called upon to solve. Perhaps this extraordinary expression of feeling in matters of moral concern is an exhibition of racial sentiment otherwise repressed. Is the idea too fantastic? Man's heart must rest on something solid, and the Decalogue will serve as a floating island in the world of ideas until we come to a broader and more firmly anchored territory. The tendency to set character above everything else, this sentimentality if I may call it so frankly, is not peculiar to any one race-strain in the total American complex ; it characterizes all of us. "Walt Whitman was truly American in his expression of diffuse and indiscriminate amiability. William James is truly American in putting an optimistic mood at the service of all his countrymen — an amia- ble project for a modem philosopher to devote him- self to. It was a typical American who recently wrote to a serious journal in the United States com- plaining of the education given in our colleges that it was too exclusively devoted to the training of the mind. Among all the faults attributable to our educational system, this special charge, that we trained the mind, we surely did not expect to hear. The danger of too great amiability is not merely 62 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS that in the world of intelligence it makes ns blind to i^hose problems which can be solved only by in- telligence, problems of pure mechanics or of pure physics or of economics, but that even in the world of emotion it ends at last by depriving us of stand- ards, so that once we feel kindly toward the conduct and ideas of other men, we shortly are well-disposed to their feelings also. If it took a long time for the United States to orient itself in this world war, the cause should perhaps be sought not only in our detachment from European affairs but more pro- foundly in our lack of common standards by which to judge conduct of any sort. The service of the war to us may prove in the end to be chiefly this, that we have limited decidedly the area of experi- ence in which we are willing to measure things solely by an amiable disposition. A foreigner expects of the American not only a new art and a new intelligence, but also great energy, great genius for machinery, and a faculty for organization. Even if he fails to discover the art and the intelligence, he usually decides that the American indeed has the mechanical or the organ- izing gift. The American, himself, however, is rather surprised at this verdict. Why should he be praised for his machines? The fact is that he sets little store by them, and merely wonders in his turn why the foreigner does not avail himself of the same simple aids toward comfort. Much as the American has been accused of loving luxury, he really does not value merely comfortable or useful things, but in a world where it is easy to have comfort he wonders what great virtue there would be in going with- out it. AMERICAN CHARACTER 63 Grave danger there is in machinery, as the American is aware; he knows that society has not yet found the right adjustment of machinery to human comfort and leisure; he knows that we may become slaves in some degree to the instruments we created for our convenience; but he also knows that this peril is not peculiarly American. The dif- ference between him and the European, as he sees it, is that the European fears to use any machinery, and he does not. He fears no loss in human dignity if he substitutes a mechanical street-sweeper for a row of laboring men. It seems to him that if the machine can clear away the mud, then sweeping the streets is no fit work for a man. He cannot see that the invention and the use of machines is any great credit to him nor any sign, as the foreigner so often interprets it to be, that his heart is set on material things. He cares little for money, though he hap- pens to live in a fortunate land where money is comparatively easy to win. It is on this subject that he is most sensitive so far as Europe is concerned, since the foreigner who gives him lectures on his too feverish pursuit of gold has in many cases come to America to make money by the lecture. At least by his own account the foreigner does not come out of admiration of American art or of American science. The American wonders also why Europe does not recognize his extraordinary preoccupation with ideas. His wars have been fought for ideas'^ his universities are debating grounds of new ideas^, he rebuilds his cities at great inconvenience in or- der to carry out his latest idea, and he will exchange all the gold he has for any idea which almost any 64! DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS European brings him. The latest success in French philosophy or British thought, the newly risen artist on the European stage, is likely to find his first and largest audience in the United States, and the puz- zled American when he reads an English criticism of the low state of our intellectual life, frequently wonders whether British idealism has reached such perfection that it would not notice the difference if all the American purchasers of British books and patrons of British art were to withdraw their sup- port. He is puzzled at the greeting accorded by the foreign press when he invests all the money he has in some ancient and priceless work of art. What better use could he put money to than to buy with it the lovely tapestry, the Rubens, or the DaVinci which he admires? To his great surprise he is ac- cused of robbing British art if he buys a Rubens, or British literature if he is willing to pay more thanl anyone else for a manuscript of Burns. He would be accused of robbing French art if he managed to purchase the Venus de Milo. The two questions that perplex him are, first, why a portrait of Rubens or of Rembrandt should be more British than Aoner- ican art, and second, why he should be thought to have done something ignoble if he pays more for the manuscript of a British poet than any British citizen is willing to pay I What Americans really think about art, to what their hearts are really given in this world as between material accomplishment and the things of the spirit, cannot yet be judged by their own product in art or in literature or even in science, for our nation by forgetting its past has temporarily sacrificed the ability to accomplish great things in the world of expression. But if we AMERICAN CHARACTER GSi have thrown overboard our past, it has been in order to make the greatest of all experiments in human brotherhood. Where we do set our scale of values and where we shall set them when we once have a common background out of which to make a great art of our own, has been witnessed for a long time in the shrines to European poets which American subscriptions have helped to set up, in the monu- ments to great artists, and in the pilgrimages to those shrines which not only rich Americans have yearly made, but all of us who could by any sacri- fice find the means to travel. IV In such times as these when wise men scrutinize with rigor even the things they love best, it would not be profitable for an American, writing either for his countrymen or for the foreign reader, to praise his own country much. Yet I suppose the last mystery in the American character which should be exposed to the foreigner is the reason why Amer- icans, having so little tradition, do after all love their country. What began with us as a necessity has become a conviction and a hope — our faith that it is possible for man to begin again and to win an unprejudiced future. We believe that the men who arrive by the thousands from older shores to be our comrades may, in changing from the discipline of Europe to the freedom of our land, succeed in a new statement of human perfection. This has long been our hope; it was expressed for us in many a m DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS great sentence of Lincoln's, in many a stirring line of Whitman's, and in many a paragraph of Emer- son's. "Every spirit builds itself a house; and be- yond its house a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house heaven and earth ; Caesar called his house Rome; you perhaps call yours a cobbler's trade, a hundred acres of plowed land, or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your domain is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world." If you were to stand at the dock and read such words as these to each shipload of immigrants, you would merely be putting into language the hope that brings them. If you were to r«ad these words to their children and to their grandchildren, you would still be ex- pressing what they have come to love in the United States, and what they believe can best be achieved there. Meanwhile our task is to make a common past of our own — not so much of the past, we hope, as to shackle us again, but just enough of the past to talk with, to give us a language for art, for poetry, to give us a proper vehicle for our emotions. We would relate our idealism at last to the facts beneath our feet. We would have a philosophy which begins in a clear understanding of the world around us, and finds in that world intelligent means to reach ideal ends. We believe that by education the vast majority of men can be made capable of this devel- opment. Our faith has been immensely strength- AMERICAN CHARACTER 67 ened by wliat we have seen in our Army in Europe, regiment upon regiment of all races and all lan- guages, yet all American and loyal. Loyal to what? To their ideal of a country where race does not count. They will go home, we believe, with discrimi- nating admiration for what they have seen of the great qualities of their allies. They have been at school. They have had a glimpse of that interna- tional sphere in which the nations will some day practice unselfishness. But it is not ILkely that they will carry back much love for the past — only indeed for the beautiful things out of the past, the things of art which we have always loved in the United States, and which seem to belong not to time at all. Ill FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN In France we have caught reflections of our char- acter in the opinions which the Frenchman from time to time lets slip in his familiar talk. Since these opinions show the speaker's character also, we are prompted to use them for a comparison of the two nations, of their accomplishments and of their ideals. The average American who would un- derstand France may best begin with a comparison of ideals, for he will find it hard to believe that by his standards the French have accomplished much, nor from his point of view are they an active or an energetic people, nor apparently do they wish to be. He will admit that in moments of extreme peril they have improvised a kind of desperate ef- ficiency, at Valmy in 1792, at the Mame in 1914, but he will think these moments exceptional. If, how- ever, the American begins by asking what France wishes to do, what is her object in life, the inquiry is likely to disclose some weakness, or at least some doubtful areas, in the program of his own ideals. It will then be easier for him perhaps to understand how marvelous is the accomplishment of France, measured in terms of the French spirit. 68 FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 69 In material achievement France and tlie United States differ greatly, but in our ideals we at least have the appearance of agreement ; certain formulas of our hopes and of our faith are spread like plati- tudes over the daily speech of both nations. If you should ask an American audience, for example^ whether the mind is more than the body, whether what a man is should count for more than what he has, the American audience would say yes — espe- cially on Sunday. Should you ask a French audience the same question, they would give the same answer, but they would wonder why you asked; they woiild also wonder why the American is so given to saying over these phrases of idealism, yet so slow to act upon them. Long ago the French made it the prin- ciple of their national life that spiritual things should be valued above material, that a man's riches should be looked for in his character. We live by no such principle, however we may have flattered ourselves, and in France, of all countries, under the scrutiny of friends who like ourselves are taking inventory of national ideals, we are most certain to learn how widely our practice varies from our talk. Before America entered the war the French gen- eral public thought of us as a nation of millionaires with a rather commercial interest in life. After we decided to take the side of the Allies, the average Frenchman continued to think of us as millionaires, but he realized that our chief interest in life could not be mercenary since we had cast our lot on a costly if not a losing side ; in fact, he began to see in us, as he generously said, idealists fighting for an abstraction, not for material gain, and our cross^ ing of the Atlantic he spoke of as a crusade. Eegi- 70 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ment after regiment of crusaders arrived on French soil, prayed for, waited for, and beautifully wel- comed with curiosity of spirit as well as with open arms ; every French citizen who understood English was alert for the first precious words to fall from the lips of the new-found idealists. What did fall from those lips has become almost a commonplace, it fell so uniformly — "What funny little locomo- tives!" "What a queer sound the whistle makes!" "How odd, they have no plumbing!" "Why doesn't the elevator work!" These were our instinctive and unconsidered first comments upon France. Said one astonished native, "If you really speak first of ma- chinery, if that is your involuntary thought and your nearest interest in life, perhaps you are fighting on the wrong side ; in machinery it is the Germans who excel. ' ' Of course we answer that Americans are not interested chiefly in machines, that we have eyes for beauty, for the French landscape, for the memo- rials of time and for the modem art that every- where enrich French civilization, that we have quick sympathy for the heroism which ennobled France in the great war; but the fact remains that we do not as a rule speak of these things, that in practice our idealism does not find spontaneous expression. Is it only that we are as yet a people of limited speech, still without a medium for the generous emotions we believe are ours ? In that case, how odd that we should be in France, where the human spirit for centuries has known how to utter itself! Or is it 'that before the war we were driving unconsciously into that same admiration for purely creature com- forts and that same trust in mechanical substitutes FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 71 for character which perverted modern Germany? The Frenchman is quite aware that his armchairs are less comfortable than ours, that his elevators are less practical, and that his street cars are smaller; but in explanation he reminds you that his chief effort hitherto has been toward spiritual things, and he knows quite as well as we that whereas one must travel to America or to Germany to enjoy perfection of machinery, it is to France one must go for art, for scholarship, and for civilization. True to this central principle, that the mind rather than the body is precious, the French are more care- ful in spiritual things than in physical. To give a common illustration, many An:ierican soldiers have wondered at the frankness of the French, man, woman or child, in matters — shall we say of phys- ical hygiene? But the American may not have no- ticed how far the Frenchman excels him in spiritual delicacy. We are modest about our bodies, the French are modest about their minds. Nakedness and a frank acceptance of physical fact astonish the Frenchman far less than the American, but on the other hand the Frenchman will not slap your shoul- der when he first makes your acquaintance, he will not at once call you by your first name, nor ask you to address him by his ; he will normally be cautious about inviting a new acquaintance into his home. If the American casually decides that the Frenchman is not fastidious, it might surprise liim to know that the Frenchman is shocked at the wholesale indeli- cacy of our manners, which make little distinction between those friends who are precious to us and those acquaintances whom we have barely met. Friendship in France, like every other communion 72 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS of spirit, is a delicate relation, and there is a kind of art in cherishing it. This art we Americans have not greatly cultivated ; in France it has often seemed that we hardly have eyes to recognize it, not even in its loveliest forms. The ideal of spiritual modesty is illustrated by the way the French plan their homes. On the street you will find a somewhat severe, if not forbidding, wall; in the house you will come first on some of- fices or servants' quarters, and even on the kitchen, but as you penetrate the building you arrive at a court or a garden, and around the court will be the family rooms, the household shrine. The French- man knows that, even from a practical point of view, Such an arrangement is the most convenient. But his reasons for so ordering his house is that he wishes to give the greatest privacy to the things which seem to him most precious. If he has read at all of our habits in the United States, he knows that we follow the contrary principle, placing on the street those rooms which are for the graces of life, and giving the screen of privacy to the kitchen, to the pantry and to the serving quarters. Here and there in France the astonished citizen has heard tid- ings that in the small New England town, where the bay-window of the house is exposed to the public gaze, the proud family will place their group of Eogers statuary on a pedestal in the window and will pull back the curtains. Amiable as this atti- tude is toward the the curiosity of neighbors, the Frenchman wonders why we do not put our works of art on the sidewalk and have done with it. FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 73 n ■ To praise the French home at the expense of the American may seem a straying far afield ; for some of us think that no race prizes the home as we do, and many have understood that in French life the home counts for little, and all of us have heard it said that in the French language there is no word for home. It is true of course that the French atti- tude toward the home differs from the English, as the English in turn differs from the American, but a competent comparison of the three attitudes will not at all be to the disadvantage of the French. Certainly as between the Americans and the French, we are in no position to say that the French under- estimate the home. They have always had a satis- factory way of naming it. Before the war they called it la maison, the house, and to be at home was to be chez soi, in one's own house. During the war, however, the word foyer, hearth, a literary word, has lost something of its bookishness and has crept into the talk of the French soldier, perhaps because these years have reminded him of what his home peculiarly means. It means in the old Latin sense, a hearth — a definite fire-place, where the household flame burns continuously from generation to generation, and where the hopes and the sorrows of the family are prayed for, or discussed, or suf- fered, from father to son. Especially the French home is a place where the family is born. We Amer- icans retain enough of the old world tradition to wish for our dead a definite and consecrated bury- 74 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ing-place; at that end, at least, our lives toucli the soil. But to the old Latin spirit, to the Frenchman, if he should express his frank opinion, a people who touch the soil only in the graveyard are not more than half decent, and their decency is much delayed. What should we think of a people who took no care | to mark the place where their dead lie ! The French- man has the same opinion of those who take no thought where their children come to birth. For him, the home ought to be as definitely the place where people are born as the churchyard is the place where they are buried, and he feels as strongly a pious sentiment for the room where his race first saw the light, as for the spot where each ancestor closed his eyes. In the French Army the average soldier comes from a hearth where he, his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather were born. Many soldiers come from homes of a much lengthier tradition, but the average reaches back at least so far. In the American Army in France by actual experiment, it was found that only two or three per cent of the soldiers were living at the time of their enlistment in the house where they were born — not to make any reckoning of their fathers and grandfathers. One Frenchman was heard to remark, ' ^ It is you Americans who have no word for home in your language; I hear you say in Paris, * Let's go home to the hotel' — that word home means, I judge, the last place you left your baggage. How do you say in American, 'Let's go back to the house where I was born, my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather?' " To this question the American is tempted to retort that he loves his FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 75 home as dearly as other people, that the American home has special virtues of which he is peculiarly- proud, and that he has frequently been homesick — which implies that the home is for him something more than the last place he left his baggage. But even as he makes the retort he will realize that for us, necessarily moving about as most Americans have moved in our new and not quite settled country, we have defined the home as the group of people, the family ; we have attached our affections to a hu- man relationship exclusively, and we have taught ourselves to depart lightly from the actual soil on which our hearth was once founded, and from the garden or the fields in which our childhood was passed. When the Englishman speaks of home he means England, though he means also of course his family circle, and perhaps the particular hearth beside which the family circle may still live. When the American speaks of home he means his family circle, without much reference to its location. When the Frenchman speaks of his hearth he means also of course his family circle, but more profoundly he means the family altar and the actual ground made sacred to his primitive and enduring piety by the lives of his ancestors which have been begun and ended there. This attitude of the French toward the location of the home is the clue to their patriotism and to their religion. Their gods are found in the soil of France — the soil, not as a figure of speech, but as the actu- al earth which they have worked with their own hands. France may be reckoned an agricultural nation, but the difference between the agriculture 76 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS of Burgundy or of tlie Midi and the agriculture of Wisconsin, let us say, or of Minnesota, is so great that it is really a mistake to try to express both by one word. The French farmer raises his crops, but his labor has another end than the production of food. His toil is an ancient cult, the full sentiment of which he feels at every stage of his work. No wonder he is reluctant to let machinery, no matter how efficient, come between him and the earth, in which, when he labors by primitive means, he can almost fancy he touches hands with his fathers. He lives close to nature in the poetic sense that he is conscious of the dramatic vicissitudes of weather, of the large element of chance in sunshine and rain ; with the oldest of faiths he recognizes dependence on dim gods, to whom the fields and the weather and the human family belong. Whatever religious de- bates take place in France, the essential religion of the French is not abstract. The French atheist has it as profoundly as the Protestant or the Roman Catholic; it is his feeling that the earth is kind and motherly, that life is a perpetual miracle springing from the actual soil, and that to live close to the soil and exposed to the weather, which seems to vitalize that soil, is to take part in the perpetual sacrament of existence. Sharing this sentiment, he is near that antique vision of life which worshiped Demeter and Bacchus, and indeed these gods, though they now may be unnamed, are still realized instinctively in the French heart. What the Frenchman will do with his life, therefore, or what kind of work he will devote himself to, cannot be determined entirely by economic considerations. He may prefer, for ex- ample, to make wine rather than beer, since beer is FRENCH IDEAI.S AND AMERICAN 77 a manufactured thing, independent of weather and the seasons, whereas the vine really is France — a thing of religion, a cult, the product of prayers, of a beneficent heaven, and of a fruitful earth. This national interpretation of the soil can be il- lustrated from many a French book. Rostand's "Chantecler" is a modern instance. To the French critic this phantasy remains a somewhat unsuccess- ful tour de force; he will tell you that the costuming of the actors as barnyard fowls made the piece im- possible to present, and he will point out shallow- ness in the sentiment and lapses of taste in the dia- logue. But the foreigner can find in ^'Chantecler" an embodiment of the good sense, the courage and the idealism of the French, qualities which the war has brought into relief; in this play he sees also, and chiefly, the peculiar French love of the soil. Chantecler, the cock, is the emblem of France; he crowns all weather vanes. Our bird is the eagle, but the Frenchman has a sense of humor and does not mind taking the symbol of himself from his beloved farmyard. We might be tempted to reflect that the cock is not the bird which flies high, and certainly the foreigner, contemplating the tenacity with which the French have clung to their small farms, has often judged that the imagination of this people is too limited. In the United States we have frankly boasted of the grandiose sweep which we think character- izes our own attitude to life — "The eagle is a bird of large ideas; the continent is his home." But the Frenchman is no less an idealist, even though he keeps his good sense and from time to time smiles at himself. Chantecler believes that his crow- 78 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ing brings up the sun each day, that the light of the world depends on his singing. Though he loves the earth, he has no great turn for facts; the soil for him is poetry. In France it is the women who have the greatest sense of fact, and in the play the Golden Pheasant, who loves Chantecler, tries to persuade him out of his heroic illusion. When she asks what is the secret of his marvelous singing, his reply is one of the fine illustrations of French sentiment for the soil: "I never sing but when my claws have weeded the grass, and dislodged the pebbles, and have reached at last down to the soft black soil ; then, when I touch the good earth, I sing, and that is half the mystery, half the secret of my song — not the kind of song you must think up as you go along, but the kind that flows through you like sap from the earth you are rooted in." In a quite different direction, the ideal of the hearth and of the soil throws light on a much mis- understood side of French character. The worship of the ancestral hearth and of the ancestral earth explains the small French family. Critics of France have encouraged us to believe that her families are small because of some decadence in the race, but if this is true, the decadence must have started several hundred years ago. In France you can buy in any stationer's store, among other mottoes with which to decorate your wall, the framed copy of a sonnet, first printed in the sixteenth century, on "Le Bonheur de ce Monde. ' ' In this inventory of happi- ness we begin with these ideals, "A comfortable home, clean and beautiful, a garden wall tapestried with fragrant trees, fruits and good wine, a simple life, and few children." To-day as in the sixteenth FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 79 century the French father and mother, mindful of the household shrine, pray for one son and for one daughter, and for no more children. The son will inherit the hearth, and the daughter will marry some boy who inherits a hearth, but what provision can be made for a second son or for a sec- ond daughter? The family birthplace can no more be divided than the graves of one 's ancestors. This point of view has its perils for France, now espe- cially when German imperialism has made a religion of the large family — all the more now that France has lost so much of her man-power. But however mistaken the French ideal may be in the light of other social theories and practices, at least their own theory of the family is a noble one, and it has made home life in France precious and sacred to a degree which should put to silence any criticism the foreigner in his ignorance might make. If the French hearth has fewer comforts than the American apartment, if it lacks the plumbing which seems to be the real god of the American soul, at least it is a genuine piety that has kept the house unchanged, and those who live by the French fireside are con- scious to-day, as few other people are, of the dignity of the home. Perhaps because of this consciousness the French feel the worth of the individual more than we do, which means of course that they appreciate the dignity of old age. Our American soldiers, seeing decrepit old men breaking stones, rather inefficiently, along French roads, have often commented on the impractical way France has of doing things ; at home we should use the stone crusher and some road ma- chines, and the old men would be out of sight. With 80 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS us they would indeed be out of sight, in the poor- house perhaps, or in the old people's home, con- veniently shelved until their time should come to die. France does not like poor-houses, nor old peo- ple's homes. The proper home for old people is their own hearth. The state, therefore, humanely pro- vides such moderate work as aged men can perform by the roadside, and society finds such simple duties for old women — perhaps tending the flocks — as will keep even those whom we would call inefficient still in their place in society, earning with dignity their right to live among their fellowmen, no matter what their age. Once more ''Chantecler" furnishes an illustration, in the old hen, the cock's mother, who dispenses wisdom in shrewd proverbs from over the top of the wicker basket in which she finishes her days. When we understand this noble attitude of France, this frank envisaging of all of human life, quiet old age as well as vigorous youth, this desire to make life kindly and human, we are not likely to think so well of ourselves ; for nobody in his senses would choose for his own later years the poor-house or the old folks ' home rather than a life in the open air, as in France, with self-respect and an active work still to do for society. m When the Frenchman and the Anglo-Saxon agree that spirit is more than matter, the Frenchman does not mean exactly what the Anglo-Saxon means. For FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 81 us the life of the spirit is emotional rather than in- tellectual ; for the Frenchman the life of the spirit is both intellectual and emotional, with emphasis per- haps on the intellect — a life of feeling, certainly, of sentiment and of intuition, but chiefly a life of rea- son. Even while we agree, therefore, in the con- trast between matter and spirit, we may be quite far apart in our understanding of the words, and the separation may reoccur in our use of certain other words, equally familiar. When, for example, we hear France spoken of as the land of liberty and of art, perhaps we miss the special point of the remark, since we do not know what liberty or art is in the French scheme of life, nor are we aware that in France art and science mean more nearly the same thing than they do in the United States. With us liberty implies the absence or the removal of some- thing — the word suggests an escape; with the French, liberty implies the acquisition of something, and the word suggests control. To us art is an ad- dition to life, a luxury; to the French it is a way of living. Our art is to be found in museums, in studios, in rich men's houses — we think that if ever we Jiave the time and the money, we too shall enjoy the privilege of art ; but in France art is a quality of every-day existence, without which life is not con- sidered worth while. It is hardly too much to say further that, to the French mind, art and science are practically identical ; at least, the words liberty, art, and science, as the French use them, involve a single ideal, and form together a harmonious com- ment on the natural conditions in which man finds himself. The average Frenchman, though his philosophy may be unconscious and inarticulate, 82 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS conceives of the world as made up of forces and in- stincts, themselves neither good nor bad — ^blind forces, as we say — ^which however can be directed to good or to bad ends, according as we have the skill and the desire. Not all Frenchmen, of course, take this point of view; there are no doubt many who think as the middle ages taught that in essentials human nature and the nature of the world about us are bad and need repression ; there are many more who believe with Kousseau that nature, especially human nature, is essentially good, and that to be happy man needs only the opportunity to fol- low his instincts. But th§ majority of men and women in France approve by tradition and by training the humane teaching which readers of books associate with the great name of Aristotle — that excellence lies in the control which man es- tablishes over the forces of nature — over his own nature to begin with; and that without intelligent direction of these forces man is a slave or a passive victim, as a boat without a pilot is the plaything of the storm; but that in the measure of man's knowl- edge of the forces that surround him he becomes free to achieve whatever destiny he dreams of, as the pilot who understands the mechanics of sailing is free to sail where he will, and the wind is for him no longer an obstacle nor a difficulty, but a source of power. In this point of view art and science are much the same thing; man is free only in proportion as he controls the forces of nature and in proportion as these forces do not control him, and he can take control of these forces only by study, by intelligence, by self-discipline — ^virtues which in operation be- come science-or art. FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 83 The implications of this doctrine make clear why the French prize above other virtues reasonableness and self-control, and why so eager a desire for in- dividualism combines in them with a profound re- spect for tradition. Their search for freedom, as we have just defined it, makes sacred a man's in- dividual personality, but at the same time the desire to understand the eternal forces of life in order to control them compels respect for the experiences and for the wisdom of the past. The world has called humane that Greek morality which laid upon man himself, rather than upon heredity or environment, the responsibility of choosing the best; and of all nations the French have preserved longest, in the midst of contradictory modem philosophies, the humane ideal. They say with Aristotle that where there is no choice of action there can be no virtue, and that where men are compelled to do right, evil may indeed be prohibited but there can be no positive good. The man who by temperament is ignorant of fear is, of course, no coward, yet he is not brave ; we must call him rash, and we must deny him the credit of being virtuous, for he has acted as irre- sponsibly as the feather that floats in the wind, or as the stone that sinks through the water. He has fulfilled his nature, to be sure, but without conscious choice. Those who are sheltered from temptation are neither good nor bad — they are simply untried. To be moral, therefore, the Frenchman thinks one must be absolutely free, even free from the law itself; for that reason we need not be surprised to find in French life at all points what at first seems an unmeaning paradox, that though the Frenchman's 84 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ideal of culture by its very reasonableness will sooner or later articulate itself into laws, yet the Frencbman will resent the existence of the laws — he will create Academies and then make fun of them — and why not? since an ideal so articulated becomes a kind of constraint toward excellence, and to that extent it robs man of the opportunity to be virtuous. When he is quite free, however, the Frenchman feels induced to use his liberty wisely — at least it seems to him common sense to profit by the experience stored up in the past, in the form of tradition and more subtly in the guise of taste. When you are free to make what you will of life — that is, when you have the skill to make what you will of it, you begin to see, as the profoundest kind of morality, the opportunity to discriminate among your ideals ; and this choice involves taste. Perhaps we might say that the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin races seek in general the same degree of excellence, but at least they define life differently, and from the difference in this initial definition comes a wide difference in the quality of their final ideals. Since the Anglo- Saxon has been brought up in a philosophy which on the whole thinks of life as a collection of bad im- pulses, of temptations to resist or to run away from, against that background his ideal achievement is character, goodness, which is to him the chief moral- ity. Since the Frenchman conceives of life as a mass of unorganized and neutral forces to be brought into order only by intelligent mastery of them, and since that order will vary according as his knowledge of other men's experiences teaches him to discriminate and to know the best, against the back- ground of this problem his ideal virtues are intel- FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 85 ligence and taste, and he defines morality chiefly; in these terms. We cannot understand all that the war meant to France unless we reflect that in the German legions a very different philosophy had taken amis. The French soldier recognized in the atrocities inflicted upon his country and upon his hearth a demonstra- tion of ways of thought not his, which, if successful, would make it imposible for him to keep his way of thought at all. Not every German, nor many of them perhaps, had read Nietzsche and Treitschke, of whom we heard much at the beginning of the war : but it seems that these writers are typical, and that if they did not influence popular German thought, they were influenced by it. Their philosophy, illus- trated on a colossal scale by the German armies, con- ceives of the world as a collection of forces which yield power, not when they are controlled, but when they are followed. When we chop wood, to give the simplest illustration, we do not lay the log against the ceiling and lift the axe ; we make use of gravita- tion to do our work. ' ' Something is checked in every impulse which reason guides — better to follow the impulse," says this philosophy; "if the impulse is to selfishness, let us be more selfish ; if to cruelty, let us be more cruel; if war is terrible, let us add to it another terror; whatever else we do, let us not arrest life with what the French would call the con- trol of reason, but which to our philosophy is but hesitation and lack of nexve. So to take life as one vast selfishness, as one unvaried sailing before the wind, is to be successful, to be a superman." That such a philosophy conscientiously followed will in- deed yield power of a sort, the French would not 86 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS deny, nor can our armies deny it after facing the poison gas and the organized devastation of recent years; but this is power of a kind that the French spirit believes ignoble — better to perish than to sur- vive by it, for it makes the spirit of man conform more and more to the purely .brute operations of the world, it implies an efficiency impersonal, irre- sponsible and cruel, and finally it strengthens those impulses of the body which, if uncontrolled, are but prison bars for the spirit ; whereas the ideal of in- telligent choice, the humane ideal, looks toward the dignity of the individual, considers the right of other men to be dignified in their own personalities, and seeks to bring about that subordination of material and bodily forces to the guidance of the spirit, which alone to the humane philosophy is freedom. IV No one can understand this French conception of art, as no one could understand the similar Greek conception, without distinguishing clearly between art and artifice. The first comment of the Anglo- Saxon on all art is likely to be that it is arMficial; his comment upon the French life, itself an art, is that it partakes too much of the quality of artifice. Such a comment assumes civilization as a natural thing. The Frenchman knows better. When our mothers sent us to childhood parties and cautioned us to behave naturally, they did not mean what they said ; they meant that we should wear our acquired arts of courtesy as though they were natural. In FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 87 that sense all civilization is not natural, and French life, being the most highly civilized, has most the character of art. But the French themselves are even more severe than we are in condemning artifice, which to them is not art but its most perverse enemy. Art for them must be frank and sincere, a quite open control of means to reach an intelligible ideal. There is nothing secret about it; its glory is the large part tliat reason and calculation frankly play in it — as any choice between good and evil should be calculating and reasonable. Artifice, on the other hand, is the putting on of disguise, the assuming of methods which do not harmonize with the genuine purpose ; it is a too great emphasis upon means and a too slight valuation of the end. Art is, as it were, the contrast or other pole to nature ; it is the condi- tion which is reached when man has given an in- terpretation and a direction to the chaos of crude experience. In between these extremes is artifice, partaking of the quality of both — half directed, half mean- ingless. It is often a weakness of the race, how- ever, to prefer artifice to art, since in artifice the untrained mind can recognize so much of what seems reality — that is, so much of what remains in the crude state of nature. It is the very condemna- tion of artifice, however, that it is an imitation. In Chantecler's farmyard we hear suddenly the cry of the cuckoo. A silly hen runs up; "Which is it, the one in the woods, or the one in the farmer's clock T* **The one iq the woods," they tell her. "Ah," she sighs with relief, "I was afraid I had missed the other one." Illustrations of this French point of view occur 88 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS most easily in the realms of judgment in wluch the Anglo-Saxon is most readily severe — in those actions which he will dispose of promptly as vicious or wrong. Some of these actions the French tempera- ment will excuse, or at least will reserve opinion on them, since they may well be sincere ex- pressions of genuine ideals; the ideals may be matters of taste, but they have been reached by choice, and they imply no failure on the actor's part to assume responsibility for his own destiny. Other conduct, however, a Frenchman will utterly condemn with more than Anglo-Saxon severity, though at first the case seems much the same as that with which he has dealt leniently; he has no forgiveness for behavior in which the actor fails to be intelligent and responsible — in which, consequently, the actor is insincere, wearing a mask on his real intentions. From this point of view a Frenchman was speaking of a noted writer, now in his dotage, who lives with a woman whom he intro- duces as his housekeeper, but who is really the mother of his children, and who now in his old age directs his affairs for him with something of the tyrant's hand. The Frenchman speaking of this case condemned it utterly; then remembering that he spoke to an Anglo-Saxon, he added quickly: '*I do not presume to pass judgment on his love affairs — I would not say that they were wrong ; but for such a great man to disguise the facts of his life and to be told to do this and to do that by some one of whom he seems afraid, is altogether ignoble." In other words, Abelard and Heloise are admirable to the imagination, no matter how little their career may recommend itself as a desirable program, but FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 89 Abelard must not allow himself to be henpecked. It is not only in doubtful spheres of conduct, however, that the French exact a sincere art of life ; they are also on their guard against artificial goodness. They can understand lovers and saints equally — they de- spise equally the street-walker and the professional good man. The most revealing caution the French- man can give to the Anglo-Saxon is the shrewd ad- vice, "Do not let my people suspect that you are earning your living by being good." No better example need be sought of the French conception of art than in the field of manners. Even in France, let us admit quickly, there are people whose manners seem artificial and others whose manners are as we say natural, yet all manners everywhere are acquired; and in France they are recognized as the means in ordinary conduct by which man achieves freedom in his relations with other men. Without manners we should meet our fellows only on the plane of those physical appetites which indeed furnish their own expression, but which limit the range of action for the spirit. Far from being spontaneous or uncalculated, manners to the French mind should always have a definite purpose; if this purpose is clear and admirable, the manners also will be admirable and sincere, but if the manners have no purpose or an insufficient one, they will be artificial. Just how many calling cards one leaves at the door, is a matter of little conse- quence ; convention here is likely to be artificial. But table manners, to take the opposite extreme, will be sincere and noble, since they are supremely neces- sary for any society which would live in the spirit. The purpose of table manners is to disguise the un- 90 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS doubted fact that at meal time a number of animals are gathered to feed. If men wished to observe in the process of eating no other fact than this, man- ners would not be necessary ; but we would make of the sharing of food a sacrament of higher kinds of sustenance, an exchange of ideas of spiritual bread, and to do this we cultivate such conduct as will prevent the physical fact from obtruding. For that reason we tell children not to reach too frantically for the breadplate. If this illustration seems academic, it will not seem so to those who have watched American soldiers and French side by side on the battle front at mess time. The American sol- dier, lined up before the kitchen, received his rations with great expedition, sat down on the nearest rock, or leaned against a tree, or simply stood in the mid- dle of the road, cleared his plate, washed it up, and got the meal over with. The French soldier, by con- trast, would seek always three or four companions and would sit down with the group, in the mud, if necessary, for a half hour or an hour of what could be called by no less dignified term than a ritual of friendship. Whatever the degree of their education, their conversation was likely to be a sharing of thought and a feeding of the mind. That this dif- ference between their use of manners and our neglect of them was not unnoticed on their part, they evi- denced in many a shrewd remark: "Why is it," one poilu was asked, "that even near the front you give so much time to your meals, and carry on such con- versations as one would expect only at a dinner table in time of peace T' "Because," answered the little man in blue, "if we are fighting for civiliza- tion, we might as well remain civilized. ' ' This ideal FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 91 of manners can be summed np in the word etiquette, which of course we took from the French. We seem to have taken it, as many an American soldier now suspects, from the end of the French freight cars, where the label is pasted to show the destination of the cargo. The second and the third syllables of this word give us our * * ticket. ' ' What is etiquette ? To us perhaps it is a system of manners one must cultivate if one wishes to be like other folk in arti- ficial society. To the French, etiquette in every walk of life is quite simply the label which shows where you are going. Perhaps it would be better to say, not that your destination is the consequence of your manners, but that your manners are chosen care- fully to direct you to the end you desire. Do you wish to talk with the shop-keeper, or with the Presi- dent, or with the Sultan of Turkey 1 There are ways and means of doing so, and if you care enough to master this etiquette you can have your will, but this is a career for intelligence, for patience and for pur- pose — also for the imagination. The French think highly of manners for the reason that they esteem intelligence as a divine thing ; manners indicate that men and women have conceived of an ideal and are studying to reach it, leaving as little as possible to chance, and trusting as much as possible to the mind. *'What do you suppose is the derivation of this wordf*' a Frenchman was asked. ''I think it may come," he said, ''from the Greek word which gives us ethics.*^ He was wrong, but his false etymology indicated the truth that for the French spirit, in- telligence and manners are moral duties. 92 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS Let us return to the idea with which we began. What one thinks of the French will eventually de- pend on what choice one makes of a philosophy of life. It is for that reason that our stay in France has been particularly important, as a kind of test of American civilization. Differences of Ismgnsige can be overcome, and superficial differences of custom, but there will remain the question whether we really share the point of view which underlies the whole culture of France — ^whether we really be- lieve that the spirit is more than the body, and whether we interpret spirit merely as fine feeling, or as emotion guided by intelligence. The Anglo- Saxon, and those of us who live in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, have been brought up to respect emotion as something opposed to reason. Reason we say is cold; when we call a man calculating we mean no compliment. That poetry or prose we esteem most highly which is most emotional ; the work of Pope or of Swift we incL'ne to rate second, since reason so obviously is at the heart of it. Certainly a life with- out feeling, no matter how rational, would be an existence almost diabolical; it is a fair charge against such a poet as Alexander Pope that his art expresses too little emotion to satisfy the experience of the average man. Yet if one is to follow a humane philosophy — that is, if one is to believe that what- ever order is in the world must be put there by reason, by imagination, by the intelligence of man, one must class reason, intelligence and imagination FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 93 as the divine instruments by which man works, and one must find even in ideas themselves a subject for emotion. It is not unusual in a French theater to see an audience applaud an idea as we might ap- plaud an action, and more than once in her history France has given herself as a nation to the prosecu- tion of the most advanced and exalted ideas. More than other nations she has the credit of following her ideals to their logical end, cost what it may ; not even her own superb common sense can distract her from the reckless pursuit of a dream once possessed. When Chantecler discovers that the feun has risen even without his song, he clings to his ideal; "I must sing. " " But how can you keep on when your work perhaps is useless, ' ' asks the Golden Pheasant. '*I must work." ''Even if you don't make the sun rise?" persists the Pheasant. **That is because I am the herald of a dawn more remote! My cries pierce the night, making those day-wounds men call stars. Never shall I see shine on the steeples the light of the finished heaven, the day made all of stars touching side by side ; but if I keep on sing- ing, punctual and loud enough, and if in each farm- yard the other cocks sing after me, loud enough and just on time, I think there will be no more night." "Whenr' insists the Pheasant. "One of these daysl" Since 1870, it is true, the government of France, and perhaps her whole people, have neglected the development of their national resources, have failed to improve village life, have let go by those modern inventions for comfort and sanitation which the American on his first arrival in France sadly misses ; but it is also true that since 1870 France has lived 94 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS under sucli a threat as the American, safe in his own continent, cannot easily understand. And more pro- foundly it is true that France has permitted this shadow to affect only her activities in the realm of physical comfort; the fear of Germany has never touched her spirit. On the contrary, worn and dis- abled as in many ways she now is, France is still the country toward which artists and thinkers love best to turn, as likely to find there intelligence, reason- ableness, and sensitiveness to beauty, and a clear choice always for the things which make the soul of man great. IV SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY (For the opening of the American E. F. University at Beaune, Cote D'Or, France.) The university which we are about to open here has been built in response to certain needs. It is conditioned by the war background from which those needs have grown, but it looks also to the future. We intend here to save for some good use if possible the time that would otherwise be spent in irksome waiting for the ship that is to take us home ; we in- tend to teach and to study whatever things the wait- ing army may desire to learn ; we intend also to seize out of the very handicaps and necessities of the mo- ment some lasting advantage. In our earlier school or college days perhaps we thought of education as merely one of the special enterprises which a civil- ized state is expected to support. Perhaps we thought that schools and colleges spring from earth full-grown, that methods of instruction, however unpleasant, are inevitable and unchangeable, and that the best use of a classroom is to escape from it once for all into the real world. We may never have cared greatly to learn; we may have thought that no red-blooded creature ever cared to teach. Now, however, we are reduced to a society of fellow- citizens, each trying to help the other to a little 95 96 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS knowledge. The university which rises in these simple buildings and with such meager equipment illustrates to us what education really is when stated in simple and sincere terms. Here we find in what sense society itself — that is, any group of human beings who live together — may be for tJie best in- tellectual purposes a university. In the first place we observe that this university is devoted to adult education. Even if we are not all somewhat advanced in years beyond the age when men usually attend school or college, at least the experience of the war has been for most of us the equivalent of time, and we approach our studies here with a maturity not vouchsafed to the average fresh- man. Did we ever think it disgraceful for a man to be still going to school when he is, as we say, beyond the school age 1 May we learn here and carry back home with us thejmportant truth that no man should ever consider himself beyond the school age. The education of adults ought to be as natural in society as the education of youth. There was a time in American history when a college boy left his course at the end of the sophomore or junior year, and earned the money to complete his education. Fifty years ago some of the best New England colleges postponed the spring term until fairly late in the summer, and began the autumn term fairly early, so that in mid-winter the seniors could be free for teaching bchool. The record is clear that the stu- SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 97 dents who in this way varied their studies with prac- tice achieved far better results as scholars than those do now whom we try to cram for life — try, that is, to pour into them, as though into a reservoir, all the wisdom, all the technical and professional knowledge, all the artistic inspiration, all the good manners, all the ideas they will ever need. It is to be feared that the college graduate who is thus charged once for all with culture must be economical of the supply; many graduates are. Yet men and women do become well-educated ; often they explain the fact by saying that they learned more in some experience or other after they left college than in all the classrooms they attended. Their explanation amounts to this — that having come in contact with real life they were aware from time to time of a need of fresh intellectual equipment for their work, and they were fortunate enough to find what they needed, either in books or in some person who shared the wisdom with them; their life, therefore, became an alternation of study and practice — the study fitting them to proceed with their career, and each new experience in their career showing them more dearly what they needed to study. We may find the illustration in ourselves. The work to which we were appointed in the army was for the most part predestined by the preparation we had made in civil life, and the studies which we now care to follow are in many cases suggested to us by what we did in the war. We have discovered new needs, we say; now we shall study to supply them. Yet we would not turn to a university for help if we had not been accustomed to some sort of study, and we certainly would not have asked for the par- 98 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ticular instruction we now desire had not our recent experience taught us something about ourselves. If any man thinks this state of mind temporary, be- longing to the accidents of war, we hope here in this university to make such a state of mind seem the permanent ideal for all men and women. We hope that our experiment here may spread the habit of life-long study at home. Why should a man give up the good custom of withdrawing occasionally from his work to secure the training which that very work has caused him to desire ! The foolishness of trying to cram for life, as we have tried in our educational system, would be demonstrated, even if we had no other proof of it, by the number of things of which we had no immediate need when we left school, and which have rusted in our memory until the unlucky day when we wished to use them and found them out of repair. We tried to learn such matters at the wrong time of life; we studied too many things at once. Geography, for example, is considered still by many people a school subject, but were we ever so much interested in studying it as we are now? Whether we are twenty years old or thirty at the moment, why should we not study geography under the best instruction as soon as we discover the im- portance of if? Of course such a point of view, could we make it prevail in America, would force us to change much of our educational machinery. We should then find it an impertinent thing to impose entrance examina- tions upon men and women who ask simply to be taught. We are rather proud that we have no entrance examinations for this university. There is no reason why any person, so he be sane, should not SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 99 have access freely to the instruction he desires. Whether the candidate can profit by the course will in many cases be evident enough to whoever is com- petent to give the course ; but often where the teacher would expect otherwise, the instruction will prove unexpectedly valuable for the student, simply be- cause his experience has taught him a need which he alone best understands. The place for examinations is at the end of the course. Yet even in the giving of degrees and certificates there is some folly unless men preserve their common sense — unless they re- member that what a man knows is in no way con- ditioned by the parchment, however sealed and signed, and that a genuine access of knovv^ledge will appear sufficiently and inevitably in his conduct, in his power to live more wisely, more unselfishly, more happily. The second aspect of our university work here, growing out of the conditions of the moment and yet holding a prophecy for education at home, is that the teaching here will be done by fellow-citizens — that is, the faculty will be drawn from officers and men who yesterday were simply comrades in arms. To be sure they are asked to undertake this work be- cause of their standing as educators in well-known schools and colleges, but we prefer to think of them in the significance just suggested, as good citizens sharing with their fellows the advantage they hap- pen to possess in intellectual wealth. Just as we have thought of education on the whole as a subdivision of life, something apart, not vital, so we think of teaching too exclusively as a special profession. Yet if the business of education is to help a man to live, if the best edu- 100 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS cation is alternate study and experience, then surely teaching should be a normal function for any gen- erous man or woman. As a matter of fact, the world of education, far from being an unselfish world, as we sometimes permit ourselves to think, is really the very citadel of selfishness. A few teachers indeed devote their lives to spreading knowledge, but so- ciety as a whole studies only for its own purposes, and the individual man and woman feels no responsi- bility to pass on to their fellows their share of light, as precious and for the giver as simple as tHe cup of cold water. We content ourselves with thinking that the pub- lic schools or the paid teacher at the university can attend to education for us ; we need not worry about it. There once were men and women, in days long gone by, who thought the ordinary charity of life should be the affair of specialists — of the monk, the priest, the hermit. We now understand better the obligation upon us all to provide clothing and shelter for our fellows in need. The most selfish man now loses a little sleep, even in a comfortable bed, if he knows a beggar is couched on the cold pavement in front of his house. But this is the only kind of charity we are as yet deeply interested in, and this is but physical charity. We are not yet quick to share the intellectual bread and drink and warmth which may have come to us by good fortune. The beggar and the starving man trouble us ; we are even worried over the poor who do not realize how poor they are; we would teach them to take their part in society. But we are not yet greatly troubled by ignorance in a man, though his ignorance may bring himself and his family to SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 101 many kinds of disaster — though his ignorance may poison us with disease, or with what is as dangerous, with prejudice and the beginnings of hate. We are little disturbed when such a man is conscious of his ignorance and would be glad to learn ; still less does it cost us worry if he is quite content not to know. If in this university we can adopt an unselfish atti- tude toward those fellow-citizens who wish to be taught the knowledge in which we are richer than they, perhaps we may take home with us a new ideal of intellectual service. That the ideal is needed, we can illustrate once more from ourselves. When a young man asks, "Have you such or such a course for meV" if we are compelled to say, "No, this course is not yet ready," the possible student, since he cannot get the particular course he thought he wanted, will turn away as though his concern with the university were ended. He is surprised if we suggest to him that since he is so far advanced in his studies as to outstrip what the university can offer, he should himself do some teaching to share his knowledge with those who know less. The third aspect of our program here which we hope will be permanent in education at home, is the preparation we have tried to make to teach a man what he needs. This preparation might seem to be inevitable and the idea of it so obvious that it should not be mentioned at all, but in fact very few schools and colleges in the United States are organized to meet the particular and immediate demands of in- dividuals. When you apply at the door of a uni- versity for instruction in a particular thing, you find that the university expects you to work toward a degree, or to register in a certain school; it ex- 102 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS pects to label you ; you must be a candidate for some- thing. If you apply at a high school, you are grouped for convenience of administration with cer- tain others, presumably desiring the same things as yourself, and in order to make the group symmet- rical to the eye of the administrator you and the other members of the group are all required to take a few courses which you all know you do not want. Even here in the peculiarly free university which we are improvising we have heard the question raised of a student who takes three courses, let us say, one in the College Business, one in the College of Letters, and one in the College of Art — to what college does he belong? Of course he belongs to all three, or rather, to none of them; he is a candi- date, if you choose, for knowledge, and he is chiefly interested in life. The record ought to be complete and satisfying even to the statistician, when we know which courses he is for the moment following. Unfortunately, however, the ideal of teaching people just what they need at the moment when they need it, is sometimes stated in a negative way. We some- times hear that education will be successful when this or that subject shall not be taught. Yet the absence of a subject will not of itself make a good curriculum. There is danger also that when we try to give people just what they need we may give them something temporary and not what they most pro- foundly need ; there is danger that we may not pro- vide for the demands of the day after to-morrow or the day after that, when the students shall have outgrown the satisfied need of to-day. It is the hope of this university, not only to supply each student with such instruction as his present condition calls SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 103 for, but to teach him also the means of access to more knowledge as his desire for the knowledge may grow. What the needs of all of us may be, we discover in a general way by observing the experience of the world and of the men immediately about us in these last four or five years. Adult education we have learned to look upon as of the first importance, since the war has taught us what continuous training is necessary to keep our imagination young and our attitude toward life supple and adaptable. It is our frailty as human beings, unless we watch our- selves ceaselessly, to become stiff and unbending in a world that changes always. Were we hot radicals at twenty-one? We shall be cool and conservative at thirty, unless some blessed chance or some excep- tional wisdom keeps us adjusted to each new day. Momentum counts for as much in human characters as it does in railway trains. It hurts us to stop a habit or to change the direction of it — most of all an intellectual habit. When some such catastrophe as the war uproots us, forcing us to alter our way of life and our ideas, we observe that our neighbors fall into groups according as they are quick or slow to adapt themselves to the new world, or according as they are unable to adapt themselves at all. Some men who had spent their lives in the city with small opportunity for experience out-of-doors, found themselves quickly at home in the camp and in the trench. Others seemed unable to face the hard fact 104( DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS that they had been rooted out of their old ways; they sought even in camp and trench for their ac- customed environment. Among the students com- ing to this university — shall I admit even among the teachers? — ^not all are aware of what should be obvious, that this university is unlike other uni- versities, that it has not the same equipment in laboratories, in libraries, in dormitories, and cer- tainly not the same wealth of tradition. These ex- amples illustrate more than our moment or this place; men everywhere and at all times are slow to change their mental attitude. It is no great wonder that the occasional genius whose imagination is alert and whose spirit is supple to the facts just as they are, and just as they change, should lead his fellows. Once he has turned them in a certain direc- tion, however, it is no wonder that he should some day incur their dislike; for he will continue to change, and they will prefer the first path he taught them. Whatever consistence of ideals we may strive for, there is no persistent way of life, outside of growth itself. Last year's wisdom, slavishly con- served, produces no Ught for to-day. The best coun- try, it would seem, and the safest is that in which the greatest number of citizens are supple-minded. The most dangerous country, as we have found to our cost, is that in which the intellectual momentum is strongest, in which ideas have become fixed and organized. To itself such a country will seem sin- cere. Unfortunately it will also seem to itself adapt- able and supple. But only by training, by life-long education, by the most vigilant self-examination, can any man or any nation remain open-minded. It is SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 105 the irony of this insidious momentum that we all think ourselves peculiarly open in spirit, and wish that the foreigner were not so fond of his tradition. We pity the Hindu in the fever districts who is re- luctant to boil the drinking water; his ancestors were not in the habit of boiling it. Poor fool, we think. "We ourselves, however, are not likely to adopt the metric system. Of course there is every reason why we should adopt it, except the Hindu reason that our fathers got on without it. We are not greatly different, we highly civilized men, from the spiders and the bees and the other small crea- tures of instinct whom we study sometimes with won- der and sometimes with patronizing self-satisfac- tion, noticing that what they do has been suggested by instinct until instinct itself has become habit. Man has been tempted in some phases of his phi- losophy to believe that his instincts, if left to them- selves, would prove as wise as seem the instincts of the bee or of the spider. The popular theorists of the eighteenth century spread the hope that all of us might be perfect if our natural instincts were al- lowed to develop undisturbed, and that such an un- embarrassed development of instinct would be the best education. The men and women who sought happiness by this program found the results some- what disastrous. Other philosophers have believed that though not all instincts are necessarily good, perhaps the good instincts might be exclusively developed until they should become habits, and goodness, after our in- stincts were once selected, might be automatic. Yet even though such a program of education were possible, it is not likely that the sort of goodness 106 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS which habitual instincts will provide would answer the demands of a changing world. It is really not enough to be good. One must be intelligent also and, if possible, wise. This simple truth is not often realized in practice ; it might well be the chief object of our study here. The noblest con- ception of lif^ is not that which would make good- ness automatic; it is that which would add intelli- gence to goodness, which by study would cultivate suppleness of mind and keep the imagination alert; it is that which in this world of shifting problems would keep the character sound and the mind always on guard. Once more we might illustrate from our experi- ence here in setting up this university. We have heard some complaints from students — let us admit again from teachers also — that we lack books, that we lack tables and desks and chairs and office room, that we lack laboratories. Once more we are crea- tures of intellectual momentum. Our chief concern here, as it ought to be in any university, is to learn something about life itself, about society, about citizenship; is it true that men who have gone through the experience of this war cannot teach each other anything important about life unless they are furnished with textbooks'? The answer of course will be that we are here to study other things than life — algebra, for example, or chemistry, or law, and that the material for such study is chiefly stored up in books. True; but education has for a long time become too much a matter of textbooks. We can make experiments in physics only if the proper in- struments are put into our hands, but if we really understood physics we could make the instruments. SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 107 We have studied the history of science too much as we have studied other history, in a book; yet to know science we should live again the experience of each historic genius, we should invent anew the ap- paratus, make the new experiment, and arrive at the new demonstration. A really great teacher of law will teach his pupils to deduce the principles from such cases as normally come before them. Can no legal problems be found except those stored away in textbooks? Can we find nothing for the mind to lay hold on in the life around us? Some of us suspect that the consternation we feel at the lack of textbooks or other physical equipment is the realiza- tion that intellectual momentum has carried us out of touch with life ; we suspect that a wise man would find enough things to study and to teach right here in the daily events of our community. But it may be objected again that the great poets, the great novelists, and the great historians of the world left us masterpieces which cannot be improvised, and which, of course, cannot be studied unless they are here in the university library. Well, they are here. But if they were not, would it be such a terrible mis- fortune if we were forced to express ourselves a little, to make some portrait of our own life, to be- come to some extent ourselves poets, novelists and historians'? Obviously there was a day when men, studying their own lives, did write their own books. Our destiny is nobler than merely to ponder what other men have felt, have done, and have said, in- stead of feeling and doing and saying things our- selves which other men would care to know. In the countryside about us here, in the town of Beaune, in the city o'' Dijon, history and art may be studied to 108 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS whatever extent we please. But it is in the end less profitable to pass hours admiring the beauty with which men long dead built their houses, than to work ourselves here in our university camp to make our own barracks and lecture halls beautiful. Our opportunity is to recover our intellectual independ- ence in a world of too many books, too many libra- ries, and too much physical equipment. When a man is once independent and alert to the life about him, all these things are precious as aids. They are, how- ever, the mere baggage and incumbrance of educa- tion when we find nothing to study except in books, and can arrive at no science unless the laboratory is made for us by somebody else. in The new world into which we are now entering will be, it seems, a world of experts. However we may have blundered happily through life before now, no man can reasonably hope for success or happi- ness hereafter unless he have the training to con- tribute his share to the society in which he moves. The war, more than any other experience we have passed through, has proved the advantages of train- ing. It has also proved how easily skill can be sup- plied where men desire it. Ships have been built, guns have been made, troops have been led by men whose occupation was quite different until they an- swered the call of the moment, but in each case they underwent training for their new task, and their suc- cess was in proportion to that instruction. We begin SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 109 to see that in the improvised armies of the world the undertrained man has been carried as a dead weight. We begin to see that society at all times must carry the ignorant as so much handicap for the educated. For the moment I speak of education in those things which help us to earn our living. No man about us can be poor without making us poor also; for we shall have to give him alms on the street, or if we prefer not to give alms that way, we must pay taxes to support the asylum or the hospital, or we must contribute to the charitable society which furnishes him with free medicine when he is ill or with shelter when he cannot pay his rent. Had we no other than selfish motives, we should still be obliged by every means possible to cure this man of his poverty — that is, to supply him with the technical training and to implant in him if we can the necessary energy to support himself. Just how shall we approach this problem? Shall we force the lazy and the poor to work, or shall we educate them to such a point of view that they themselves will desire further training and will feel ashamed not to take their part in citizenship? This question will press upon us from many angles ; shall society protect itself by physical or legal force, or shall it use the spiritual force of education? Upon our answer to this question we may be sure the happiness of the new world will turn. But the question of training is not limited to the economic field. Even though a man can earn his living, even though he flatter himself that he is in no way a burden upon society, he may have forgotten that life itself is an art or science, and that citizen- ship demands more than mere good-will. In the new 110 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS world we shall expect men and women to be trained, not only to earn their living, but, much more, to take their part in the state. If we have learned nothing else from Germany, that country of superb efficiency in material things, we ought to have learned from her that men must be expert in citizenship unless they will be led like sheep, and that a nation must be expert in world affairs unless they will give their consent to the committing of international crimes. "Without expertness in the citizenship of one's nation and in the larger citizenship of the world, we shall be victims of that intellectual momentum which everywhere endangers human virtue and happiness. We no longer explain the causes of war with the bril- liant simplicity of Carlyle; when two armies face each other, and when we ask why those who had no personal quarrel with each other are now pre- paring to blow each other's brains out, it is not enough to answer, they are there because their rulers had a quarrel and were shrewd enough to send others to fight it out ; we now know that this explanation is insufficient. But just what is the cause of any par- ticular war, no one knows — at least, the historians who have studied the causes most profoundly usually disagree. It is time with some humility to study the effects of international manners — to seek, that is, such expertness in world conduct as may avoid setting up new causes for war even in the attempt to frame a lasting peace. It may be long before we reach world expertness, but in each nation the fields are quite clear which call for study. We must know all that can be known of primitive labor, of food supply, of the land; we must know all the facts available about machinery SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY IIL I and its proper nse ; we must know the utmost of the principles which govern personal relations — rela- tions to other men as individuals and relations to the state, and we must know far more than Americans in general have yet learned of that world of art within which alone a nation can fully express its spirit. The question of land is so important that any, citizen, one might suppose, would be ashamed not to be expert in it. Before anything else we must have food; yet in our country, as in other modern states, men desert the farms for the cities, food be- comes scarce or expensive, the country becomes the unproductive playground of the rich, the cities be- come the devouring furnaces in which the poor are burned up. These tendencies now repeating them- selves in our own history have occurred many times before — in ancient Eome and in societies older still. What shall be done about if? Food must be raised, yet we cannot force men back to the soil if they wish to leave it — cannot, that is, unless the farmer's life is to be an actual slavery. How to teach men the importance of life on the soil, and how to make that life so rich in rewards that men will be content to serve in it — that is our economic task. But in America a closer contact with the soil is needed for intellectual reasons. Our society lacks the kind of wisdom most easily cultivated among men who work close to nature, and who do tkviir thinking furthest removed from city artifice and from the tyranny of books. The country in which we find ourselves at this moment, France, illustrates what is called peas^ ant wisdom, but what for us should be the plain com-' monsense of citizenship. Waiting here as we are 112 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS for our tarn to go home, we have at least the oppor- tunity to watch the instinctive behavior of a great people taking np again the ways of peace. We can at the same moment study the programs of ear- nest statesmen, moving as they must in a world of theory, and we can see the French peasant once more happily tilling the beloved farm with mud-stains on his uniform, stains no longer of the trench but of that soil on which his forefathers worked. Such a man asks of peace the simple privilege of continuing his happy labor. What we all of us ask of peace is the opportunity to return to our private happmess. But when we have become too subtle in our theories, we may have lost the secret of that simple peace we desire; we need to be reminded constantly of the peasant point of view, of that elemental wisdom of the soil without which no nation has yet been great, and without which not the most optimistic of us can expect any lasting good fortune for our own country. This university does not hope to impart the precise truth in answer to the hard questions of to-day, for no man yet has found the answers. But we can re- mind ourselves here, and find the illustrations around us, that life rests primarily on very simple facts, that quite literally it rests on the soil, and that our thinking should begin with a desire to keep close to earth, to make life on the land rich intel- lectually, profitable for the man who lives it, in- spiring to his fellows. When we turn from the farm to the city, we face the problem of machinery, which might be used as the metaphor of all modern difficulties. We have not yet found the right relation of machinery to man's happiness. Every inventor of a machine has no SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 113 doubt believed that his invention would decrease the labor of the world and would add somewhat to men's leisure. Yet it has never been proved that those first British weavers were altogether wrong who wished to annihilate the power looms. Those machines took man from the leisure and comfort of his home into the noise and torture of the factory. They destroyed the artisan and substituted the ma- chine-tender. In the countries most progressive economically they discouraged him who would make a complete and beautiful thing, who would make all of a chair or a table or a watch. By subdividing labor they have brought up a generation of machine hands who see but parts of the product and often have not even a thought of the whole. Leisure has not been increased in the world. The personal dig- nity of the laborer is constantly less. Joy in labor has gone out. Man is, as it wer^, caught in his own machine. We all realize this aspect of the modem world, even though we may think there is something to be said on the other side. What we usually say is that machinery is now with us, that its development is inevitable, that we can only ameliorate the dis- advantages of it. Yet since we made it ourselves, the thought will cross our mind at such a moment as this, when the world is taking an inventory of its handicaps and its advantages, that what a man created himself he ought not to look upon as fate. It is our problem to regulate the machinery of the world with constant thought to the happiness and the dignity of the individual, so that even to-day he who makes things, be he dramatist or cobbler, shall have the full joy of creating, and shall keep his full dignity as a man. 114j democracy AND IDEALS In the larger sense also we are caught in the ma- chinery of institutions. Once more the momentum of intellectual habit bids us fear the instrument we ourselves have made. Society makes us do this and that, we say, whereas the conventions of society are of our contriving, and we are free to observe them or not as we choose. We say that it was dangerous for Germany to have so great an army, because with such a weapon in her hand the nation had no choice at last but to use it. Yet there is the same danger precisely from all other organizations, if man feebly lets go his power to change or to direct or to stop the machine he himself set in motion. What we are in danger of doing, if the lessons of history mean any- thing, is to suffer under our own institutions until we can suffer no longer, and then to go mad and in- augurate a revolution — as futile an approach to free- dom as the British weavers made when they broke the power looms. We must educate ourselves to re- tain control of all the machinery of society, with the same hope for society that we cherish for the man in the factory — that none of us may lose or diminish the dignity that belongs to a human being, nor the sacredness of his own personality. In the world of personal relations we shall have many problems which might well be discussed in this university. Perhaps they are too numerous to men- tion here. But the principle upon which they are to be decided is itself a question of the first order. Shall we force people to be good, to be healthy and to be happy according to some idea we may have of good- ness or health or happiness, or shall we submit to them frankly in the most general education all the SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 115 facts that science gives us in the field of ethics, of personal conduct? Education, let us remind ourselves again, is indeed a kind of force, for once a man has felt the charm of reason, he is not entirely free thereafter to make a fool of himself ; at least he can do it only with re- gret. But the cruder kinds of force, the laws which seek to make man good by removing the possibility of being bad — we must decide sooner or later whether such laws do not practically educate men to be feeble of will and incapable of any choice. We can conceive of society as of an army in which every citizen obeys the state only because he is driven to obedience. We can conceive of society also as of an army in which every citizen sub- mits to the same discipline, but for the far different reason that he realizes the value of cooperation. These societies may outwardly look the same, but the state of man in them is worlds apart. Liberty in both societies is indeed limited, in one by the police, in the other by the mind. It is not at all clear at this moment that our own country is in the way of choosing that sort of discipline which reason alone dictates. We as citizens in our moment of study here may reflect upon this problem. Not simply because we are here in France, the country of art, should we remind ourselves of our own poverty of expression. Our artistic life in com- parison with that of other great nations is indeed poor. We love painting and architecture and music, but except for some of us who have studied those things in Europe, we are not as a nation far ad- vanced in art. To say so frankly may hurt our pride, but it is necessary to recognize the fact if we are 116 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS to mend it. The question presses home, I repeat, not simply because we are here in France, but be- cause having measured ourselves beside other na- tions, we find we cannot adequately express the ideas and the ideals we know we possess. We are less expert in social manners, in letters, in the other arts than men of whom we think, much as we respect them, that they have a spiritual life not deeper than our own. If that is indeed our conviction, there is no choice but to train ourselves at once in the ex- pression which we lack. Yet this training is ad- visable for deeper reasons than the mere desire to show ourselves in arjt the equals of other people. It is a fair question whether a man ever knows any- thing until he can express what he knows. Much American knowledge, we have come to suspect, is not knowledge at all, but a half-guessed thought or feeling, an inadequate information about something in general. The preciseness of tha. Frenchman, the Englishman's solid grasp of fact, are not the pe- culiar gifts of some one climate nor the inheritance of a particular blood — they are the results of train- ing. If we admire such abilities, we can make them our own. IV This university, then, though it may have a short career in this particular place, we hope will con- tinue its work in the memory of all who come here, and in lasting influence on our country 's future. We wish it to stand for the idea of national training. If society must use any force in self -protection, let SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 117 ns organize the intelligence of men, let us educate them. Let us make our fellows expert. We hope for fewer wars, but we have no wild dream that men will suddenly become unselfish or automatically wise. If wars are ever to cease it will be because society has learned how to avoid the causes of war. To this good end each one of us must see that our country takes its part by organizing what might be called a national army against ignorance, by taking arms against the prime cause of disease, of poverty, of crime, and of those strong prejudices which in times past have led men to hate each other. UNIVERSAL TRAINING FOR NATIONAL SERVICE No problem now before the United States is more important than the question of national education. Even while we were preparing for war we had oc- casion to feel some alarm at certain weaknesses in our educational system revealed by those prepara- tions. At the same time so amazed were we at the resourcefulness of the nation in times of stress, that we asked why our great reserves of character and of skill should not be mobilized more completely in times of peace for the constant good of the country. Now that the war is past we find ourselves facing the special problem of training for national defense. Some kind of army we must have, large or small, and some kind of training. Shall we give this train- ing only to a group of professional soldiers? Shall this training look only to the contingencies of war? Some of us who have been working with our fel- low citizens on foreign soil, and from that distance have been looking back toward our country, study- ing it with increased affection and perhaps also with increased concern, earnestly hope that the people at 118 j UNIVERSAL TRAINING 119 home will compel training for national defense, and that they will interpret national defense in a larger way than any nation has yet thought of. We have .in mind of course the total needs of American educa- tion — the need of more and better schools, the need of large revisions in college and university cur- ricula, the need of a strong national department of education. For the moment, however, we have in mind particularly the defects of education observed in the United States Army in France, and also what the educational program in the American Ex- peditionary Force has done to remedy those defects ; and since we are convinced that the time has come for all progressive nations to organize for peace as well as for war, conceiving of national defense as preparation for both peace and war, we would ad- dress ourselves for the moment to the specific prob- lem of national training. The principles according to which we would envisage such national training are five. In the first place, the idea of universal service should be expanded to include training for all other duties of citizenship besides military, and to include training of all prospective citizens, even of those physically unfit for military service. In the second place, the present temporary cantonments in the United States, or equivalent cantonments, should be con- verted at once into permanent training schools for citizenship. In the third place, a permanent educa- tional corps should be added to the army ; this corps should be formed of experts in school, in vocational, and in the more elementary college subjects; from time to time competent officers in other branches of army service should be assigned to this corps. 120 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS In the fourth place, there should be a compulsory training period of twelve months with the colors, from September first to September first or from June first to June first, or between any other dates which should be found practical — care being taken simply to fit this period into other educational or vocational obligations. This training should be be- gun between the ages approximately of eighteen or twenty, perhaps a little earlier or a little later, as experience might prove advisable. Approximately one-half of this training should be for military science and for physical development, the other half for training under military discipline in school, in vocational, or in college subjects. In the fifth place, the citizen in training should be free to elect the kini of civil education he receives, with the ex- ception that training in elementary subjects should be compulsory for illiterates and for the foreign- born. The mobilization of the American Army demon- strated that an astounding number of native-bom citizens are illiterate, and that of our foreign-bom citizens a still larger number cannot read or write the English language, and in some cases cannot understand it. The mobilization demonstrated also that an appalling number of our young men are not in proper physical condition. It is unlikely that any economic or social pressure will tend to remedy these evils. The illiterate citizen can make a living UNIVERSAL TRAINING 121 of a sort more or less satisfactory to himself, and the foreign-born can associate with others of his origin, and both classes can avoid that social criti- cism which would urge them toward complete citizen- ship. In fact, economic and social pressure tends actually to segregate in our country the illiterate ele- ments and the various groups of foreign-bom, and unless some strenuous effort is made to weld all these groups into one, there is no likelihood of change in these unfortunate conditions. The program of edu- cation in the A. E. F. demonstrated, on the other hand, that even brief courses of study followed in- tensively under military discipline are adequate to correct illiteracy and to teach our language. The whole experience of our army demonstrates further that if brought together in a common purpose, the various elements of our population can be speedily made into one nation. We should now find a means to provide these benefits for our country in time of peace. Even those soldiers who were neither illiterate nor unable to command the English language showed to a distressing degree the inefficiency of our popular education. The men waiting to return to the United States were pathetically eager to master some trade or some profession in order to be sure of a worthy place in the society to which they were returning. Far more than one-half of the A. E. F. were with- out adequate training for any trade or profession, and perhaps because of the intellectual stimulus of their experiences in the war the men themselves were uncomfortably aware of their lack. It is disturbing to think that they may miss their proper place in their generation. It is more disturbing to reflect, 122 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS however, that even had they not gone to Europe in the army, they would still have been without train- ing for professions or trades; in fact, through the army educational program many of them accident- ally received such training and preparation for citizenship as is provided nowhere in the United States for any large group of men. It seems folly not to make permanent in our national life for all citizens the advantages which the soldiers in France temporarily enjoyed. The mobilization of our army showed, on the other hand, how rich potentially the manhood of our na- tion is, and how quickly it responds to the regular life and the scientific care which even a hurried prep- aration for war supplied. The soldiers in general enjoyed such health as is the rule in no other com- munity. The total discipline of their life — regular hours, rational diet and decorum of conduct — brought out their best physical and moral traits, so that to look at the average group of American sol- diers was a satisfaction ; and this condition of health and good living quickened to the full their intel- lectual capacities, so that those who taught them in all subjects, from the most elementary to the most advanced, wondered at their eagerness and their ability to learn. Furthermore, the life in the army developed in our youth a sense of social cooperation which some of us had feared was lacking in the American character. No body of men in our coun- try seems now more eager to study and to deal in- telligently with the social problems which confront us than the men of the army, who have been learning in a kind of laboratory course what responsibility man owes to his fellow. The fact that in the army UNIVERSAL TRAINING 123 they met other Americans from all parts of the coun- try, developed a new sense of nationality; and the meeting in the same ranks of rfch and poor, de- veloped a new sense of democracy. These advan- tages of health and morals, of intellectual awaken- ing, of patriotism and of democratic sympathy, we desire to provide for each generation in our country, as much for those who are never called into battle as for those who in time of need answer the call. It is the logic of our course in this war that our army, organized to defend the ideals of civilization, at the end proved itself to be a vast university of citizen- ship. It would be the most profitable result of the war for our country and for the world, should this university in citizenship become permanent for all our people. This training should be provided for all men not mentally defective. Even those who are physically unfit for military service can derive great benefit from such bodily training as is suited to their needs, and quite as much as other men they can derive benefits from training in the non-military duties of citizenship. Much of the disruptive thinking in so- ciety is done by men physically handicapped, whose point of view toward their fellows is warped or em- bittered by their own misfortunes. In many cases their philosophy of life would be made more gen- erous by an improvement in their health, and in all cases society owes it to them to provide even more adequate advantages than for those who start life without handicap. Association with their fellow citizens in a national system of training would prob- ably develop in these men at least a greater sense of unity with the nation and an increase of pride in. IM DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS what they themselves could contribute to society as a whole. In a very large number of cases the physi- cal defects which now weaken the youth of our coun- try can easily be corrected, but like illiteracy they can be corrected only if society insists on bringing the individuals under the proper course of train- ing. The advantage of converting the present training cantonments or equivalent cantonments into perma- nent training schools is obvious. In our country much sentiment attaches to places of education, and if we are to instal in our national life a vast system of training in citizenship, it is in our temper to make of those places where this citizenship is taught, shrines as it were of affection. If men look back with reverence to their college campus or to the school in which they first had some glimpse of the possibilities of life, there is reason why these larger schools should be far more deeply revered in which men from whole sections of the country would be brought together for training in the total defense of their homes — ^in the defense of their country against possible enemies on sea or land, and in its defense against disease, ignorance and incompe- tency. In these permanent schools much of the material now used only for purposes of war could be used constantly for purposes of peace. The materials which in times of war must be gathered hurriedly, instruments for engineering, for chemical research, for hospital and sanitary service, would be main- tained at the highest point of excellence in the laboratories of these schools. At the American E. F. University at Beaune the laboratories in UNIVERSAL TRAINING 125 chemistry, physics, bacteriology, medicine, biology, engineering, fine arts and music, were supplied largely out of the resources of the army. On the return of the army to the United States it would have been in the highest degree desirable if these laboratories could have continued to serve educa- tional purposes, and other laboratories also on a much larger scale, which would then have been avail- able at short notice for any emergency of national defense. If it is desirable to maintain for permanent uses the material instruments which our army tempo- rarily collects for war, it is still more desirable to retain for the advantage of our country in times of peace the educational resources which the army must also improvise for war. A large part of the duty of the modem army involves scholarship of a high order, knowledge of languages, of history, of inter- national politics and of course of the sciences. A nation which trains for all duties of citizenship, civil as well as military, will find it advantageous to develop in peace times the same scholarship in the same things. To conduct such schools as are described above, experts would be needed for the teaching of all ele- mentary and secondary school subjects, for the teaching of trades and vocations, and for the teach- ing of such subjects of college or university grade as the youth in training would be studying at the time. In addition to the experts who would form the nucleus of this educational corps, teachers should be recruited from officers in other branches of army service, who from time to time would thus have an opportunity to expand their own scholarship, and to 126 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS make a direct contribution to the intellectual and social life of the country. Hitherto it has been only by accident that armies have been permitted to do constructive social work; after a war with Cuba, for example, the army surgeon is permitted to clean up a fever district. There is no reason why the train- ing of engineers, of surgeons, of officers in every branch of the service, should not at all times be put at the disposal of the country. It will be noted that in the period of training the proportion of non-military education is approxi- mately equivalent to the amount of time devoted to study yearly in the average high school or college. The time therefore spent in national training would not be in addition to the years required for higher education. The period of training should be so situated between high school and college that those young men, the comparatively few of our country, who enjoy a college education, could during the year of service cover the ground of their Freshman work, and could also learn habits of application and of study at the moment when they most need to learn them. In fact, it is not improbable that the months spent in the unusually favorable conditions of regu- lar hours and good health would save time for the average student. No one familiar with college life is blind to the fact that college students ordinarily waste the greater part of their time; this is true even if one admit that an important benefit of col- lege life is the social contact established with other men of one's age. It is not so generally realized that the average college student is extremely care- less in his diet, and on the whole is far below the UNIVERSAL TRAINING 127 physical state in which at his age he should be. It has been the hope of college athletics to correct this deplorable condition, but in this hope college athletics have been disappointing. Army life, hpw- ever, as this war has demonstrated, provides for every soldier a finer system of training than athletes usually submit themselves to in times of peace. A student in perfect health will waste less time in idle- ness and will make greater progress when he does study than the average college boy as we have known him in the United States. Obviously we must teach the illiterate to read and write, and we must teach the foreign-born to use our language. Aside from this obligation, however, an essential feature of national training should be the complete liberty of the man trained to select his studies. The nation should undertake during this year of training to advance him as far as possible in any course of study which he desires and is enuipped to follow. If he looks forward to busi- ness, to agriculture, to industry, then his training should help him toward that career. If he expects to attend college, the training should take the place of his Freshman year. If he desires to study art, Iiis training should be in art. Experience with the educational program in the A. E. F. demonstrated the almost unthought-of potentialities in the Ameri- can character. Our soldiers apparently have as great native endowments in the arts as the most favored of the Latin races, and a system of national training which should try to develop all the latent powers of the individual would shortly transform our national life. Perhaps the temptation of any 128 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS such system as we are here suggesting would be to prescribe for the youth of the nation what it should study. This temptation must be absolutely avoided. To yield to it would be to overwhelm the whole country in that form of intellectual Prussian- ism which now fortunately is found only in the con- servative catalogues of some of our universities — those which persist in prescribing subjects which have become dead, or in teaching vital subjects as though they were dead. Beyond this suggested sys- tem of national training, the universities should still pursue their work of teaching and research, func- tioning according to their special facilities. But the nation should undertake to make an inventory of its citizenship in each generation, and to advance every man as far as possible toward the work to which he feels called. in Such a system of training as is here suggested would be very expensive. The items of expense would be the buildings and their up-keep, their equipment, the teachers who would form the frame- work of the educational corps, and the cost of pro- viding subsistence for the men in training. All these expenses, however, should be charged frankly to national education, and the nation should realize that in one form or another this expense is unavoid- able. "We may refuse to combat illiteracy and dis- ease, we may refuse to assume responsibility for the making of the foreign elements in the United UNIVERSAL TRAINING 129 States into a unified nation ; but in that case we shall pay for the support of poor houses, of hospitals, of jails and of police, and we shall pay even more heavily in loss of national health and efficiency. If we are to check the ignorance, the disease and the discontent which in various ways menace our so- ciety, we must be ready to pay as much for education as we are now prepared to invest in international canals or in emergency war bills. It is a tendency of our country to disguise the cost of education. We remit taxes on educational build- ings and on land devoted to educational purposes, and in our bookkeeping we distribute the cost of tuition. Yet even when the whole account is shown, it does not appear that we give generously to educa- tion, though as a nation we have enjoyed the reputa- tion of great generosity in this field. Until we are ready to pay for popular education, we are not likely to achieve even approximately those minimum results which we sometimes try to make ourselves believe we are reaching. In order to give even one year of sound training to every young man in our country, it will be necessary to assume the cost as a national expense. There should of course be some financial return to the country in the greater effi- ciency of our citizens and in the decrease of dis- ease and of irresponsibility. But whether or not such a result does follow, the nation should be asked now to face the internal peril of illiteracy and of ignorance as frankly and as generously as it faced the menace of an enemy from abroad. 130 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS IV A system of training so organized would have obvious advantages. In a general way each train- ing camp would tend to become an educational cen- ter. More specifically, the annual inventory of our educational shortcomings would point out for our school system the task to which it should address itself. Undoubtedly the result would be thaf year by year the schools would send to the training camps generations better prepared ; by keeping the election of the courses in the training camps entirely free, we should be able to assist each student to make progress from the point at which his education had left off, and the gradual rise of standard in the courses in this year of training would be the barometer of the intellectual progress of the nation. The year of training would also show which parts of the country were providing inadequate facilities for education, and means could be taken by the national government to improve the elementary schools in those districts. It is not unlikely that as a result of this national training and of the statistics which it would make available, the nation would soon be persuaded, as it should have been persuaded long ago, to establish in the federal government a strong department of education, and that department would collaborate with the army in training for citizen- ship. But the most direct advantage would be for the large majority of our young men who at present re- ceive no high school training at all, nor even much UNIVERSAL TRAINING 131 elementary education. To insure for them a rea- sonable start in life would be worth any cost and any effort. In no other way than by national train- ing undertaken as a national expense can this vast body of each generation be sought out in the small town, on the farm, inHhe overcrowded city, and can be taught the things essential to each individual case. To care for this neglected majority would be really to train our nation. Perhaps the by-product of such a system of train- ing as is here outlined would be the bringing of the army into a sane relation with society. Through the fear of militarism which possesses the modem world, it has become our custom to support the army and to admire military science only in fiioments of extreme need. As a result, the soldier in war time receives an adulation perhaps exaggerated, and in peace times he is neglected, feared, certainly put to no good use. At this moment when our army thinks of returning, it is interesting to consider that every man in it hopes to go back to some constructive work for his country, except the professional soldier. He can look forward only to inactivity until the spas- modic need of him arises again. Perhaps society is wise in fearing the army which has nothing to do; it has been stupid, however, in finding no use for the army in time of peace. If we could add to the military functions of our army this constructive kind of national defense, we should be providing a noble and honored career for the man on whom in extreme moments the life of the nation depends. We should be bringing the soldier into constant relation with the social needs of the country he serves, and we should be teaching every youth within our borders 132 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS that broad conception of citizenship expressed for the Anglo-Saxon race by John Milton, ''I call a com- plete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices both private and public, of peace and war." VI UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP In this moment of recovery, when it would he a satisfaction to name some positive fruit of the war, not merely the checking of a foe but some advance in the condition of mankind, we like to believe that the war has indicated anew the power of the mind if rightly trained, and consequently the importance of education. Even in the midst of what seemed a trial by force, the play of mind was imposing and decisive. No wonder if the armies in the field began to cherish that oldest of deferred hopes, the vision of a world made orderly by intelligence. The war forced us all to think a little ; it suggested at last what might hap- pen if we all thought a great deal. Other wars before now have inspired this vision in other men, but hitherto, as I said, the hope has been deferred. It is not easy to be thoughtful or intelligent, and human beings will not use the mind they have, much less train it, unless a strong motive compels them. Such a motive has been supplied by a state of war but never hitherto by conditions of peace. When the nation is in great peril we will make sacrifices — that is, we will use our minds, we will cooperate intelligently with our neighbors, we' 133 « 134 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS will improve ourselves ; when peace comes, however, we relax these and other forms of discipline. It is not a moral substitute for war that we need ; for war there can be no substitute, as there can be none for peace. But we need a motive to become civilized, a motive to use our intelligence in the blessed years of tranquillity, a motive at least as strong as those which in the time of danger urge us toward good sense, imagination, and sympathy. Until we have discovered such a motive, we must not expect as the fruit of the war just over any final installation of reason in the affairs of men. But we may note how near we came during this war to a permanent reliance upon intelligence, and we will retard so far as we can the failing of that reliance, if fail it must. It is something that for a time at least men in large numbers became aware of the mind, and a few of us dare believe that if the schools and universities put themselves at the ser- vice of this temporary regard for the intellect, there need be no relapse but continued progress. We base our hope on what we saw in the armies abroad. The power of the mind was revealed to the soldier in his own resistance to privation, to suffering and to mo- notony, in his ability to rise above evil conditions and to remain above them. The life of civilized man, we say, is the life of the spirit. In the trenches men lived in the spirit or not at all. The rest, the warmth and the food usually found in the material world, were for the time transferred to the world of ideas, and were there studied affectionately in all their implications. From this study three conclusions seemed in- variable among the fighting men — -that the war was UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 135 but a preparatory safeguarding of the world so that the real problems might be grappled with ; that these problems would be solved only by the well-trained; and that if the world is to be democratic, good train- ing should be made accessible to all men and women. In their brief moments of leisure the soldiers dis- cussed constantly the questions political, social and economic, which now confront us, and noth- ing could be more uniform than their conviction that to take part in solving these questions one must be expert and prepared. They almost grasped the truth too often unmentioned by those who would settle the affairs of the world, that justice itself is not to be achieved simply by good intentions, but must be preceded by adequate knowl- edge. With such a temper in the armies it is not surprising that the war was a gigantic debate as well as a conflict of arms. Many of us expected the armistice to bring the kind of peace which is silence. When instead it seemed to let loose a chaos of dis- cussion, we were disappointed. We forgot that the discussion had been going on throughout the war, only covered over by heavy artillery and by the cen- sor. Not all of the discussion, of course, was wise or useful, but it was the sincere attempt of a vast number of human beings to use their minds, many of them for the first time; and those who saw that awakening wondered at the eagerness to read, to study, to be informed, at the fierce hunger for bet- ter intellectual equipment, at the impatience which turned away from those who had nothing but ad- monition to offer, and at the attention which followed those who seemed really to know something about anything. Without formulating their convictions 136 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS under too many points, our armies believed anew that men and women should have a decent place in the world, and should be equipped not only to occupy that place, but also to grow out from it into the enjoyment of life as a whole. They believed, that is, in a complete education. Whatever may have been the concern of the diplomats, our fellow-citizen in arms, when he spoke of the future, seemed but to sound variations on the fine ideal written into the program of the British labor party, and worthy of being written into all plans for democracy, — to "bring effectively within the reach not only of every boy and girl, but also of every adult citzen, all the training, physical, mental, and moral, literary, tech- nical, and scientific, of which he is capable." But this was during the war. What reason have we for hoping that this intellectual ferment has not quickly subsided? During the armistice the large number of American soldiers in France who enjoyed opportunities in the army schools and in French and British universities, had a motive toward study, even though the excitement of war was withdrawn. They believed that expert skill would hold every strategic position in the new era, and the monoto- nous waiting in a foreign land made them the prey of fears lest they might not be expert enough to earn their living or to take up again their old place in society. Those who had no trade or vocation were eager to acquire one, and those who already had such skill were eager to convert it into richer living. Now that we are at home again, these two motives seem to operate no less strongly in the majority of men, and the second motive seems es- pecially persuasive. Those Americans who have UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 137 been taught a trade or a profession begin, many of them, to realize that they have not been taught to live. All classes of society feel this motive to educa- tion, but the workingmen perhaps interest us most, since they are taking steps to help themselves. The establishment of workingmen 's schools or col- leges abroad and the first scattered attempts to es- tablish them in this land, can mean only that the worker trained in his craft begins to suspect the truth — that without education also in the things of the spirit, in the world of ideas, he must remain the servant or at least the passive follower of other men. He who works with his hands may make more money than they who follow the learned professions, but he does not on that account feel that his life is as rich as theirs ; when he meets them face to face he knows that in some way which seems unjust he is their inferior. Knowledge is indeed power, and there can be no equality among men until there is an equal opportunity for education. The students in the American army showed an interest in agricul- ture and in business, but they showed an even greater interest in history, in social science, in literature and in the fine arts. They wished to earn their living, but they wished also to live. The schools which workingmen have established abroad, in Belgium, for example, look toward liberal culture, toward raising the craftsman to an intellectual equality with the capitalist, and toward making profitable his free hours. It is mortifying to scholars that when their associate, the educational expert, proposes a new curriculum for training the world, he usually drops those subjects which if wisely taught and stud- 138 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS ied enrich leisure, and he stresses those which at best can only fatten a pay envelope; whereas when the workman founds a school of his own, he asks like a Renaissance prince to enter that general field of knowledge which we call humane. n This difference of aim is the one thing in the pres- ent situation which ought to alarm us who are pro- fessional educators. Thousands of men and women to-day crave knowledge and desire to be taught, but it is not clear that they desire to be taught by us. They will go where they tliink to find intellectual leadership, but possibly they will not look for that in the university. The university ought indeed to lead, to provide teachers and ideas and inspiration, but perhaps our universities and our colleges too, for that matter, are not in the proper relation to society to furnish this service. They receive a kind of respect from the world at large and they seem not likely to lack students, but in the moment when humanity is to some extent conscious of an intel- lectual ambition, it may not be to the universities or colleges already established that men and women will turn, nor to the professional educator. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the university and the professor are to-day but the half-hearted resort of those who seriously desire to know the world and to know life. This prejudice is not surprising if we recall tKe beginnings of our older colleges. Some of them UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 139 have remained small colleges, and others have be- come universities; for the moment, however, the terms may be interchangeable, since with us in America the conditions of leadership are the same for the college in its sphere as for the higher institu- tion. It is therefore illuminating to recall that our colleges were usually built in response to an educa- tional need, such as the world feels to-day ; that their most glorious years were often their earliest, and that during those years there was close collaboration between the college and the community. The stu- dents came from the vicinity ; it was for them that the college had been built, and not infrequently they boarded with the townsfolk, who took them into their homes less to earn money than to help in their educa- tion. The influence of these homes was for many a boy no small part of his training. The teachers also and the trustees were usually representatives of the community, and their work was consecrated by a sense of usefulness to their neighbors. In some colleges the neighbors had actually built the halls with their own hands, and in all of them the public attended the commencement exercises, to judge by the speeches and essays of the graduates whether the boys were doing as the community had the right to expect. If the teacher in those days enjoyed a prestige upon which we now look back with envy, it was because he had earned the gratitude of his fel- lowmen by the great services he rendered; he gave them the aid they desired. So long as the college had such teachers, it continued to be the spiritual product of the locality, as truly a flower of the land- scape as its chapel tower seemed to be, rising from the clustered trees of its campus. 140 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS Few of us would deny that the colleges, or the universities into which some of them grew, have to a certain extent lost this position of honor. We say that times have changed, and that the American community no longer asks the kind of help scholar- ship is qualified to give; we imply that all else de- teriorates, but our colleges retire into the obscurity of a finer and finer excellence. There is another ex- planation, however. The colleges after a while for- got that their life was bound up with the life of the community of which they were the product ; they detached themselves from the landscape and became at last aliens in their own birthplace. In the early days the college trained the boys of the neighbor- hood and sent them into the world, to remote places, to be good citizens and to bring credit to their home and to their Alma Mater. In time, however, the sons of honored graduates began to return to the campus where their fathers had passed their youth. These youngsters could admire the college, but they had nothing in common with the townsfolk, from whom, as they would feel, their fathers had risen; and to the college unfortimately it began to seem more creditable to be training the sons of alumni even though they came from afar, than to be helping those boys at the very door whose parents perhaps had enjoyed no education at all. The estrangement from the community followed quickly, once the col- lege took such an attitude. The students now rarely belong in the landscape ; the townsfolk regard them as strangers, perhaps a bit snobbish, and would not care to receive them into their homes, even if the students would condescend to be so entertained ; the immediate neighborhood no longer attends the com- UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 141 mencement, but devotes its energies to selling haber- dashery and soda-water to student patrons, or from time to time considers the advisability of taxing the college property; and the professor is ignored, un- less by his own personality he makes a place for himself among his neighbors — for in his scholarly functions he is, like the college, detached, and the community has little occasion to know him. Somewhat in this condition, as it seems to me, are the American College and the American University, more especially the institutions in the East, at the moment when they should draw to themselves the eyes of all seekers after truth and life. Their plight is that of the fabulous tree which having sent forth branches so long that they touched the ground, de- cided to use them as roots, and worked itself free at the trunk. The separation may prove fatal, but we seem to think of it as an achievement. Our col- lege catalogues take pains to show that the students come from the ends of the earth, but never boast that the majority of them come from within a radius of ten miles. If we are of the academic cult and are advising a boy where to seek his education, we will of course point out the advantage of going far from home. Any college we live next to is a poor one. We must begin again. If the university is to be our intellectual leader, it must approach with sym- pathy the community in which it is placed, and must put its scholarship at the disposal of its neighbors. Let the foreign student be welcome, whether he come from across the state, or across the continent, or across the world ; but let the first care be for those' within our gates. Said Emerson to the New Eng- 142 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS land abolitionist with the latest news from Barba- dos, *'Love your neighbor, love your wood-chopper; why this incredible tenderness for black folk a thou- sand miles away?" The spirit of our times says to the university, ''Serve the place that produced you; why this ambition to teach anybody, so he be not of your own household?*' in If the university would really serve the men and women around it, it must not insist on solving the problems of a society that has disappeared. And if it asks the present America what problems to solve, the answer will show more often the wish to do than the wish to hear about something. To- day we would live more deeply than before, and since to live requires a technique as well as a theory, we ask for the kind of knowledge that can be con- verted immediately into living. This disposition is as strong at home as it was among the army students abroad. Offer a course in the history of painting, in the history of music, in the history of engineer- ing, and you will have few students, however profit- able such instruction in some circumstances might be ; but offer to teach men how to paint, how to plpy the piano, how to be engineers, and your classes overflow. For us Americans there is no permanent joy in being a looker-on. This wash to practice life colors our thoughts of our two principal needs — the need of skill to earn our living, and the equal need of skill to enjoy our UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 14S leisure. Obviously the skill to earn one's living is a practical need, and here the university most often hesitates to be of aid. If it should collaborate with the whole community, suggesting the answer to the problems of business, of industry as w^ell as of the professions, many scholars fear that the institution would degenerate into a vast trade school, and that the spirit of scholarship would perish. Whether the university ought to become a trade school depends on what kind of trade school we mean. There is every reason why the teaching of trades should be enriched by contact with the spirit of scholarship. The living we earn, whether in a workshop or at a desk, is but a door to life, and the university can show us to what good things of the spirit our trade or profession is a natural entrance, having in mind that the carpenter does not wish to live in a world simply of wood and tools, nor the doctor in a world of sick-beds and medicine, but that both wish to ex- ercise their calling in a common world of ideas, I believe it is true that those who work with their hands consciously desire to live in the world of ideas, but if they had not this desire, it would be the duty of the university to impart it. From the windows of his study the scholar can imagine the whole of society and all the avenues by which men and women must be served; he sees what the car- penter can contribute to the safety, the comfort and the beauty of the home, he sees what the plumber achieves for the public health, he sees how vital is the ministry of him who brings the morning milk to the house of children, how critical to heart and mind the service of those who print our books, how large the usefulness of those who carry our letters and 144. DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS speed tJie exchange of the world 's ideas. The schol- ar can see all this ; why should he not ennoble human toil by sharing his vision with the carpenter, the plumber, the milkman, the printer, the postman? Surely there could be no loss to scholarship in giv- ing them a sight of life as a whole and of the dig- nity of their own work in it. Engineering was once thought to be no proper concern of the university, but even the last tardy conservative now honors the engineer who is a scholar and who therefore makes of his skill a social and a spiritual force. Not long ago a dentist was considered no better than a tooth- carpenter, but the presence of dental schools has not injured our universities, and the work of schol- arly dentists throughout the nation has been for the advancement of science and the happiness of mankind. Droll though the prophecy may sound, we shall yet train our scholar-carpenters and schol- ar-plumbers, who will make their contribution to our spiritual sanity, as well as serve us with their hands. Is there danger to scholarship here ? I would rather say that once the plumber or the carpenter sees the bearing and the implications of his work, he will be, in the words of one of my colleagues, lost to mediocrity forever. We shall have scholarly workmen or none at all, for without some play of mind, some sufficient meaning, all labor now begins to seem intolerable. The work must be done, but before men will undertake it it must be invested with new significance. The second need of us all to-day is skill to enjoy leisure. We shall have more free time, but what can we do with it? Recently Georges Duhamel wrote of the peril to Franch manners and culture, now UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 145 that the laborer has an eight-hour day — some extra leisure, that is, which the French poet did not think his countrymen were trained to profit by. If leisure is an embarrassment for the French, with their ca- pacity for self -entertainment, their wide-spread pro- ficiency in the arts, their love of ideas and their ability to express them, what is it for us, who have so few resources in ourselves? Even now our free hours bore us ; we have many ideas but cannot" ex- change them, and though beautiful arts appeal to us, we are untaught to practice them. "VVe particularly need that teaching which has gone from the curric- ulum — the teaching of the humanities, of the things that increase the enjoyment of leisure. No doubt it is vain to restore them in their old form; better to build them up again by training all the humane aptitudes of which we are conscious. If the univer- sity has lost its students of Greek, let it serve the larger number who would study painting, sculpture, singing, writing, dancing. It takes courage to men- tion the dancing before one's scholarly colleagues, but the truth is that Americans love dancing better than any other art — I had almost said, better than any other occupation. The soldiers abroad danced wherever there was a smooth floor and a little music. The fact that they danced with each other showed, I suppose, that it was the art which interested them. Even when there were girls to dance with, the art transcended courtesy ; she who danced best had the partners. If dancing is our one talent, why should we not increase it? Serious it now is; why should it not be significant? If the graduate faculty hesi- tates to instal a practical course in dancing, how inconsistent of them to accept a documented thesis 146 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS on the dancing the Greeks did some time ago. I speak of dancing, but the principle concerns all the arts in which we have made a beginning, and all the pastimes we genuinely love. If our use of leisure is to be satisfying and happy, we must learn to do beautifully and significantly the things we like to do — we must develop them into fine arts ; and it is the opportunity of the university to lead in this development. In music we love rag- time; the opportunity is to build up out of those rhythms a national music, noble and sincere. Other schools of music are far better developed, but no other so well expresses us, our kind of humor, our kind of sentiment. If in a hundred years ragtime is transformed into the art it should become, and if we university professors meanwhile do not see light, theses may be written on the early symptoms of American music in 1919. But if the university is to be a leader, it will help create the art, not wait to glean in the footsteps of the creators. Let us say much the same thing of the cinema. We are devoted to it heart and soul. The opportunity then is to raise it from an appetite of the nerves to an art. I admit I do not know how this is to be done, but that is only my ignorance. I have seen the soldiers in France by the thousands watching the films in huts and halls and dug-outs. They were all too expert in what they saw not to know that the performance Ln such conditions must be poor. It seemed that they were too expert to be satisfied with any film that can be seen to-day. One had a queer sense that they watched the screen with hunger for the beauty that will some day appear on it. All arts develop out of such a popular interest, whenever the leader appears UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 14(7 to direct that interest; and what excuse shall we make, if the university is not equipped for such leadership ? IV I know what quesuxons will arise in the minds of many sound scholars and good citizens when this proposal is made, to put the universities more than ever at the service of the community. They will ask if in this program there is not danger of over- looking the one service which a university is pecul- iarly destined to render, the service of scientific in- quiry. It is well to impart the skill to earn one's living and the skill to enjoy leisure, but, they will say, in these matters perhaps the university should be content to impart the principles, permitting other agencies to direct the practice; otherwise we may lose the ideal of truth-seeking for its own sake, and by descending into the arena, though with the best of motives, we may ourselves lose some of the vision it was our wish to share. The pursuit of truth, they will say, involves sacrifice and abnegation; the greatest scholar cannot expect to be also the pop- ularizer of his scholarship, and the university, if it would serve its true ends, must be content with the discovery of truth, leaving the spread of it to insti- tutions closer to the daily interests of men. With much of this questioning attitude I sym- pathize. The life of scholarship does indeed involve abnegation and sacrifice, and there are many sub- jects, of the utmost importance to human welfare, which can be appreciated only by the specially 148 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS trained. Some aspects of truth never have been popular and perhaps never will be. But there is a difference in subjects ; some aspects of truth have always been popular, and the study of them involves no sacrifice of the larger audience, nor any retreat into esoteric realms. There is danger that a scholar, overlooking this difference, may come to regard the small audience as a necessary proof that his scholarship is im- portant. Certainly a perceptible distrust arises in any faculty when one of its members draws numbers to him. "If we stooped to make our subject popular," they seem to say, ''we too could have such a following." But the truth is that their subject can be made popular or it cannot ; if it cannot be so made, there is no opportunity for them to ** stoop," and if it can be so made, I, for one, find it difficult to forgive them for reserving it within a limited circle. Those subjects which are most the creations of the human mind and have therefore to the greatest degree a logical and necessary architec- ture — subjects like mathematics or the sciences — must be studied in a given order; if we have not taken the earlier steps, we cannot take the later. But those subjects which at every stage represent or describe the same thing — literature, history, phi- losophy, let us say, which in every age and in all lands give an account of life — these subjects can be entered at any point, as life can be begun at any moment, and though they have purple patches, they have no inaccessible altitudes; in fact, in these subjects the altitudes are often marked by those authors who have had the widest audience. In our university and college catalogues, as UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 149 any one can see who cares to turn the pages for a few successive years, the teachers of literature, of history and of philosophy have recorded their own inabihty to define what is an elementary course in their subject and what is an advanced course. Sometimes we teach modem thought first, and af- terwards ancient thought ; sometimes we reverse the order ; sometimes we throw chronology to the winds, and quite simply invade the subject with a study of miscellaneous authors or periods. It really makes little difference. Yet the scholar's wish to have his exclusive moments leads the teacher of literature to yearn for some difficulties in his field comparable to the splendid obstacles that engage the biologist or the chemist, and having no difficulties at hand, he creates them. Hence the arduous advanced courses in Shakespeare, let us say (prerequisite. Freshman English and at least two other English courses num- bered above thirty). Since Shakespeare designed his art for a fairly average audience, one suspects that those things in Shakespeare which only the chosen can understand are not Shakespeare at all, but the impediments of a self -deceived peda- gogy. If the university should be thrown open to the world — if, for example, we allowed in our class- rooms any who desired to enter, there might at first be embarrassment and confusion, but there would be no vulgarization of any scholarship that really is on the frontier of truth. Those classes which only the few can follow, would be attended only by a few. In such a small audience I should recognize the pe- culiarity of the situation, the difficulty of the subject, but I should not on that account hold the scholar 150 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS necessarily in high esteem. Those classes which any one might follow would be attended by large num- bers. In those numbers I should recognize again the nature of the subject, but I should not count the attendance necessarily to the credit of the teacher. I should admire only the scholar, whether in the narrow paths of science or in the open fields of let- ters, who sought truth with his whole heart, who shared it with the greatest number of his fellows whom he could reach, and who so envisaged his sub- ject that it became a measure of the whole of life, and therefore of the whole community. Truth is for all men, but some men are less prepared for it than others. The task of preparing the more igno- rant is a necessary task; in the eyes of scholarship, however, it is sometimes considered less dignified than the companionship of the learned. No doubt it would be a waste of genius to set a great mathe- matician teaching arithmetic in the third grade. But if one says to us, ^'I cannot cheapen my pursuit of truth by making my work available for the many — only the trained mind can appreciate what I am do- ing," we may be pardoned for finding in the re- mark no proof of greatness nor of scholarship, but rather an indication that the speaker values too high his own intelligence and too low the intelligence of others. Let the university remain indeed the citadel of scholarship and of disinterested research — rather I would say, let it become such a citadel. But let us remember also that true scholarship has a kin- dling power upon all who approach it. For that rea- son I would permit the community, men and women, to come as near to scholarship as they may wish. UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 151 Pernaps they may astonish us by the loftiness of their own conception of scholarship. At least they would be more likely to approach scholarship in a wholesome spirit if they could see that in the thought of the university itself even the highest scholarsEip touches hands naturally with a humble desire to know. Let us therefore break down still further the artificial walls between what have been wrongly considered separate fields and separate stages of knowledge. Life is one, and society under all its complexities is one, and the teaching of the univer- sity, whatever the differences of emphasis, must re- gard the whole life and all the needs of society. To think of life and society as a whole is to re- turn to our present needs and to our hope of satis- fying them. An adequate motive toward civilization can be discerned in man's renewed desire to be com- pletely a man. Therefore we have courage to dream of the worker as intellectually master of the whole plan in which he builds a section; to conceive of mankind at their tasks as differing only as to the tools and the materials, not at all as to the dignity nor the value of the labor; to conceive of mankind at play as differing only in their talents, but all alike trained artisans of happiness and beauty. This part of our ideal may be realized with or without our aid. We have courage also to imagine the community, at work or at play, finding its unity, its communion, its guidance in the university. This part of our ideal will be realized when the university says to the community: Whatever you do, whether for use or for pleasure, can he done heautifuUif. I am here to show you the way. Whatever you do has a mean- ing also. I awo here to, tell you what it means. That 152 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS / am here at all, after the centuries, is a sign that those long dead, ivho hade me say this to you, touched the work of their hour with the enduring wmd. C 310 88 . co^^^->o ^/^^X Z-^^^'^o o « o - ,0 '.<«i/Of«l ♦- «