which demands that they shall pay in honest useful work the price of life they will know contentment. An appro priate expenditure of brain or muscle is the price of life. There is no honest alternative. Work or die. THE AMERICAN MIND* The great Americans of the past have nearly all been conservative-liberals. Washington was a great republican; he was also essentially an aristocrat in social and economic relations, who kept slaves and did not believe in universal suffrage. Lincoln, politically was the greatest of English-speaking democrats, but he let the privileged classes exploit the workingman and the soldier, partly in order to win the war, chiefly because problems of wages and unearned increments and economic privilege generally did not enter into his scheme of democracy. Roosevelt fought a good fight for the square deal in public and private life, but hesitated and at last turned back when it became evident that a deal that was completely square meant the overturning of social life as we knew and loved it in America. And these men we feel were right. Their duty was to make possible a good government and a stable society, and they worked not with theories only, but also with facts as they were. The Germans have argued that the first duty of the state is self-preservation, and that rights of individual men and other states may properly be crushed in order to preserve it. We have crushed the Germans and, one hopes, their philosophy. But no one doubts that it is a duty of society to preserve itself. No one believes that universal suffrage for all, negroes *From the Century Magazine, July, 1919. Reprinted by permission of the author. HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 181 included, would have been advisable in Washington's day, when republicanism was still an experiment. No one believes, I fancy, that the minimum wage, the inheritance tax, and coöperative management should have had first place, or indeed any place, in the mind of Lincoln of 1863. Few suppose that Roosevelt as a socialist would have been as useful to his United States as Roosevelt the Progressive, with a back-throw toward the ideals of the aristocratic state; as Roosevelt the conservative-liberal. Thus the American mind is worth troubling about; and if politically, socially, economically the spirit that we and the foreigners call American has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is time to awake. In liberalism inheres our vitality, our initiative, our strength. Its stagnation, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves of freedom sweeping upward from the masses and on in broken and muddy torrents through the world are poignant dangers. We must open eyes; we must change our ground; we must fight the evil in the new revolution, but welcome the good. Our own revolution lies before the deluge; it is no longer enough to go on; it is not now the sufficing document of a political philosophy. We must not stop with Washington and Lincoln. We must go on where . the conservative Washington and the radical Lincoln would lead if they were our contemporaries. Radicalconservatism is good, and Toryism or radicalism have their uses; but conservative-liberalism, preserved, desiccated museum liberalism, long continued in, is death to the minds that maintain it. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. What liberal ideas have been advanced in recent years by Wm. J. Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Louis F. Post? THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC WENDELL PHILLIPS Gibbon says we have two educations, one from teachers, and the other we give ourselves. This last is the real and only education of the masses—one gotten from life, from affairs, from earning one's bread; necessity, the mother of invention; responsibility, that teaches prudence, and inspires respect for right. Anacharsis went into the Archon's court of Athens, heard a case argued by the great men of that city, and saw the vote by five hundred men. Walking in the streets, someone asked him, "What do you think of Athenian liberty?" "I think," said he, "wise men argue cases, and fools decide them." Just what that timid scholar, two thousand years ago, said in the streets of Athens, that which calls itseli scholarship here says to-day of popular agitation-that it lets wise men argue questions and fools decide them. God lent to Athens the largest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain peaks of the Old World; while Egypt, the hunker conservative of antiquity, where nobody dared to differ from the priest or to be wiser than his grandfather; where men pretended to be alive, though swaddled in the graveclothes of creed and. custom as close as their mummies were in linen-that Egypt is hid in the tomb it inhabited, and the intellect Athens has trained for us digs to-day those ashes to find out how buried and forgotten hunkerism lived and acted. I urge on college-bred men that, as a class, they fail in republican duty when they allow others to lead in the agitation of the great social questions which stir and educate the age. Agitation is an old word with a new WENDELL PHILLIPS 183 meaning. Sir Robert Peel, the first English leader who felt himself its tool, defined it to be "marshalling the conscience of a nation to mould its laws." Its means are reason and argument-no appeal to arms. Wait patiently for the growth of public opinion. That secured, then every step taken is taken forever. An abuse once removed never reappears in history. The freer a nation becomes, the more utterly democratic in its form, the more need of this outside agitation. Parties and sects, laden with the burden of securing their own success, cannot afford to risk new ideas. "Predominant opinions," said Disraeli, "are the opinions of a class that is vanishing." The agitator must stand outside of organization, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, no party to save, no object but truth-ever ready to tear a question open and riddle it with light. To be as good as our fathers we must be better. They silenced their fears and subdued their prejudices, inaugurating free speech and equality with no precedent on the file. Europe shouted "Madmen!" and gave us forty years for the shipwreck. With serene faith they persevered. Let us rise to their level. Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward. "New occasions teach new duties; Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. Is not the word "gotten" obsolete? Consult your dictionary as to its use. 2. What is the meaning of "hunker"? 3. How long was slavery agitated in the United States before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued? THE EDUCATED MAN AND THE CHARLES E. HUGHES It is of first importance that there should be sympathy with democratic ideals. I do not refer to the conventional attitude commonly assumed in American utterances and always taken on patriotic occasions. I mean the sincere love of democracy. As Montesquieu says: "A love of the republic in a democracy is a love of the democracy; as the latter is that of equality." It would be difficult to find an association in which wealth, or family, or station are of less consequence, and in which a young man is appraised more nearly at his actual worth, than in an American college. Despite the increase of luxury in college living, the number of rich men's sons who frequent these institutions, and the amount of money lavishly and foolishly expended, our colleges are still wholesomely democratic. A young man who is decent, candid, and honorable in his dealings will not suffer because he is poor, or his parents are obscure, and the fact that he may earn his living in humble employment in order to pay for his education. will not cost him the esteem of his fellows. He will be rated, as the rich man's son will be rated, at the worth of his character, judged by the standards of youth which *From Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government, Yale University Press, 1910. Reprinted by permission. |