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Title: Social organization
A study of the larger mind

Author: Charles Horton Cooley

Release date: January 5, 2024 [eBook #72636]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's sons, 1909

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION ***

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

BOOKS BY CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Social Organization; a Study of the net,
Larger Mind $1.50
net,
Human Nature and the Social Order
$1.50

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

A STUDY OF THE LARGER MIND

BY
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
AUTHOR OF “HUMAN NATURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER”

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1911

Copyright, 1909, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published April, 1909

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

To E. J. C.

WHOSE INFLUENCE IS A CHIEF
SOURCE OF ANY LITERARY
MERIT IT MAY HAVE

PREFACE
Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real
knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process:
and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this
whole are properly distinguished by change in the point of sight rather than
by any division in the thing that is seen. Accordingly, in a former book
(Human Nature and Social Order), I tried to see society as it exists in the
social nature of man and to display that in its main outlines. In this one the
eye is focussed on the enlargement and diversification of intercourse which
I have called Social Organization, the individual, though visible, remaining
slightly in the background.
It will be seen from my title and all my treatment that I apprehend the
subject on the mental rather than the material side. I by no means, however,
overlook or wish to depreciate the latter, to which I am willing to ascribe all
the importance that any one can require for it. Our task as students of
society is a large one, and each of us, I suppose, may undertake any part of
it to which he feels at all competent.

Ann Arbor, Mich., February, 1909.

CONTENTS

PART I—PRIMARY ASPECTS OF ORGANIZATION

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND
PAGE

nd an Organic Whole—Conscious and Unconscious Relations—Does
Self-Consciousness Come First? Cogito, Ergo Sum—The Larger
3
Introspection—Self-Consciousness in Children—Public
Consciousness
CHAPTER II

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND—(CONTINUED)
ral Aspect of the Organic View—It Implies that Reform Should Be
Based on Sympathy—Uses of Praise and Blame—Responsibility
13
Broadened but Not Lost—Moral Value of a Larger View—Organic
Morality Calls for Knowledge—Nature of Social Organization
CHAPTER III

PRIMARY GROUPS
aning of Primary Groups—Family, Playground, and Neighborhood—
How Far Influenced by Larger Society—Meaning and Permanence 23
of “Human Nature”—Primary Groups the Nursery of Human Nature
CHAPTER IV

PRIMARY IDEALS
ure of Primary Idealism—The Ideal of a “We” or Moral Unity—It 32
Does Not Exclude Self-Assertion—Ideals Springing from Hostility
—Loyalty, Truth, Service—Kindness—Lawfulness—Freedom—The

Doctrine of Natural Right—Bearing of Primary Idealism upon
Education and Philanthropy
CHAPTER V

THE EXTENSION OF PRIMARY IDEALS
mary Ideals Underlie Democracy and Christianity—Why They Are Not
Achieved on a Larger Scale—What They Require from Personality 51
—From Social Mechanism—The Principle of Compensation
PART II—COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER VI

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COMMUNICATION
aning of Communication—Its Relation to Human Nature—To Society
61
at Large
CHAPTER VII

THE GROWTH OF COMMUNICATION
-Verbal Communication—The Rise of Speech—Its Mental and Social
Function—The Function of Writing—Printing and the Modern World 66
—The Non-Verbal Arts
CHAPTER VIII

MODERN COMMUNICATION: ENLARGEMENT AND ANIMATION
racter of Recent Changes—Their General Effect—The Change in the
United States—Organized Gossip—Public Opinion, Democracy,
80
Internationalism—The Value of Diffusion—Enlargement of Feeling
—Conclusion
CHAPTER IX

MODERN COMMUNICATION: INDIVIDUALITY
Question—Why Communication Should Foster Individuality—The
Contrary or Dead-Level Theory—Reconciliation of These Views— 91
The Outlook as Regards Individuality

CHAPTER X

MODERN COMMUNICATION: SUPERFICIALITY AND STRAIN
mulating Effect of Modern Life—Superficiality—Strain—Pathological
98
Effects
PART III—THE DEMOCRATIC MIND

CHAPTER XI

THE ENLARGEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS
rowness of Consciousness in Tribal Society—Importance of Face-to-
Face Assembly—Individuality—Subconscious Character of Wider
107
Relations—Enlargement of Consciousness—Irregularity in Growth
—Breadth of Modern Consciousness—Democracy
CHAPTER XII

THE THEORY OF PUBLIC OPINION
lic Opinion as Organization—Agreement Not Essential—Public
Opinion versus Popular Impression—Public Thought Not an Average
—A Group Is Capable of Expression through Its Most Competent
121
Members—General and Special Public Opinion—The Sphere of the
Former—Of the Latter—The Two Are United in Personality—How
Public Opinion Rules—Effective Rule Based on Moral Unity
CHAPTER XIII

WHAT THE MASSES CONTRIBUTE
Masses the Initiators of Sentiment—They Live in the Central Current
of Experience—Distinction or Privilege Apt to Cause Isolation—
Institutional Character of Upper Classes—The Masses Shrewd
135
Judges of Persons—This the Main Ground for Expecting that the
People Will Be Right in the Long Run—Democracy Always
Representative—Conclusion
CHAPTER XIV

DEMOCRACY AND CROWD EXCITEMENT
Crowd-Theory of Modern Life—The Psychology of Crowds—
Modern Conditions Favor Psychological Contagion—Democracy a
149
Training in Self-Control—The Crowd Not Always in the Wrong—
Conclusion; the Case of France
CHAPTER XV

DEMOCRACY AND DISTINCTION
Problem—Democracy Should Be Distinguished from Transition—
The Dead-Level Theory of Democracy—Confusion and Its Effects
—“Individualism” May Not Be Favorable to Distinguished
Individuality—Contemporary Uniformity—Relative Advantages of 157
America and Europe—Haste, Superficiality, Strain—Spiritual
Economy of a Settled Order—Commercialism—Zeal for Diffusion—
Conclusion
CHAPTER XVI

THE TREND OF SENTIMENT
aning and General Trend of Sentiment—Attenuation—Refinement—
Sense of Justice—Truth as Justice—As Realism As Expediency—As 177
Economy of Attention—Hopefulness
CHAPTER XVII

THE TREND OF SENTIMENT—(CONTINUED)
ure of the Sentiment of Brotherhood—Favored by Communication and
Settled Principles—How Far Contemporary Life Fosters It—How
Far Uncongenial to It—General Outcome in this Regard—The Spirit 189
of Service—The Trend of Manners—Brotherhood in Relation to
Conflict—Blame—Democracy and Christianity
PART IV—SOCIAL CLASSES

CHAPTER XVIII

THE HEREDITARY OR CASTE PRINCIPLE
ure and Use of Classes—Inheritance and Competition the Two
Principles upon which Classes Are Based—Conditions in Human 209
Nature Making for Hereditary Classes—Caste Spirit
CHAPTER XIX

CONDITIONS FAVORING OR OPPOSING THE GROWTH OF CASTE
ee Conditions Affecting the Increase or Diminution of Caste—Race-
Caste—Immigration and Conquest—Gradual Differentiation of
Functions; Mediæval Caste; India—Influence of Settled Conditions 217
—Influence of the State of Communication and Enlightenment—
Conclusion
CHAPTER XX

THE OUTLOOK REGARDING CASTE
Question—How Far the Inheritance Principle Actually Prevails—
Influences Favoring Its Growth—Those Antagonizing It—The
229
Principles of Inheritance and Equal Opportunity as Affecting Social
Efficiency—Conclusion
CHAPTER XXI

OPEN CLASSES
Nature of Open Classes—Whether Class-Consciousness Is Desirable
—Fellowship and Coöperation Deficient in Our Society—Class 239
Organization in Relation to Freedom
CHAPTER XXII

HOW FAR WEALTH IS THE BASIS OF OPEN CLASSES
ersonal Character of Open Classes—Various Classifications—Classes,
as Commonly Understood, Based on Obvious Distinctions—Wealth
248
as Generalized Power—Economic Betterment as an Ideal of the Ill-
Paid Classes—Conclusion

CHAPTER XXIII

ON THE ASCENDENCY OF A CAPITALIST CLASS
Capitalist Class—Its Lack of Caste Sentiment—In What Sense “the
Fittest”—Moral Traits—How Far Based on Service—Autocratic and
Democratic Principles in the Control of Industry—Reasons for
Expecting an Increase of the Democratic Principle—Social Power in 256
General—Organizing Capacity—Nature and Sources of Capitalist
Power—Power over the Press and over Public Sentiment—Upper
Class Atmosphere
CHAPTER XXIV

ON THE ASCENDENCY OF A CAPITALIST CLASS—(CONTINUED)
Influence of Ambitious Young Men—Security of the Dominant Class
in an Open System—Is There Danger of Anarchy and Spoliation?—
273
Whether the Sway of Riches Is Greater Now than Formerly—
Whether Greater in America than in England
CHAPTER XXV

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ILL-PAID CLASSES
Need of Class Organization—Uses and Dangers of Unions—General
284
Disposition of the Hand-Working Classes
CHAPTER XXVI

POVERTY
Meaning of Poverty—Personal and General Causes—Poverty in a
Prosperous Society Due Chiefly to Maladjustment—Are the Poor the
290
“Unfit”?—Who Is to Blame for Poverty?—Attitude of Society
toward the Poor—Fundamental Remedies
CHAPTER XXVII

HOSTILE FEELING BETWEEN CLASSES

nditions Producing Class Animosity—The Spirit of Service Allays
Bitterness—Possible Decrease of the Prestige of Wealth—Probability
of a More Communal Spirit in the Use of Wealth—Influence of 301
Settled Rules for Social Opposition—Importance of Face-to-Face
Discussion
PART V—INSTITUTIONS

CHAPTER XXVIII

INSTITUTIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Nature of Institutions—Hereditary and Social Factors—The Child
and the World—Society and Personality—Personality versus the
Institution—The Institution as a Basis of Personality—The Moral 313
Aspect—Choice versus Mechanism—Personality the Life of
Institutions—Institutions Becoming Freer in Structure
CHAPTER XXIX

INSTITUTIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL—(CONTINUED)
ovation as a Personal Tendency—Innovation and Conservatism as
Public Habit—Solidarity—French and Anglo-Saxon Solidarity—
Tradition and Convention—Not so Opposite as They Appear—Real 327
Difference, in this Regard, between Modern and Mediæval Society—
Traditionalism and Conventionalism in Modern Life
CHAPTER XXX

FORMALISM AND DISORGANIZATION
Nature of Formalism—Its Effect upon Personality—Formalism in
Modern Life—Disorganization, “Individualism”—How it Affects the
Individual—Relation to Formalism—“Individualism” Implies 342
Defective Sympathy—Contemporary “Individualism”—Restlessness
under Discomfort—The Better Aspect of Disorganization
CHAPTER XXXI

DISORGANIZATION: THE FAMILY

and New Régimes in the Family—The Declining Birth-Rate
—“Spoiled” Children—The Opening of New Careers to Women—
356
European and American Points of View—Personal Factors in
Divorce—Institutional Factors—Conclusion
CHAPTER XXXII

DISORGANIZATION: THE CHURCH
Psychological View of Religion—The Need of Social Structure—
Creeds—Why Symbols Tend to Become Formal—Traits of a Good
372
System of Symbols—Contemporary Need of Religion—Newer
Tendencies in the Church
CHAPTER XXXIII

DISORGANIZATION: OTHER TRADITIONS
order in the Economic System—In Education—In Higher Culture—In
383
the Fine Arts
PART VI—PUBLIC WILL

CHAPTER XXXIV
E FUNCTION OF PUBLIC WILL Public and Private Will—The Lack
395
of Public Will—Social Wrongs Commonly Not Willed at All
CHAPTER XXXV

GOVERNMENT AS PUBLIC WILL
vernment Not the Only Agent of Public Will—The Relative Point of
View; Advantages of Government as an Agent—Mechanical
Tendency of Government—Characteristics Favorable to Government 402
Activity—Municipal Socialism—Self-Expression the Fundamental
Demand of the People—Actual Extension of State Functions
CHAPTER XXXVI

SOME PHASES OF THE LARGER WILL

wing Efficiency of the Intellectual Processes—Organic Idealism—The
Larger Morality—Indirect Service—Increasing Simplicity and
411
Flexibility in Social Structure—Public Will Saves Part of the Cost of
Change—Human Nature the Guiding Force behind Public Will
ex 421

PART I
PRIMARY ASPECTS OF ORGANIZATION

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

CHAPTER I
SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND

Mind an Organic Whole—Conscious and Unconscious Relations—Does
Self-Consciousness Come First? Cogito, Ergo Sum—The Larger
Introspection—Self-Consciousness in Children—Public
Consciousness.
Mind is an organic whole made up of coöperating individualities, in
somewhat the same way that the music of an orchestra is made up of
divergent but related sounds. No one would think it necessary or reasonable
to divide the music into two kinds, that made by the whole and that of
particular instruments, and no more are there two kinds of mind, the social
mind and the individual mind. When we study the social mind we merely
fix our attention on larger aspects and relations rather than on the narrower
ones of ordinary psychology.
The view that all mind acts together in a vital whole from which the
individual is never really separate flows naturally from our growing
knowledge of heredity and suggestion, which makes it increasingly clear
that every thought we have is linked with the thought of our ancestors and
associates, and through them with that of society at large. It is also the only
view consistent with the general standpoint of modern science, which
admits nothing isolate in nature.
The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in
organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation among its parts,
by virtue of which everything that takes place in it is connected with
everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole. Whether, like the
orchestra, it gives forth harmony may be a matter of dispute, but that its
sound, pleasing or otherwise, is the expression of a vital coöperation,
cannot well be denied. Certainly everything that I say or think is influenced
by what others have said or thought, and, in one way or another, sends out
an influence of its own in turn.

This differentiated unity of mental or social life, present in the simplest
intercourse but capable of infinite growth and adaptation, is what I mean in
this work by social organization. It would be useless, I think, to attempt a
more elaborate definition. We have only to open our eyes to see
organization; and if we cannot do that no definition will help us.
In the social mind we may distinguish—very roughly of course—
conscious and unconscious relations, the unconscious being those of which
we are not aware, which for some reason escape our notice. A great part of
the influences at work upon us are of this character: our language, our
mechanical arts, our government and other institutions, we derive chiefly
from people to whom we are but indirectly and unconsciously related. The
larger movements of society—the progress and decadence of nations,
institutions and races—have seldom been a matter of consciousness until
they were past. And although the growth of social consciousness is perhaps
the greatest fact of history, it has still but a narrow and fallible grasp of
human life.
Social consciousness, or awareness of society, is inseparable from self-
consciousness, because we can hardly think of ourselves excepting with
reference to a social group of some sort, or of the group except with
reference to ourselves. The two things go together, and what we are really
aware of is a more or less complex personal or social whole, of which now
the particular, now the general, aspect is emphasized.
In general, then, most of our reflective consciousness, of our wide-awake
state of mind, is social consciousness, because a sense of our relation to
other persons, or of other persons to one another, can hardly fail to be a part
of it. Self and society are twin-born, we know one as immediately as we
know the other, and the notion of a separate and independent ego is an
illusion.
This view, which seems to me quite simple and in accord with common-
sense, is not the one most commonly held, for psychologists and even
sociologists are still much infected with the idea that self-consciousness is
in some way primary, and antecedent to social consciousness, which must
be derived by some recondite process of combination or elimination. I
venture, therefore, to give some further exposition of it, based in part on
first-hand observation of the growth of social ideas in children.

Descartes is, I suppose, the best-known exponent of the traditional view
regarding the primacy of self-consciousness. Seeking an unquestionable
basis for philosophy, he thought that he found it in the proposition “I think,
therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum). This seemed to him inevitable, though
all else might be illusion. “I observed,” he says, “that, whilst I thus wished
to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus
thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think,
hence I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt,
however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it,
I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of
the philosophy of which I was in search.”[1]
From our point of view this reasoning is unsatisfactory in two essential
respects. In the first place it seems to imply that “I”-consciousness is a part
of all consciousness, when, in fact, it belongs only to a rather advanced
stage of development. In the second it is one-sided or “individualistic” in
asserting the personal or “I” aspect to the exclusion of the social or “we”
aspect, which is equally original with it.
Introspection is essential to psychological or social insight, but the
introspection of Descartes was, in this instance, a limited, almost abnormal,
sort of introspection—that of a self-absorbed philosopher doing his best to
isolate himself from other people and from all simple and natural conditions
of life. The mind into which he looked was in a highly technical state, not
likely to give him a just view of human consciousness in general.
Introspection is of a larger sort in our day. There is a world of things in
the mind worth looking at, and the modern psychologist, instead of fixing
his attention wholly on an extreme form of speculative self-consciousness,
puts his mind through an infinite variety of experiences, intellectual and
emotional, simple and complex, normal and abnormal, sociable and private,
recording in each case what he sees in it. He does this by subjecting it to
suggestions or incitements of various kinds, which awaken the activities he
desires to study.
In particular he does it largely by what may be called sympathetic
introspection, putting himself into intimate contact with various sorts of
persons and allowing them to awake in himself a life similar to their own,
which he afterwards, to the best of his ability, recalls and describes. In this

way he is more or less able to understand—always by introspection—
children, idiots, criminals, rich and poor, conservative and radical—any
phase of human nature not wholly alien to his own.
This I conceive to be the principal method of the social psychologist.
One thing which this broader introspection reveals is that the “I”-
consciousness does not explicitly appear until the child is, say, about two
years old, and that when it does appear it comes in inseparable conjunction
with the consciousness of other persons and of those relations which make
up a social group. It is in fact simply one phase of a body of personal
thought which is self-consciousness in one aspect and social consciousness
in another.
The mental experience of a new-born child is probably a mere stream of
impressions, which may be regarded as being individual, in being
differentiated from any other stream, or as social, in being an undoubted
product of inheritance and suggestion from human life at large; but is not
aware either of itself or of society.
Very soon, however, the mind begins to discriminate personal
impressions and to become both naïvely self-conscious and naïvely
conscious of society; that is, the child is aware, in an unreflective way, of a
group and of his own special relation to it. He does not say “I” nor does he
name his mother, his sister or his nurse, but he has images and feelings out
of which these ideas will grow. Later comes the more reflective
consciousness which names both himself and other people, and brings a
fuller perception of the relations which constitute the unity of this small
world.[2]
And so on to the most elaborate phases of self-consciousness and social
consciousness, to the metaphysician pondering the Ego, or the sociologist
meditating on the Social Organism. Self and society go together, as phases
of a common whole. I am aware of the social groups in which I live as
immediately and authentically as I am aware of myself; and Descartes
might have said “We think,” cogitamus, on as good grounds as he said
cogito.
But, it may be said, this very consciousness that you are considering is
after all located in a particular person, and so are all similar

consciousnesses, so that what we see, if we take an objective view of the
matter, is merely an aggregate of individuals, however social those
individuals may be. Common-sense, most people think, assures us that the
separate person is the primary fact of life.
If so, is it not because common-sense has been trained by custom to look
at one aspect of things and not another? Common-sense, moderately
informed, assures us that the individual has his being only as part of a
whole. What does not come by heredity comes by communication and
intercourse; and the more closely we look the more apparent it is that
separateness is an illusion of the eye and community the inner truth. “Social
organism,” using the term in no abstruse sense but merely to mean a vital
unity in human life, is a fact as obvious to enlightened common-sense as
individuality.
I do not question that the individual is a differentiated centre of psychical
life, having a world of his own into which no other individual can fully
enter; living in a stream of thought in which there is nothing quite like that
in any other stream, neither his “I,” nor his “you,” nor his “we,” nor even
any material object; all, probably, as they exist for him, have something
unique about them. But this uniqueness is no more apparent and verifiable
than the fact—not at all inconsistent with it—that he is in the fullest sense
member of a whole, appearing such not only to scientific observation but
also to his own untrained consciousness.
There is then no mystery about social consciousness. The view that there
is something recondite about it and that it must be dug for with metaphysics
and drawn forth from the depths of speculation, springs from a failure to
grasp adequately the social nature of all higher consciousness. What we
need in this connection is only a better seeing and understanding of rather
ordinary and familiar facts.
We may view social consciousness either in a particular mind or as a
coöperative activity of many minds. The social ideas that I have are closely
connected with those that other people have, and act and react upon them to
form a whole. This gives us public consciousness, or to use a more familiar
term, public opinion, in the broad sense of a group state of mind which is
more or less distinctly aware of itself. By this last phrase I mean such a
mutual understanding of one another’s points of view on the part of the

individuals or groups concerned as naturally results from discussion. There
are all degrees of this awareness in the various individuals. Generally
speaking, it never embraces the whole in all its complexity, but almost
always some of the relations that enter into the whole. The more intimate
the communication of a group the more complete, the more thoroughly knit
together into a living whole, is its public consciousness.
In a congenial family life, for example, there may be a public
consciousness which brings all the important thoughts and feelings of the
members into such a living and coöperative whole. In the mind of each
member, also, this same thing exists as a social consciousness embracing a
vivid sense of the personal traits and modes of thought and feeling of the
other members. And, finally, quite inseparable from all this, is each one’s
consciousness of himself, which is largely a direct reflection of the ideas
about himself he attributes to the others, and is directly or indirectly
altogether a product of social life. Thus all consciousness hangs together,
and the distinctions are chiefly based on point of view.
The unity of public opinion, like all vital unity, is one not of agreement
but of organization, of interaction and mutual influence. It is true that a
certain underlying likeness of nature is necessary in order that minds may
influence one another and so coöperate in forming a vital whole, but
identity, even in the simplest process, is unnecessary and probably
impossible. The consciousness of the American House of Representatives,
for example, is by no means limited to the common views, if there are any,
shared by its members, but embraces the whole consciousness of every
member so far as this deals with the activity of the House. It would be a
poor conception of the whole which left out the opposition, or even one
dissentient individual. That all minds are different is a condition, not an
obstacle, to the unity that consists in a differentiated and coöperative life.
Here is another illustration of what is meant by individual and collective
aspects of social consciousness. Some of us possess a good many books
relating to social questions of the day. Each of these books, considered by
itself, is the expression of a particular social consciousness; the author has
cleared up his ideas as well as he can and printed them. But a library of
such books expresses social consciousness in a larger sense; it speaks for
the epoch. And certainly no one who reads the books will doubt that they

form a whole, whatever their differences. The radical and the reactionist are
clearly part of the same general situation.
There are, then, at least three aspects of consciousness which we may
usefully distinguish: self-consciousness, or what I think of myself; social
consciousness (in its individual aspect), or what I think of other people; and
public consciousness, or a collective view of the foregoing as organized in a
communicating group. And all three are phases of a single whole.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Discourse on Method, part iv.
[2] There is much interest and significance in the matter of children’s first
learning the use of “I” and other self-words—just how they learn them and what
they mean by them. Some discussion of the matter, based on observation of two
children, will be found in Human Nature and the Social Order; and more
recently I have published a paper in the Psychological Review (November,
1908) called A Study of the Early Use of Self-Words by a Child. “I” seems to
mean primarily the assertion of will in a social medium of which the child is
conscious and of which his “I” is an inseparable part. It is thus a social idea and,
as stated in the text, arises by differentiation of a vague body of personal thought
which is self-consciousness in one phase and social consciousness in another. It
has no necessary reference to the body.

CHAPTER II
SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND—Continued.

Moral Aspect of the Organic View—It Implies that Reform Should Be
Based on Sympathy—Uses of Praise and Blame—Responsibility
Broadened but not Lost—Moral Value of a Larger View—Organic
Morality Calls for Knowledge—Nature of Social Organization.
So far as the moral aspect is concerned, it should be the result of this
organic view of mind to make the whole teaching and practice of
righteousness more rational and effectual by bringing it closer to fact. A
moral view which does not see the individual in living unity with social
wholes is unreal and apt to lead to impractical results.
Have not the moral philosophies of the past missed their mark, in great
part, by setting before the individual absolute standards of behavior, without
affording him an explanation for his backwardness or a programme for his
gradual advance? And did not this spring from not discerning clearly that
the moral life was a social organism, in which every individual or group of
individuals had its own special possibilities and limitations? In general such
systems, pagan and Christian, have said, “All of us ought to be so and so,
but since very few of us are, this is evidently a bad world.” And they have
had no large, well-organized, slow-but-sure plan for making it better.
Impracticable standards have the same ill effect as unenforcible law; they
accustom us to separate theory from practice and make a chasm between
the individual and the moral ideal.
The present way of thinking tends to close up this chasm and bring both
persons and ideals into more intelligible relations to real life. The sins or
virtues of the individual, it seems, are never fortuitous or disconnected; they
have always a history and collateral support, and are in fact more or less
pleasing phases of a struggling, aspiring whole. The ideals are also parts of
the whole; states of being, achieved momentarily by those in front and
treasured for the animation and solace of all. And the method of

righteousness is to understand as well as may be the working of this whole
and of all its parts, and to form and pursue practicable ideals based on this
understanding. It is always to be taken for granted that there is no real break
with history and environment. Each individual may be required to put forth
a steadfast endeavor to make himself and his surroundings better, but not to
achieve a standard unconnected with his actual state. And the same
principle applies to special groups of all sorts, including nations, races, and
religions; their progress must be along a natural line of improvement
suggested by what they are. We are thus coming under the sway of that
relative spirit, of which, says Walter Pater, “the ethical result is a delicate
and tender justice in the criticism of human life.”[3]
According to this, real reform must be sympathetic; that is, it must begin,
not with denunciation—though that may have its uses—but with an
intimate appreciation of things as they are, and should proceed in a spirit
opposite to that in which we have commonly attacked such questions as the
suppression of intemperance and the conversion of the heathen.
Human nature, it appears, is very much the same in those we reckon
sinners as in ourselves. Good and evil are always intimately bound up
together; no sort of men are chiefly given over to conscious badness; and to
abuse men or groups in the large is unjust and generally futile. As a rule the
practical method is to study closely and kindly the actual situation, with the
people involved in it; then gradually and carefully to work out the evil from
the mixture by substituting good for it. No matter how mean or hideous a
man’s life is, the first thing is to understand him; to make out just how it is
that our common human nature has come to work out in this way. This
method calls for patience, insight, firmness, and confidence in men, leaving
little room for the denunciatory egotism of a certain kind of reformers. It is
more and more coming to be used in dealing with intemperance, crime,
greed, and in fact all those matters in which we try to make ourselves and
our neighbors better. I notice that the most effectual leaders of philanthropy
have almost ceased from denunciation. Tacitly assuming that there are
excuses for everything, they “shun the negative side” and spend their
energy in building up the affirmative.
This sort of morality does not, however, dispense with praise and blame,
which are based on the necessity of upholding higher ideals by example,
and discrediting lower ones. All such distinctions get their meaning from

their relation to an upward-striving general life, wherein conspicuous men
serve as symbols through which the higher structure may be either
supported or undermined. We must have heroes, and perhaps villains
(though it is better not to think much about the latter), even though their
performances, when closely viewed, appear to be an equally natural product
of history and environment. In short it makes a difference whether we judge
a man with reference to his special history and “lights,” or to the larger life
of the world; and it is right to assign exemplary praise or blame on the latter
ground which would be unwarranted on the former. There is certainly a
special right for every man; but the right of most men is partial, important
chiefly to themselves and their immediate sphere; while there are some
whose right is representative, like that of Jesus, fit to guide the moral
thought of mankind; and we cherish and revere these latter because they
corroborate the ideals we wish to hold before us.
It matters little for these larger purposes whether the sins or virtues of
conspicuous persons are conscious or not; our concern is with what they
stand for in the general mind. In fact conscious wickedness is
comparatively unimportant, because it implies that the individual is divided
in his own mind, and therefore weak. The most effective ill-doers believe in
themselves and have a quiet conscience. And, in the same way, goodness is
most effectual when it takes itself as a matter of course and feels no self-
complacency.
Blame and punishment, then, are essentially symbolic, their function
being to define and enforce the public will, and in no way imply that the
offenders are of a different nature from the rest of us. We feel it to be true
that with a little different training and surroundings we might have
committed almost any crime for which men are sent to prison, and can
readily understand that criminals should not commonly feel that they are
worse than others. The same principle applies to those malefactors, more
dangerous perhaps, who keep within the law, and yet are terribly punished
from time to time by public opinion.
Perhaps it would be well if both those who suffer punishment and those
who inflict it were more distinctly aware of its symbolic character and
function. The former might find their sense of justice appeased by
perceiving that though what they did was natural and perhaps not
consciously wrong, it may still need to be discredited and atoned for. The

culprit is not separated from society by his punishment, but restored to it. It
is his way of service; and if he takes it in the right spirit he is better off than
those who do wrong but are not punished.
The rest of us, on the other hand, might realize that those in the pillory
are our representatives, who suffer, in a real sense, for us. This would
disincline us to spend in a cheap abuse of conspicuous offenders that moral
ardor whose proper function is the correction of our own life. The spectacle
of punishment is not for us to gloat over, but to remind us of our sins,
which, as springing from the same nature and society, are sure to be much
the same as that of the one punished. It is precisely because he is like us that
he is punished. If he were radically different he would belong in an insane
asylum, and punishment would be mere cruelty.
Under the larger view of mind responsibility is broadened, because we
recognize a broader reach of causation, but by no means lost in an abstract
“society.” It goes with power and increases rapidly in proportion as the evil
comes nearer the sphere of the individual’s voluntary action, so that each of
us is peculiarly responsible for the moral state of his own trade, family, or
social connection. Contrary to a prevalent impression, it is in these familiar
relations that the individual is least of all justified in being no better than his
environment.
Every act of the will, especially where the will is most at home, should
be affirmative and constructive; it being the function and meaning of
individuality that each one should be, in the direction of his chief activities,
something other and better than his surroundings. Once admit the plea “I
may do what other people do,” and the basis of righteousness is gone;
perhaps there is no moral fallacy so widespread and so pernicious as this. It
is these no-worse-than-other-people decisions that paralyze the moral life in
the one and in the whole, involving a sort of moral panmixia, as the
biologists say, which, lacking any progressive impulse, must result in
deterioration. In the end it will justify anything, since there are always bad
examples to fall back upon.
It is commonly futile, however, to require any sharp break with the past;
we must be content with an upward endeavor and tendency. It is quite true
that we are all involved in a net of questionable practices from which we
can only escape a little at a time and in coöperation with our associates.

It is an error to imagine that the doctrine of individual responsibility is
always the expedient and edifying one in matters of conduct. There is a sort
of people who grow indignant whenever general causes are insisted upon,
apparently convinced that whether these are real or not it is immoral to
believe in them. But it is not invariably a good thing to urge the will, since
this, if over-stimulated, becomes fagged, stale, and discouraged. Often it is
better that one should let himself go, and trust himself to the involuntary
forces, to the nature of things, to God. The nervous or strained person only
harasses and weakens his will by fixing attention upon it: it will work on
more effectually if he looks away from it, calming himself by a view of the
larger whole; and not without reason Spinoza counts among the advantages
of determinism “the attainment of happiness by man through realizing his
intimate union with the whole nature of things; the distinction between
things in our power and things not in our power; the avoidance of all
disturbing passions, and the performance of social duties from rational
desire for the common good.”[4]
An obvious moral defect of the unbalanced doctrine of responsibility is
that it permits the successful to despise the unfortunate, in the belief that the
latter “have only themselves to blame,” a belief not countenanced by the
larger view of fact. We may pardon this doctrine when it makes one too
hard on himself or on successful wrong-doers, but as a rod with which to
beat those already down it is despicable.
The annals of religion show that the moral life has always these two
aspects, the particular and the general, as in the doctrines of freedom and
predestination, or in the wrestlings with sin followed by self-abandonment
that we find in the literature of conversion.[5] Perhaps we may say that the
deterministic attitude is morally good in at least two classes of cases: First,
for nervous, conscientious individuals, like Spinoza, whose wills need
rather calming than stimulating, also for any one who may be even
temporarily in a state of mental strain; second, in dealing on a large scale
with social or moral questions whose causes must be treated dispassionately
and in a mass.
These questions of free-will versus law, and the like, are but little, if at
all, questions of fact—when we get down to definite facts bearing upon the
matter we find little or no disagreement—but of point of view and
emphasis. If you fix attention on the individual phase of things and see life

as a theatre of personal action, then the corresponding ideas of private will,
responsibility, praise, and blame rise before you; if you regard its total
aspect you see tendency, evolution, law and impersonal grandeur. Each of
these is a half truth needing to be completed by the other; the larger truth,
including both, being that life is an organic whole, presenting itself with
equal reality in individual and general aspects. Argument upon such
questions is without limit—since there is really nothing at issue—and in
that sense the problem of freedom versus law is insoluble.
Above all, the organic view of mind calls for social knowledge as the
basis of morality. We live in a system, and to achieve right ends, or any
rational ends whatever, we must learn to understand that system. The public
mind must emerge somewhat from its subconscious condition and know
and guide its own processes.
Both consciously and unconsciously the larger mind is continually
building itself up into wholes—fashions, traditions, institutions, tendencies,
and the like—which spread and diversify like the branches of a tree, and so
generate an ever higher and more various structure of differentiated thought
and symbols. The immediate motor and guide of this growth is interest, and
wherever that points social structure comes into being, as a picture grows
where the artist moves his pencil. Visible society is, indeed, literally, a work
of art, slow and mostly subconscious in its production—as great art often is
—full of grotesque and wayward traits, but yet of inexhaustible beauty and
fascination. It is this we find in the history of old civilizations, getting from
it the completed work of the artist without that strain and confusion of
production which defaces the present. We get it, especially, not from the
history of the theorist or the statistician, but from the actual, naïve, human
record to be found in memoirs, in popular literature, in architecture,
painting, sculpture, and music, in the industrial arts, in every unforced
product of the mind.
Social organization is nothing less than this variegation of life, taken in
the widest sense possible. It should not be conceived as the product merely
of definite and utilitarian purpose, but as the total expression of conscious
and subconscious tendency, the slow crystallization in many forms and
colors of the life of the human spirit.

Any fairly distinct and durable detail of this structure may be called a
social type; this being a convenient term to use when we wish to break up
the whole into parts, for analysis or description. Thus there are types of
personality, of political structure, of religion, of classes, of the family, of art,
of language; also of processes, like communication, coöperation, and
competition; and so on. The whole is so various that from every new point
of view new forms are revealed. Social types are analogous to the genera,
species, and varieties of the animal world, in being parts of one living
whole and yet having a relative continuity and distinctness which is
susceptible of detailed study. Like biological types, also, they exist in
related systems and orders, are subject to variation, compete with one
another, flourish and decay, may be flexible or rigid, and may or may not
form prolific crosses with one another.
Without forgetting to see life as individuals, we must learn to see it also
as types, processes, organization, the latter being just as real as the former.
And especially, in order to see the matter truly, should we be able to
interpret individuals by wholes, and vice versa.

FOOTNOTES:
[3] See his essay on Coleridge.
[4] Pollock’s Spinoza, 2d ed., 195.
[5] Amply expounded, with due stress on the moral value of letting-go, by
William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience: “This abandonment of
self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as
distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of
philosophies ... it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every
speculative creed.” Page 289.

CHAPTER III
PRIMARY GROUPS

Meaning of Primary Groups—Family, Playground, and Neighborhood—
How Far Influenced by Larger Society—Meaning and Permanence
of “Human Nature”—Primary Groups the Nursery of Human
Nature.
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face
association and coöperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly
in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the
individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain
fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one’s very self, for
many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group.
Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is
a “we”; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which
“we” is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and
finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.
It is not to be supposed that the unity of the primary group is one of mere
harmony and love. It is always a differentiated and usually a competitive
unity, admitting of self-assertion and various appropriative passions; but
these passions are socialized by sympathy, and come, or tend to come,
under the discipline of a common spirit. The individual will be ambitious,
but the chief object of his ambition will be some desired place in the
thought of the others, and he will feel allegiance to common standards of
service and fair play. So the boy will dispute with his fellows a place on the
team, but above such disputes will place the common glory of his class and
school.
The most important spheres of this intimate association and coöperation
—though by no means the only ones—are the family, the play-group of
children, and the neighborhood or community group of elders. These are
practically universal, belonging to all times and all stages of development;

and are accordingly a chief basis of what is universal in human nature and
human ideals. The best comparative studies of the family, such as those of
Westermarck[6] or Howard,[7] show it to us as not only a universal
institution, but as more alike the world over than the exaggeration of
exceptional customs by an earlier school had led us to suppose. Nor can any
one doubt the general prevalence of play-groups among children or of
informal assemblies of various kinds among their elders. Such association is
clearly the nursery of human nature in the world about us, and there is no
apparent reason to suppose that the case has anywhere or at any time been
essentially different.
As regards play, I might, were it not a matter of common observation,
multiply illustrations of the universality and spontaneity of the group
discussion and coöperation to which it gives rise. The general fact is that
children, especially boys after about their twelfth year, live in fellowships in
which their sympathy, ambition and honor are engaged even more, often,
than they are in the family. Most of us can recall examples of the endurance
by boys of injustice and even cruelty, rather than appeal from their fellows
to parents or teachers—as, for instance, in the hazing so prevalent at
schools, and so difficult, for this very reason, to repress. And how elaborate
the discussion, how cogent the public opinion, how hot the ambitions in
these fellowships.
Nor is this facility of juvenile association, as is sometimes supposed, a
trait peculiar to English and American boys; since experience among our
immigrant population seems to show that the offspring of the more
restrictive civilizations of the continent of Europe form self-governing play-
groups with almost equal readiness. Thus Miss Jane Addams, after pointing
out that the “gang” is almost universal, speaks of the interminable
discussion which every detail of the gang’s activity receives, remarking that
“in these social folk-motes, so to speak, the young citizen learns to act upon
his own determination.”[8]
Of the neighborhood group it may be said, in general, that from the time
men formed permanent settlements upon the land, down, at least, to the rise
of modern industrial cities, it has played a main part in the primary, heart-
to-heart life of the people. Among our Teutonic forefathers the village
community was apparently the chief sphere of sympathy and mutual aid for
the commons all through the “dark” and middle ages, and for many

purposes it remains so in rural districts at the present day. In some countries
we still find it with all its ancient vitality, notably in Russia, where the mir,
or self-governing village group, is the main theatre of life, along with the
family, for perhaps fifty millions of peasants.
In our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by
the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers
to people who live in the same house. And even in the country the same
principle is at work, though less obviously, diminishing our economic and
spiritual community with our neighbors. How far this change is a healthy
development, and how far a disease, is perhaps still uncertain.
Besides these almost universal kinds of primary association, there are
many others whose form depends upon the particular state of civilization;
the only essential thing, as I have said, being a certain intimacy and fusion
of personalities. In our own society, being little bound by place, people
easily form clubs, fraternal societies and the like, based on congeniality,
which may give rise to real intimacy. Many such relations are formed at
school and college, and among men and women brought together in the first
instance by their occupations—as workmen in the same trade, or the like.
Where there is a little common interest and activity, kindness grows like
weeds by the roadside.
But the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in the
open and plastic time of childhood makes them even now incomparably
more influential than all the rest.
Primary groups are primary in the sense that they give the individual his
earliest and completest experience of social unity, and also in the sense that
they do not change in the same degree as more elaborate relations, but form
a comparatively permanent source out of which the latter are ever
springing. Of course they are not independent of the larger society, but to
some extent reflect its spirit; as the German family and the German school
bear somewhat distinctly the print of German militarism. But this, after all,
is like the tide setting back into creeks, and does not commonly go very far.
Among the German, and still more among the Russian, peasantry are found
habits of free coöperation and discussion almost uninfluenced by the
character of the state; and it is a familiar and well-supported view that the
village commune, self-governing as regards local affairs and habituated to

discussion, is a very widespread institution in settled communities, and the
continuator of a similar autonomy previously existing in the clan. “It is man
who makes monarchies and establishes republics, but the commune seems
to come directly from the hand of God.”[9]
In our own cities the crowded tenements and the general economic and
social confusion have sorely wounded the family and the neighborhood, but
it is remarkable, in view of these conditions, what vitality they show; and
there is nothing upon which the conscience of the time is more determined
than upon restoring them to health.
These groups, then, are springs of life, not only for the individual but for
social institutions. They are only in part moulded by special traditions, and,
in larger degree, express a universal nature. The religion or government of
other civilizations may seem alien to us, but the children or the family
group wear the common life, and with them we can always make ourselves
at home.
By human nature, I suppose, we may understand those sentiments and
impulses that are human in being superior to those of lower animals, and
also in the sense that they belong to mankind at large, and not to any
particular race or time. It means, particularly, sympathy and the
innumerable sentiments into which sympathy enters, such as love,
resentment, ambition, vanity, hero-worship, and the feeling of social right
and wrong.[10]
Human nature in this sense is justly regarded as a comparatively
permanent element in society. Always and everywhere men seek honor and
dread ridicule, defer to public opinion, cherish their goods and their
children, and admire courage, generosity, and success. It is always safe to
assume that people are and have been human.
It is true, no doubt, that there are differences of race capacity, so great
that a large part of mankind are possibly incapable of any high kind of
social organization. But these differences, like those among individuals of
the same race, are subtle, depending upon some obscure intellectual
deficiency, some want of vigor, or slackness of moral fibre, and do not
involve unlikeness in the generic impulses of human nature. In these all
races are very much alike. The more insight one gets into the life of
savages, even those that are reckoned the lowest, the more human, the more

like ourselves, they appear. Take for instance the natives of Central
Australia, as described by Spencer and Gillen,[11] tribes having no definite
government or worship and scarcely able to count to five. They are
generous to one another, emulous of virtue as they understand it, kind to
their children and to the aged, and by no means harsh to women. Their faces
as shown in the photographs are wholly human and many of them
attractive.
And when we come to a comparison between different stages in the
development of the same race, between ourselves, for instance, and the
Teutonic tribes of the time of Cæsar, the difference is neither in human
nature nor in capacity, but in organization, in the range and complexity of
relations, in the diverse expression of powers and passions essentially much
the same.
There is no better proof of this generic likeness of human nature than in
the ease and joy with which the modern man makes himself at home in
literature depicting the most remote and varied phases of life—in Homer, in
the Nibelung tales, in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the legends of the American
Indians, in stories of frontier life, of soldiers and sailors, of criminals and
tramps, and so on. The more penetratingly any phase of human life is
studied the more an essential likeness to ourselves is revealed.
To return to primary groups: the view here maintained is that human
nature is not something existing separately in the individual, but a group-
nature or primary phase of society, a relatively simple and general
condition of the social mind. It is something more, on the one hand, than the
mere instinct that is born in us—though that enters into it—and something
less, on the other, than the more elaborate development of ideas and
sentiments that makes up institutions. It is the nature which is developed
and expressed in those simple, face-to-face groups that are somewhat alike
in all societies; groups of the family, the playground, and the neighborhood.
In the essential similarity of these is to be found the basis, in experience, for
similar ideas and sentiments in the human mind. In these, everywhere,
human nature comes into existence. Man does not have it at birth; he cannot
acquire it except through fellowship, and it decays in isolation.
If this view does not recommend itself to common-sense I do not know
that elaboration will be of much avail. It simply means the application at

this point of the idea that society and individuals are inseparable phases of a
common whole, so that wherever we find an individual fact we may look
for a social fact to go with it. If there is a universal nature in persons there
must be something universal in association to correspond to it.
What else can human nature be than a trait of primary groups? Surely not
an attribute of the separate individual—supposing there were any such thing
—since its typical characteristics, such as affection, ambition, vanity, and
resentment, are inconceivable apart from society. If it belongs, then, to man
in association, what kind or degree of association is required to develop it?
Evidently nothing elaborate, because elaborate phases of society are
transient and diverse, while human nature is comparatively stable and
universal. In short the family and neighborhood life is essential to its
genesis and nothing more is.
Here as everywhere in the study of society we must learn to see mankind
in psychical wholes, rather than in artificial separation. We must see and
feel the communal life of family and local groups as immediate facts, not as
combinations of something else. And perhaps we shall do this best by
recalling our own experience and extending it through sympathetic
observation. What, in our life, is the family and the fellowship; what do we
know of the we-feeling? Thought of this kind may help us to get a concrete
perception of that primary group-nature of which everything social is the
outgrowth.

FOOTNOTES:
[6] The History of Human Marriage.
[7] A History of Matrimonial Institutions.
[8] Newer Ideals of Peace, 177.
[9] De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 5.
[10] These matters are expounded at some length in the writer’s Human
Nature and the Social Order.
[11] The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Compare also Darwin’s views and
examples given in chap. 7 of his Descent of Man.

CHAPTER IV
PRIMARY IDEALS

Nature of Primary Idealism—The Ideal of a “We” or Moral Unity—It
Does not Exclude Self-Assertion—Ideals Springing from Hostility
—Loyalty, Truth, Service—Kindness—Lawfulness—Freedom—The
Doctrine of Natural Right—Bearing of Primary Idealism upon
Education and Philanthropy.
Life in the primary groups gives rise to social ideals which, as they
spring from similar experiences, have much in common throughout the
human race. And these naturally become the motive and test of social
progress. Under all systems men strive, however blindly, to realize objects
suggested by the familiar experience of primary association.
Where do we get our notions of love, freedom, justice, and the like which
we are ever applying to social institutions? Not from abstract philosophy,
surely, but from the actual life of simple and widespread forms of society,
like the family or the play-group. In these relations mankind realizes itself,
gratifies its primary needs, in a fairly satisfactory manner, and from the
experience forms standards of what it is to expect from more elaborate
association. Since groups of this sort are never obliterated from human
experience, but flourish more or less under all kinds of institutions, they
remain an enduring criterion by which the latter are ultimately judged.
Of course these simpler relations are not uniform for all societies, but
vary considerably with race, with the general state of civilization, and with
the particular sort of institutions that may prevail. The primary groups
themselves are subject to improvement and decay, and need to be watched
and cherished with a very special care.
Neither is it claimed that, at the best, they realize ideal conditions; only
that they approach them more nearly than anything else in general
experience, and so form the practical basis on which higher imaginations
are built. They are not always pleasant or righteous, but they almost always

contain elements from which ideals of pleasantness and righteousness may
be formed.
The ideal that grows up in familiar association may be said to be a part of
human nature itself. In its most general form it is that of a moral whole or
community wherein individual minds are merged and the higher capacities
of the members find total and adequate expression. And it grows up because
familiar association fills our minds with imaginations of the thought and
feeling of other members of the group, and of the group as a whole, so that,
for many purposes, we really make them a part of ourselves and identify
our self-feeling with them.
Children and savages do not formulate any such ideal, but they have it
nevertheless; they see it; they see themselves and their fellows as an
indivisible, though various, “we,” and they desire this “we” to be
harmonious, happy, and successful. How heartily one may merge himself in
the family and in the fellowships of youth is perhaps within the experience
of all of us; and we come to feel that the same spirit should extend to our
country, our race, our world. “All the abuses which are the objects of
reform ... are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of friends.”[12]
A congenial family life is the immemorial type of moral unity, and source
of many of the terms—such as brotherhood, kindness, and the like—which
describe it. The members become merged by intimate association into a
whole wherein each age and sex participates in its own way. Each lives in
imaginative contact with the minds of the others, and finds in them the
dwelling-place of his social self, of his affections, ambitions, resentments,
and standards of right and wrong. Without uniformity, there is yet unity, a
free, pleasant, wholesome, fruitful, common life.
As to the playground, Mr. Joseph Lee, in an excellent paper on Play as a
School of the Citizen, gives the following account of the merging of the one
in the whole that may be learned from sport. The boy, he says,
“is deeply participating in a common purpose. The team and the plays that it executes
are present in a very vivid manner to his consciousness. His conscious individuality is
more thoroughly lost in the sense of membership than perhaps it ever becomes in any
other way. So that the sheer experience of citizenship in its simplest and essential
form—of the sharing in a public consciousness, of having the social organization
present as a controlling ideal in your heart—is very intense....
Along with the sense of the team as a mechanical instrument, and unseparated from
it in the boy’s mind, is the consciousness of it as the embodiment of a common

purpose. There is in team play a very intimate experience of the ways in which such a
purpose is built up and made effective. You feel, though without analysis, the subtle
ways in which a single strong character breaks out the road ahead and gives
confidence to the rest to follow; how the creative power of one ardent imagination,
bravely sustained, makes possible the putting through of the play as he conceives it.
You feel to the marrow of your bones how each loyal member contributes to the
salvation of all the others by holding the conception of the whole play so firmly in his
mind as to enable them to hold it, and to participate in his single-minded
determination to see it carried out. You have intimate experience of the ways in which
individual members contribute to the team and of how the team, in turn, builds up
their spiritual nature....
And the team is not only an extension of the player’s consciousness; it is a part of
his personality. His participation has deepened from coöperation to membership. Not
only is he now a part of the team, but the team is a part of him.”[13]

Moral unity, as this illustration implies, admits and rewards strenuous
ambition; but this ambition must either be for the success of the group, or at
least not inconsistent with that. The fullest self-realization will belong to the
one who embraces in a passionate self-feeling the aims of the fellowship,
and spends his life in fighting for their attainment.
The ideal of moral unity I take to be the mother, as it were, of all social
ideals.
It is, then, not my aim to depreciate the self-assertive passions. I believe
that they are fierce, inextinguishable, indispensable. Competition and the
survival of the fittest are as righteous as kindness and coöperation, and not
necessarily opposed to them: an adequate view will embrace and harmonize
these diverse aspects. The point I wish particularly to bring out in this
chapter is that the normal self is moulded in primary groups to be a social
self whose ambitions are formed by the common thought of the group.
In their crudest form such passions as lust, greed, revenge, the pride of
power and the like are not, distinctively, human nature at all, but animal
nature, and so far as we rise into the spirit of family or neighborhood
association we control and subordinate them. They are rendered human
only so far as they are brought under the discipline of sympathy, and refined
into sentiments, such as love, resentment, and ambition. And in so far as
they are thus humanized they become capable of useful function.
Take the greed of gain, for example, the ancient sin of avarice, the old
wolf, as Dante says, that gets more prey than all the other beasts.[14] The
desire of possession is in itself a good thing, a phase of self-realization and

a cause of social improvement. It is immoral or greedy only when it is
without adequate control from sympathy, when the self realized is a narrow
self. In that case it is a vice of isolation or weak social consciousness, and
indicates a state of mind intermediate between the brutal and the fully
human or moral, when desire is directed toward social objects—wealth or
power—but is not social in its attitude toward others who desire the same
objects. Intimate association has the power to allay greed. One will hardly
be greedy as against his family or close friends, though very decent people
will be so as against almost any one else. Every one must have noticed that
after frank association, even of a transient character, with another person,
one usually has a sense of kindred with him which makes one ashamed to
act greedily at his expense.
Those who dwell preponderantly upon the selfish aspect of human nature
and flout as sentimentalism the “altruistic” conception of it, make their
chief error in failing to see that our self itself is altruistic, that the object of
our higher greed is some desired place in the minds of other men, and that
through this it is possible to enlist ordinary human nature in the service of
ideal aims. The improvement of society does not call for any essential
change in human nature, but, chiefly, for a larger and higher application of
its familiar impulses.
I know, also, that the most truculent behavior may be exalted into an
ideal, like the ferocity of Samuel, when he hewed Agag to pieces before the
Lord,[15] or of the orthodox Christian of a former age in the destruction of
heretics. In general there is always a morality of opposition, springing from
the need of the sympathetic group to assert itself in the struggle for
existence. Even at the present day this more or less idealizes destructiveness
and deceit in the conflicts of war, if not of commerce.
But such precepts are secondary, not ideals in the same primary and
enduring sense that loyalty and kindness are. They shine by reflected light,
and get their force mainly from the belief that they express the requirements
of the “we” group in combating its enemies. Flourishing at certain stages of
development because they are requisite under the prevailing conditions of
destructive conflict, they are slowly abandoned or transformed when these
conditions change. Mankind at large has no love of them for their own sake,
though individuals, classes, or even nations may acquire them as a habit.
With the advance of civilization conflict itself is brought more and more

under the control of those principles that prevail in primary groups, and, so
far as this is the case, conduct which violates such principles ceases to have
any ideal value.
To break up the ideal of a moral whole into particular ideals is an
artificial process which every thinker would probably carry out in his own
way. Perhaps, however, the most salient principles are loyalty, lawfulness,
and freedom.
In so far as one identifies himself with a whole, loyalty to that whole is
loyalty to himself; it is self-realization, something in which one cannot fail
without losing self-respect. Moreover this is a larger self, leading out into a
wider and richer life, and appealing, therefore, to enthusiasm and the need
of quickening ideals. One is never more human, and as a rule never happier,
than when he is sacrificing his narrow and merely private interest to the
higher call of the congenial group. And without doubt the natural genesis of
this sentiment is in the intimacy of face-to-face coöperation. It is rather the
rule than the exception in the family, and grows up among children and
youth so fast as they learn to think and act to common ends. The team
feeling described above illustrates it as well as anything.
Among the ideals inseparable from loyalty are those of truth, service, and
kindness, always conceived as due to the intimate group rather than to the
world at large.
Truth or good faith toward other members of a fellowship is, so far as I
know, a universal human ideal. It does not involve any abstract love of
veracity, and is quite consistent with deception toward the outside world,
being essentially “truth of intercourse” or fair dealing among intimates.
There are few, even among those reckoned lawless, who will not keep faith
with one who has the gift of getting near to them in spirit and making them
feel that he is one of themselves. Thus Judge Lindsey of Denver has worked
a revolution among the neglected boys of his city, by no other method than
that of entering into the same moral whole, becoming part of a “we” with
them. He awakens their sense of honor, trusts it, and is almost never
disappointed. When he wishes to send a boy to the reform school the latter
promises to repair to the institution at a given time and invariably does so.
Among tramps a similar sentiment prevails. “It will be found,” said a young

man who had spent the summer among vagrants, “that if they are treated
square they will do the same.”
The ideal of service likewise goes with the sense of unity. If there is a
vital whole the right aim of individual activity can be no other than to serve
that whole. And this is not so much a theory as a feeling that will exist
wherever the whole is felt. It is a poor sort of an individual that does not
feel the need to devote himself to the larger purposes of the group. In our
society many feel this need in youth and express it on the playground who
never succeed in realizing it among the less intimate relations of business or
professional life.
All mankind acknowledges kindness as the law of right intercourse
within a social group. By communion minds are fused into a sympathetic
whole, each part of which tends to share the life of all the rest, so that
kindness is a common joy, and harshness a common pain. It is the simplest,
most attractive, and most diffused of human ideals. The golden rule springs
directly from human nature.
Accordingly this ideal has been bound up with association in all past
times and among all peoples: it was a matter of course that when men acted
together in war, industry, devotion, sport, or what not, they formed a
brotherhood or friendship. It is perhaps only in modern days, along with the
great and sudden differentiation of activities, that feeling has failed to keep
up, and the idea of coöperation without friendship has become familiar.
Mr. Westermarck, than whom there is no better authority on a question of
this sort, has filled several chapters of his work on the Origin and
Development of Moral Ideas with evidence of the universality of kindness
and the kindly ideal. After showing at length that uncivilized people
recognize the duty of kindness and support from mother to child, father to
child, child to parent, and among brethren and kinsmen, he goes on to say:
[16]
“But the duty of helping the needy and protecting those in danger goes
beyond the limits of the family and the gens. Uncivilized peoples are, as a
rule, described as kind toward members of their own community or tribe.
Between themselves charity is enjoined as a duty and generosity is praised
as a virtue. Indeed their customs regarding mutual aid are often much more
stringent than our own. And this applies even to the lowest savages.”

Beginning with the Australians, he quotes the statement of Spencer and
Gillen that their treatment of one another “is marked on the whole by
considerable kindness, that is, of course, in the case of members of friendly
groups, with every now and then the perpetration of acts of cruelty.”
Concerning the North American Indians he cites many writers. Catlin says
“to their friends there are no people on earth that are more kind.” Adair that
“they are very kind and liberal to every one of their own tribe, even to the
last morsel of food they enjoy”; also that Nature’s school “teaches them the
plain, easy rule, Do to others as you would be done by.” Morgan reports
that “among the Iroquois kindness to the orphan, hospitality to all, and a
common brotherhood were among the doctrines held up for acceptance by
their religious instructors.” An Iroquois “would surrender his dinner to feed
the hungry, vacate his bed to refresh the weary, and give up his apparel to
clothe the naked.”
And so Westermarck goes on, in the exhaustive way familiar to readers of
his works, to show that like sentiments prevail the world over. Kropotkin
has collected similar evidence in his Mutual Aid a Factor in Civilization.
The popular notion of savages as lacking in the gentler feelings is an error
springing from the external, usually hostile, nature of our contact with
them. Indeed, a state of things, such as is found in our own cities, where
want and plenty exist side by side without the latter feeling any compulsion
to relieve the former, is shocking and incomprehensible to many savages.
Ordinarily the ideal of kindness, in savage and civilized societies alike,
applies only to those within the sympathetic group; the main difference
between civilization and savagery, in this regard, being that under the
former the group tends to enlarge. One reason for the restriction is that
kindness is aroused by sympathy, and can have little life except as our
imaginations are opened to the lives of others and they are made part of
ourselves. Even the Christian church, as history shows, has for the most part
inculcated kindness only to those within its own pale, or within a particular
sect; and the modern ideal of a kindness embracing all humanity (modern at
least so far as western nations are concerned) is connected with a growing
understanding of the unity of the race.
Every intimate group, like every individual, experiences conflicting
impulses within itself, and as the individual feels the need of definite
principles to shape his conduct and give him peace, so the group needs law

or rule for the same purpose. It is not merely that the over-strong or the
insubordinate must be restrained, but that all alike may have some definite
criterion of what the good member ought to do. It is a mere fact of
psychology that where a social whole exists it may be as painful to do
wrong as to suffer it—because one’s own spirit is divided—and the
common need is for harmony through a law, framed in the total interest,
which every one can and must obey.
This need of rules to align differentiated impulse with the good of the
whole is nowhere more apparent than on the playground. Miss Buck, the
author of an instructive work on Boys’ Self-Governing Clubs, suggests that
the elementary form of equity is “taking turns,” as at swings and the like;
and any one who has shared in a boys’ camp will recall the constant
demand, by the boys themselves, for rules of this nature. There must be a
fair distribution of privileges as to boats, games, and so on, and an equal
distribution of food. And we learn from Robert Woods that gangs of boys
on the streets of cities generally have a “judge” to whom all disputes are
referred if no agreement is otherwise reached.[17]
No doubt every one remembers how the idea of justice is developed in
children’s games. There is always something to be done, in which various
parts are to be taken, success depending upon their efficient distribution. All
see this and draw from experience the idea that there is a higher principle
that ought to control the undisciplined ambition of individuals. “Rough
games,” says Miss Buck, “in many respects present in miniature the
conditions of a society where an ideal state of justice, freedom and equality
prevails.”[18] Mr. Joseph Lee, in the paper quoted above, expounds the
matter at more length and with much insight.
You may be very intent to beat the other man in the race, but after experience of
many contests the fair promise of whose morning has been clouded over by the long
and many-worded dispute terminating in a general row, with indecisive and
unsatisfying result, you begin dimly to perceive that you and the other fellows and the
rest of the crowd, for the very reason that you are contestants and prospective
contestants, have interests in common—interests in the establishment and
maintenance of those necessary rules and regulations without which satisfactory
contests cannot be carried on.... The child’s need of conflict is from a desire not to
exterminate his competitor, but to overcome him and to have his own superiority
acknowledged. The boy desires to be somebody; but being somebody is to him a
social achievement. And though there is temptation to pervert justice, to try to get the
decision when you have not really furnished the proof, there is also a motive against
such procedure. The person whom you really and finally want to convince is yourself.

Your deepest desire is to beat the other boy, not merely to seem to beat him. By
playing unfairly and forcing decisions in your own favor, you may possibly cheat the
others, but you cannot cheat yourself.
But the decisions in most of the disputes have behind them the further, more
obviously social, motive of carrying on a successful game. The sense of common
interest has been stretched so as to take the competitive impulse itself into camp,
domesticate it, and make it a part of the social system. The acutely realized fact that a
society of chronic kickers can never play a game or anything else, comes to be seen
against the background of a possible orderly arrangement of which one has had
occasional experience, and with which one has come at last to sympathize; there
comes to be to some extent an identification of one’s own interests and purposes with
the interests and purposes of the whole. Certainly the decisions of the group as to
whether Jimmy was out at first, as to who came out last, and whether Mary Ann was
really caught, are felt as community and not as individual decisions.[19]

No doubt American boys have more of the spirit and practice of this sort
of organization than those of any other country, except possibly England:
they have the constant spectacle of self-government among their elders, and
also, perhaps, some advantage in natural aptitude to help them on. But it is
doubtful if there is any great difference among the white peoples in the
latter regard. American children of German and Irish descent are not
inferior to the Anglo-Saxons, and among the newer immigrants the Jewish
children, at least, show a marked aptitude for organization. The question
might profitably be investigated in our great cities.
Of course the ideals derived from juvenile experience are carried over
into the wider life, and men always find it easy to conceive righteousness in
terms of fair play. “The Social Question,” says a penetrative writer, “is
forever an attack upon what, in some form, is thought to be unfair
privilege.”[20]
The law or rule that human nature demands has a democratic principle
latent in it, because it must be one congenial to general sentiment. Explicit
democracy, however—deciding by popular vote and the like—is not
primary and general like the need of law, but is rather a mechanism for
deciding what the rule is to be, and no more natural than the appeal to
authority. Indeed, there seems to be, among children as among primitive
peoples, a certain reluctance to ascribe laws to the mere human choice of
themselves and their fellows. They wish to assign them to a higher source
and to think of them as having an unquestionable sanction. So far as my
own observation goes, even American boys prefer to receive rules from
tradition or from their elders, when they can. Nothing is easier than for a

parent, or mentor of any kind, to be a lawgiver to children, if only he has
their confidence, and if the laws themselves prove workable. But the test of
law is social and popular; it must suit the general mind. If, for instance, a
man takes a group of boys camping, and has their confidence, they will
gladly receive rules from him, expecting, of course, that they will be good
rules. But if they prove to be unreasonable and troublesome, they will soon
cease to work.
Freedom is that phase of the social ideal which emphasizes individuality.
The whole to which we belong is made up of diverse energies which
enkindle one another by friction; and its vigor requires that these have play.
Thus the fierce impulses of ambition and pride may be as organic as
anything else—provided they are sufficiently humanized as to their objects
—and are to be interfered with only when they become destructive or
oppressive. Moreover, we must not be required to prove to others the
beneficence of our peculiarity, but should be allowed, if we wish, to “write
whim on the lintels of the door-post.” Our desires and purposes, though
social in their ultimate nature, are apt to be unacceptable on first
appearance, and the more so in proportion to their value. Thus we feel a
need to be let alone, and sympathize with a similar need in others.
This is so familiar a principle, especially among English and Americans,
to whose temperament and traditions it is peculiarly congenial, that I need
not discuss it at length. It is a phase of idealism that comes most vividly to
consciousness when formal and antiquated systems of control need to be
broken up, as in the eighteenth century. It then represented the appeal to
human nature as against outworn mechanism. Our whole social and
political philosophy still echoes that conflict.
The bearing of this view of human nature may perhaps be made clearer
by considering its relation to the familiar but now somewhat discredited
doctrine of Natural Right. This is traced from the speculations of Greek
philosophers down through Roman jurisprudence to Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, and others, who gave it its modern forms and through whose
works it became a factor in modern history. It was familiar to our
forefathers and is set forth in the Declaration of Independence. According to
it society is made up, primarily, of free individuals, who must be held to
create government and other institutions by a sort of implied contract,
yielding up a part of their natural right in order to enjoy the benefits of

organization. But if the organization does not confer these benefits, then, as
most writers held, it is wrong and void, and the individuals may properly
reclaim their natural freedom.
Now in form this doctrine is wholly at variance with evolutionary
thought. To the latter, society is an organic growth; there is no individual
apart from society, no freedom apart from organization, no social contract
of the sort taught by these philosophers. In its practical applications,
however, the teaching of natural right is not so absurd and obsolete as is
sometimes imagined. If it is true that human nature is developed in primary
groups which are everywhere much the same, and that there also springs
from these a common idealism which institutions strive to express, we have
a ground for somewhat the same conclusions as come from the theory of a
natural freedom modified by contract. Natural freedom would correspond
roughly to the ideals generated and partly realized in primary association,
the social contract to the limitations these ideals encounter in seeking a
larger expression.
Indeed, is it not true that the natural rights of this philosophy—the right
to personal freedom, the right to labor, the right to property, the right to
open competition—are ideals which in reality sprang then as they do now
largely from what the philosophers knew of the activities of men in small,
face-to-face groups?
The reluctance to give up ideals like those of the Declaration of
Independence, without something equally simple and human to take their
place, is healthy and need not look far for theoretical justification.
The idea of the germinal character of primary association is one that is
fast making its way in education and philanthropy. As we learn that man is
altogether social and never seen truly except in connection with his fellows,
we fix our attention more and more on group conditions as the source, for
better or worse, of personal character, and come to feel that we must work
on the individual through the web of relations in which he actually lives.
The school, for instance, must form a whole with the rest of life, using
the ideas generated by the latter as the starting-point of its training. The
public opinion and traditions of the scholars must be respected and made an
ally of discipline. Children’s associations should be fostered and good
objects suggested for their activity.

In philanthropy it is essential that the unity of the family be regarded and
its natural bonds not weakened for the sake of transient benefit to the
individual. Children, especially, must be protected from the destructive
kindness which inculcates irresponsibility in the parent. In general the heart
of reform is in control of the conditions which act upon the family and
neighborhood. When the housing, for example, is of such a character as to
make a healthy home life impossible, the boys and girls are driven to the
streets, the men into saloons, and thus society is diseased at its source.
Without healthy play, especially group play, human nature cannot rightly
develop, and to preserve this, in the midst of the crowding and aggressive
commercialism of our cities, is coming to be seen as a special need of the
time. Democracy, it is now held, must recognize as one of its essential
functions the provision of ample spaces and apparatus for this purpose, with
enough judicious supervision to ensure the ascendency of good play
traditions. And with this must go the suppression of child labor and other
inhumane conditions.
Fruitful attention is being given to boys’ fellowships or “gangs.” It
appears—as any one who recalls his own boyhood might have anticipated
—that nearly all the juvenile population belong to such fellowships, and put
an ardent, though often misdirected, idealism into them. “Almost every boy
in the tenement-house quarters of the district,” says Robert A. Woods,
speaking of Boston, “is a member of a gang. The boy who does not belong
is not only the exception but the very rare exception.”[21] In crowded
neighborhoods, where there are no playgrounds and street sports are
unlawful, the human nature of these gangs must take a semi-criminal
direction; but with better opportunities and guidance it turns quite as
naturally to wholesome sport and social service. Accordingly social
settlements and similar agencies are converting gangs into clubs, with the
best results; and there is also coming to be a regular organization of
voluntary clubs in affiliation with the public schools.
It is much the same in the country. In every village and township in the
land, I suppose, there are one or more groups of predatory boys and
hoydenish girls whose mischief is only the result of ill-directed energy. If
each of these could receive a little sympathetic attention from kindred but
wiser spirits, at least half of the crime and vice of the next generation would
almost certainly be done away with.

FOOTNOTES:
[12] Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 283.
[13] Charities and the Commons, Aug. 3, 1907.
[14]
Antica lupa,
Che più che tutte l’altre bestie hai preda.
Purgatorio, XX, 10.
[15] 1 Samuel, 15:33.
[16] Vol. i, 540 ff.
[17] The City Wilderness, 116.
[18] Boys’ Self-Governing Clubs, 4, 5.
[19] Charities and the Commons, Aug. 3. 1907, abridged.
[20] John Graham Brooks, The Social Unrest, 135.
[21] The City Wilderness, 113.

CHAPTER V
THE EXTENSION OF PRIMARY IDEALS

Primary Ideals Underlie Democracy and Christianity—Why They are
not Achieved on a Larger Scale—What They Require from
Personality—From Social Mechanism—The Principle of
Compensation.
It will be found that those systems of larger idealism which are most
human and so of most enduring value, are based upon the ideals of primary
groups. Take, for instance, the two systems that have most vitality at the
present time—democracy and Christianity.
The aspirations of ideal democracy—including, of course, socialism, and
whatever else may go by a special name—are those naturally springing
from the playground or the local community; embracing equal opportunity,
fair play, the loyal service of all in the common good, free discussion, and
kindness to the weak. These are renewed every day in the hearts of the
people because they spring from and are corroborated by familiar and
homely experience. Moreover, modern democracy as a historical current is
apparently traceable back to the village community life of the Teutonic
tribes of northern Europe, from which it descends through English
constitutional liberty and the American and French revolutions to its broad
and deep channels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
And Christianity, as a social system, is based upon the family, its ideals
being traceable to the domestic circle of a Judaean carpenter. God is a kind
father; men and women are brothers and sisters; we are all members one of
another, doing as we would be done by and referring all things to the rule of
love. In so far as the church has departed from these principles it has proved
transient; these endure because they are human.
But why is it that human nature is not more successful in achieving these
primary aims? They appear to be simple and reasonable, and one asks why

they are so little realized, why we are not, in fact, a moral whole, a happy
family.
It is not because we do not wish it. There can be no doubt, I should say,
that, leaving aside a comparatively few abnormal individuals, whose
influence is small, men in general have a natural allegiance to the
community ideal, and would gladly see it carried out on a large as well as a
small scale. And nearly all imaginative and aspiring persons view it with
enthusiasm, and would devote themselves to it with some ardor and
sacrifice if they saw clearly how they could do so with effect. It is easy to
imagine types of pure malignity in people of whom we have little
knowledge, but who ever came to know any one intimately without finding
that he had somewhere in him the impulses of a man and a brother?
The failure to realize these impulses in practice is, of course, due in part
to moral weakness of a personal character, to the fact that our higher nature
has but an imperfect and transient mastery of our lower, so that we never
live up to our ideals. But going beyond this and looking at the matter from
the standpoint of the larger mind, the cause of failure is seen to be the
difficulty of organization. Even if our intentions were always good, we
should not succeed, because, to make good intentions effective, they must
be extended into a system. In attempting to do this our constructive power
is used up and our ideals confused and discouraged. We are even led to
create a kind of institutions which, though good in certain aspects, may
brutalize or ossify the individual, so that primary idealism in him is almost
obliterated. The creation of a moral order on an ever-growing scale is the
great historical task of mankind, and the magnitude of it explains all
shortcomings.
From personality the building of a moral order requires not only good
impulses but character and capacity. The ideal must be worked out with
steadfastness, self-control, and intelligence. Even families and fellowships,
though usually on a higher level than more elaborate structures, often break
down, and commonly from lack of character in their members. But if it is
insufficient here, how much less will it suffice for a righteous state. Our
new order of life, with its great extension of structure and its principle of
freedom, is an ever severer test of the political and moral fibre of mankind,
of its power to hold itself together in vast, efficient, plastic wholes.

Whatever races or social systems fail to produce this fibre must yield
ascendency to those which succeed.
This stronger personality depends also upon training; and whatever
peoples succeed in being righteous on a great scale will do so only by
adding to natural capacity an education suited to the growing demands of
the situation—one at the same time broad and special, technical and
humane. There can be no moral order that does not live in the mind of the
individual.
Besides personality—or rather correlative with it—there must be an
adequate mechanism of communication and organization. In small groups
the requirements of structure are so simple as to make little trouble, but in
proportion as the web of relations extends and diversifies, they become
more and more difficult to meet without sacrificing human nature; so that,
other things equal, the freedom and real unity of the system are likely to
vary inversely with its extent. It is only because other things have not
remained equal, because the mechanism has been improved, that it has
become possible, in a measure, to reconcile freedom with extent.
Communication must be full and quick in order to give that promptness
in the give-and-take of suggestions upon which moral unity depends.
Gesture and speech ensure this in the face-to-face group; but only the recent
marvellous improvement of communicative machinery makes a free mind
on a great scale even conceivable. If there is no means of working thought
and sentiment into a whole by reciprocation, the unity of the group cannot
be other than inert and unhuman. This cause alone would account for the
lack of extended freedom previous to the nineteenth century.
There must also be forms and customs of rational organization, through
which human nature may express itself in an orderly and effective manner.
Even children learn the need of regular discussion and decision, while all
bodies of adults meeting for deliberation find that they can think organically
only by observance of the rules which have been worked out for such
occasions. And if we are to have great and stable nations, it is easy to see
that these rules of order must become a body of law and custom including
most, if not all, of the familiar institutions of society. These are a product of
progressive invention, trial, and survival as much as the railroad or the

factory, and they have in the long run the same purpose, that of the fuller
expression of human nature in a social system.
As might be expected from these conditions, there is a principle of
compensation at work in the growth of the larger mind. The more
betterment there is, the more of vital force, of human reason, feeling, and
choice, goes into it; and, as these are limited, improvement in one respect is
apt to be offset, at least in part or temporarily, by delay or retrogression in
others.
Thus a rapid improvement in the means of communication, as we see in
our own time, supplies the basis for a larger and freer society, and yet it
may, by disordering settled relations, and by fixing attention too much upon
mechanical phases of progress, bring in conditions of confusion and
injustice that are the opposite of free.
A very general fact of early political history is deterioration by growth.
The small state cannot escape its destiny as part of a larger world, but must
expand or perish. It grows in size, power, and diversity by the necessities of
its struggle for existence—as did Rome, Athens, and a hundred other states
—but in so doing sacrifices human nature to military expediency and
develops a mechanical or despotic structure. This, in the long run, produces
weakness, decay, and conquest, or perhaps revolt and revolution. The
requirements of human nature—both direct, as expressed in social idealism,
and indirect, as felt in the ultimate weakness and failure of systems which
disregard them—are irrepressible. Gradually, therefore, through
improvement and through the survival of higher types in conflict, a type of
larger structure is developed which less sacrifices these requirements.
Much of what is unfree and unhuman in our modern life comes from
mere inadequacy of mental and moral energy to meet the accumulating
demands upon it. In many quarters attention and effort must be lacking, and
where this is the case social relations fall to a low plane—just as a teacher
who has too much to do necessarily adopts a mechanical style of
instruction. So what we call “red tape” prevails in great clerical offices
because much business is done by persons of small ability, who can work
only under rule. And great bureaucratic systems, like the Russian Empire,
are of much the same nature.

In general the wrongs of the social system come much more from
inadequacy than from ill intention. It is indeed not to be expected that all
relations should be fully rational and sympathetic; we have to be content
with infusing reason and sympathy into what is most vital.
Society, then, as a moral organism, is a progressive creation, tentatively
wrought out through experiment, struggle, and survival. Not only
individuals but ideas, institutions, nations, and races do their work upon it
and perish. Its ideals, though simple in spirit, are achieved through endless
elaboration of means.
It will be my further endeavor to throw some light upon this striving
whole by considering certain phases of its organization, such as
Communication, Public Opinion, Sentiment, Classes, and Institutions;
always trying to see the whole in the part, the part in the whole, and human
nature in both.

PART II
COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER VI
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COMMUNICATION

Meaning of Communication—Its Relation to Human Nature—To Society
at Large.

By Communication is here meant the mechanism through which human
relations exist and develop—all the symbols of the mind, together with the
means of conveying them through space and preserving them in time. It
includes the expression of the face, attitude and gesture, the tones of the
voice, words, writing, printing, railways, telegraphs, telephones, and
whatever else may be the latest achievement in the conquest of space and
time. All these taken together, in the intricacy of their actual combination,
make up an organic whole corresponding to the organic whole of human
thought; and everything in the way of mental growth has an external
existence therein. The more closely we consider this mechanism the more
intimate will appear its relation to the inner life of mankind, and nothing
will more help us to understand the latter than such consideration.
There is no sharp line between the means of communication and the rest
of the external world. In a sense all objects and actions are symbols of the
mind, and nearly anything may be used as a sign—as I may signify the
moon or a squirrel to a child by merely pointing at it, or by imitating with
the voice the chatter of the one or drawing an outline of the other. But there
is also, almost from the first, a conventional development of
communication, springing out of spontaneous signs but soon losing evident
connection with them, a system of standard symbols existing for the mere
purpose of conveying thought; and it is this we have chiefly to consider.
Without communication the mind does not develop a true human nature,
but remains in an abnormal and nondescript state neither human nor
properly brutal. This is movingly illustrated by the case of Helen Keller,
who, as all the world knows, was cut off at eighteen months from the
cheerful ways of men by the loss of sight and hearing; and did not renew

the connection until she was nearly seven years old. Although her mind was
not wholly isolated during this period, since she retained the use of a
considerable number of signs learned during infancy, yet her impulses were
crude and uncontrolled, and her thought so unconnected that she afterward
remembered almost nothing that occurred before the awakening which took
place toward the close of her seventh year.
The story of that awakening, as told by her teacher, gives as vivid a
picture as we need have of the significance to the individual mind of the
general fact and idea of communication. For weeks Miss Sullivan had been
spelling words into her hand which Helen had repeated and associated with
objects; but she had not yet grasped the idea of language in general, the fact
that everything had a name, and that through names she could share her
own experiences with others, and learn theirs—the idea that there is
fellowship in thought. This came quite suddenly.
“This morning,” writes her teacher, “while she was washing, she wanted to know
the name for water.... I spelled w-a-t-e-r and thought no more about it until after
breakfast. Then it occurred to me that with the help of this new word I might succeed
in straightening out the mug-milk difficulty [a confusion of ideas previously
discussed]. We went out into the pump-house and I made Helen hold her mug under
the pump while I pumped. As the cold water gushed forth filling the mug I spelled w-
a-t-e-r in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold
water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as
one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled water several times. Then
she dropped on the ground and asked for its name, and pointed to the pump and the
trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name. I spelled ‘teacher.’ Just
then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled
‘baby’ and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited,
and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she had
added thirty new words to her vocabulary.”
The following day Miss Sullivan writes, “Helen got up this morning like a radiant
fairy. She has flitted from object to object, asking the name of everything and kissing
me for very gladness.” And four days later, “Everything must have a name now.... She
drops the signs and pantomime she used before, so soon as she has words to supply
their place, and the acquirement of a new word affords her the liveliest pleasure. And
we notice that her face grows more expressive each day.”[22]

This experience is a type of what happens more gradually to all of us: it
is through communication that we get our higher development. The faces
and conversation of our associates; books, letters, travel, arts, and the like,
by awakening thought and feeling and guiding them in certain channels,
supply the stimulus and framework for all our growth.

In the same way, if we take a larger view and consider the life of a social
group, we see that communication, including its organization into literature,
art, and institutions, is truly the outside or visible structure of thought, as
much cause as effect of the inside or conscious life of men. All is one
growth: the symbols, the traditions, the institutions are projected from the
mind, to be sure, but in the very instant of their projection, and thereafter,
they react upon it, and in a sense control it, stimulating, developing, and
fixing certain thoughts at the expense of others to which no awakening
suggestion comes. By the aid of this structure the individual is a member
not only of a family, a class, and a state, but of a larger whole reaching back
to prehistoric men whose thought has gone to build it up. In this whole he
lives as in an element, drawing from it the materials of his growth and
adding to it whatever constructive thought he may express.
Thus the system of communication is a tool, a progressive invention,
whose improvements react upon mankind and alter the life of every
individual and institution. A study of these improvements is one of the best
ways by which to approach an understanding of the mental and social
changes that are bound up with them; because it gives a tangible framework
for our ideas—just as one who wished to grasp the organic character of
industry and commerce might well begin with a study of the railway system
and of the amount and kind of commodities it carries, proceeding thence to
the more abstract transactions of finance.
And when we come to the modern era, especially, we can understand
nothing rightly unless we perceive the manner in which the revolution in
communication has made a new world for us. So in the pages that follow I
shall aim to show what the growth of intercourse implies in the way of
social development, inquiring particularly into the effect of recent changes.

FOOTNOTES:
[22] The Story of My Life, 316, 317.

CHAPTER VII
THE GROWTH OF COMMUNICATION

Pre-Verbal Communication—The Rise of Speech—Its Mental and Social
Function—The Function of Writing—Printing and the Modern
World—The Non-Verbal Arts.
The chief means of what we may call pre-verbal communication are the
expression of the face—especially of the mobile portions about the eyes and
mouth—the pitch, inflection, and emotional tone of the voice; and the
gestures of the head and limbs. All of these begin in involuntary movements
but are capable of becoming voluntary, and all are eagerly practised and
interpreted by children long before they learn to speak. They are
immediately joined to action and emotion: the inflections of the voice, for
instance, play upon the child’s feelings as directly as music, and are
interpreted partly by an instinctive sensibility. I have heard a child
seventeen months old using her voice so expressively, though inarticulately,
that it sounded, a little way off, as if she were carrying on an animated
conversation. And gesture, such as reaching out the hand, bending forward,
turning away the head, and the like, springs directly from the ideas and
feelings it represents.
The human face, “the shape and color of a mind and life,” is a kind of
epitome of society, and if one could only read all that is written in the
countenances of men as they pass he might find a great deal of sociology in
them. Hereditary bias, family nurture, the print of the school, current
opinion, contemporary institutions, all are there, drawn with a very fine
pencil. If one wishes to get a real human insight into the times of Henry the
Eighth, for example, he can hardly do better than to study the portrait
drawings of Holbein; and so of other periods, including our own, whose
traits would appear conspicuously in a collection of portraits. Many people
can discriminate particular classes, as, for instance, clergymen, by their
expression, and not a few will tell with much accuracy what church the
latter belong to and whether they are of the lower rank or in authority.

Again there is a difference, indescribable, perhaps, yet apparent, between
the look of American and of English youths—still more of girls—which
reflects the differing social systems.
This sort of communication is, of course, involuntary. An artificial
mechanism of communication originates when man begins purposely to
reproduce his own instinctive motions and cries, or the sounds, forms, and
movements of the world about him, in order to recall the ideas associated
with them. All kinds of conventional communication are believed to be
rooted in these primitive imitations, which, by a process not hard to
imagine, extend and differentiate into gesture, speech, writing, and the
special symbols of the arts and sciences; so that the whole exterior
organization of thought refers back to these beginnings.
We can only conjecture the life of man, or of his humanizing progenitor,
before speech was achieved; but we may suppose that facial expression,
inarticulate cries and songs,[23] and a variety of imitative sounds and actions
aroused sympathy, permitted the simpler kinds of general ideas to be
formed, and were the medium through which tradition and convention had
their earliest development. It is probable that artificial gesture language was
well organized before speech had made much headway. Even without
words life may have been an active and continuous mental whole, not
dependent for its unity upon mere heredity, but bound together by some
conscious community in the simpler sorts of thought and feeling, and by the
transmission and accumulation of these through tradition. There was
presumably coöperation and instruction of a crude sort in which was the
germ of future institutions.
No one who has observed children will have any difficulty in
conjecturing the beginnings of speech, since nearly every child starts in to
invent a language for himself, and only desists when he finds that there is
one all ready-made for him. There are as many natural words (if we may
call them so) as there are familiar sounds with definite associations,
whether coming from human beings, from animals, or from inanimate
nature. These the child instinctively loves to reproduce and communicate, at
first in mere sport and sociability, then, as occasion arises, with more
definite meaning. This meaning is easily extended by various sorts of
association of ideas; the sounds themselves are altered and combined in
usage; and thus speech is well begun.

Many humble inventors contribute to its growth, every man, possibly,
altering the heritage in proportion as he puts his individuality into his
speech. Variations of idea are preserved in words or other symbols, and so
stored up in a continuing whole, constantly growing in bulk and diversity,
which is, as we have seen, nothing less than the outside or sensible
embodiment of human thought, in which every particular mind lives and
grows, drawing from it the material of its own life, and contributing to it
whatever higher product it may make out of that material.
A word is a vehicle, a boat floating down from the past, laden with the
thought of men we never saw; and in coming to understand it we enter not
only into the minds of our contemporaries, but into the general mind of
humanity continuous through time. The popular notion of learning to speak
is that the child first has the idea and then gets from others a sound to use in
communicating it; but a closer study shows that this is hardly true even of
the simplest ideas, and is nearly the reverse of truth as regards developed
thought. In that the word usually goes before, leading and kindling the idea
—we should not have the latter if we did not have the word first. “This
way,” says the word, “is an interesting thought; come and find it.” And so
we are led on to rediscover old knowledge. Such words, for instance, as
good, right, truth, love, home, justice, beauty, freedom; are powerful makers
of what they stand for.
A mind without words would make only such feeble and uncertain
progress as a traveller set down in the midst of a wilderness where there
were no paths or conveyances and without even a compass. A mind with
them is like the same traveller in the midst of civilization, with beaten roads
and rapid vehicles ready to take him in any direction where men have been
before. As the traveller must pass over the ground in either case, so the
mind must pass through experience, but if it has language it finds its
experience foreseen, mapped out and interpreted by all the wisdom of the
past, so that it has not only its own experience but that of the race—just as
the modern traveller sees not only the original country but the cities and
plantations of men.
The principle that applies to words applies also to all structures that are
built of words, to literature and the manifold traditions that it conveys. As
the lines of Dante are “foot-paths for the thought of Italy,” so the successful
efforts of the mind in every field are preserved in their symbols and become

foot-paths by which other minds reach the same point. And this includes
feeling as well as definite idea. It is almost the most wonderful thing about
language that by something intangible in its order and movement and in the
selection and collocation of words, it can transmit the very soul of a man,
making his page live when his definite ideas have ceased to have value. In
this way one gets from Sir Thomas Browne, let us say, not his conceits and
credulities, but his high and religious spirit, hovering, as it were, over the
page.
The achievement of speech is commonly and properly regarded as the
distinctive trait of man, as the gate by which he emerged from his pre-
human state. It means that, like Helen Keller, he has learned that everything
has, or may have, a name, and so has entered upon a life of conscious
fellowship in thought. It not only permitted the rise of a more rational and
human kind of thinking and feeling, but was also the basis of the earliest
definite institutions. A wider and fuller unity of thought took place in every
group where it appeared. Ideas regarding the chief interests of primitive life
—hunting, warfare, marriage, feasting and the like—were defined,
communicated and extended. Public opinion no doubt began to arise within
the tribe, and crystallized into current sayings which served as rules of
thought and conduct; the festal chants, if they existed before, became
articulate and historical. And when any thought of special value was
achieved in the group, it did not perish, but was handed on by tradition and
made the basis of new gains. In this way primitive wisdom and rule were
perpetuated, enlarged and improved until, in connection with ceremonial
and other symbols, they became such institutions, of government, marriage,
religion and property as are found in every savage tribe.
Nor must we forget that this state of things reacted upon the natural
capacities of man, perhaps by the direct inheritance of acquired social
habits and aptitudes, certainly by the survival of those who, having these,
were more fitted than others to thrive in a social life. In this way man, if he
was human when speech began to be used, rapidly became more so, and
went on accumulating a social heritage.
So the study of speech reveals a truth which we may also reach in many
other ways, namely, that the growth of the individual mind is not a separate
growth, but rather a differentiation within the general mind. Our personal
life, so far as we can make out, has its sources partly in congenital tendency,

and partly in the stream of communication, both of which flow from the
corporate life of the race. The individual has no better ground for thinking
of himself as separate from humanity than he has for thinking of the self he
is to-day as separate from the self he was yesterday; the continuity being no
more certain in the one case than in the other. If it be said that he is separate
because he feels separate, it may be answered that to the infant each
moment is separate, and that we know our personal life to be a whole only
through the growth of thought and memory. In the same way the sense of a
larger or social wholeness is perhaps merely a question of our growing into
more vivid and intelligent consciousness of a unity which is already clear
enough to reflective observation.
It is the social function of writing, by giving ideas a lasting record, to
make possible a more certain, continuous and diversified growth of the
human mind. It does for the race very much what it does for the individual.
When the student has a good thought he writes it down, so that it may be
recalled at will and made the starting-point for a better thought in the same
direction; and so mankind at large records and cherishes its insights.
Until writing is achieved the accumulation of ideas depends upon oral
tradition, the capacity of which is measured by the interest and memory of
the people who transmit it. It must, therefore, confine itself chiefly to ideas
and sentiments for which there is a somewhat general and constant demand,
such as popular stories—like the Homeric legends—chants, proverbs,
maxims and the like. It is true that tradition becomes more or less
specialized in families and castes—as we see, for instance, in the
widespread existence of a hereditary priesthood—but this specialization
cannot be very elaborate or very secure in its continuance. There can hardly
be, without writing, any science or any diversified literature. These require
a means by which important ideas can be passed on unimpaired to men
distant in time and space from their authors. We may safely pronounce, with
Gibbon, that “without some species of writing no people has ever preserved
the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in
the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of
perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.”[24]
Nor can stable and extended government be organized without it, for
such government requires a constitution of some sort, a definite and

permanent body of law and custom, embracing the wisdom of the past
regarding the maintenance of social order.
It is quite the same with religious systems. The historical religions are
based upon Scriptures, the essential part of which is the recorded teaching
of the founder and his immediate disciples, and without such a record
Christianity, Buddhism or Mohammedanism could never have been more
than a small and transient sect. There may well have been men of religious
genius among our illiterate forefathers, but it was impossible that they
should found enduring systems.
The whole structure and progress of modern life evidently rests upon the
preservation, in writing, of the achievements of the antique mind, upon the
records, especially, of Judea, Greece and Rome. To inquire what we should
have been without these would be like asking what we should have been if
our parents had not existed. Writing made history possible, and the man of
history with his complex institutions. It enabled a rapid and secure
enlargement of that human nature which had previously been confined
within small and unstable groups.
If writing, by giving thought permanence, brought in the earlier
civilization, printing, by giving it diffusion opened the doors of the modern
world.
Before its advent access to the records of the race was limited to a
learned class, who thus held a kind of monopoly of the traditions upon
which the social system rested. Throughout the earlier Middle Ages, for
example, the clergy, or that small portion of the clergy who were educated,
occupied this position in Europe, and their system was the one animate and
wide-reaching mental organization of the period. For many centuries it was
rare for a layman, of whatever rank, to know how to sign his name.
Through the Latin language, written and spoken, which would apparently
have perished had it not been for the Church, the larger continuity and
coöperation of the human mind was maintained. Those who could read it
had a common literature and a vague sense of unity and brotherhood.
Roman ideas were preserved, however imperfectly, and an ideal Rome lived
in the Papacy and the Empire. Education, naturally, was controlled by the
clergy, who were also intrusted with political correspondence and the
framing of laws. As is well known they somewhat recast the traditions in

their own interest, and were aided by their control of the communicating
medium in becoming the dominant power in Europe.
Printing means democracy, because it brings knowledge within the reach
of the common people; and knowledge, in the long run, is sure to make
good its claim to power. It brings to the individual whatever part in the
heritage of ideas he is fit to receive. The world of thought, and eventually
the world of action, comes gradually under the rule of a true aristocracy of
intelligence and character, in place of an artificial one created by exclusive
opportunity.
Everywhere the spread of printing was followed by a general awakening
due to the unsettling suggestions which it scattered abroad. Political and
religious agitation, by no means unknown before, was immensely
stimulated, and has continued unabated to the present time. “The whole of
this movement,” says Mr. H. C. Lea, speaking of the liberal agitations of the
early sixteenth century, “had been rendered possible by the invention of
printing, which facilitated so enormously the diffusion of intelligence,
which enabled public opinion to form and express itself, and which, by
bringing into communication minds of similar ways of thinking, afforded
opportunity for combined action.” “When, therefore, on October 31, 1517,
Luther’s fateful theses were hung on the church door at Wittenberg, they
were, as he tells us, known in a fortnight throughout Germany; and in a
month they had reached Rome and were being read in every school and
convent in Europe—a result manifestly impossible without the aid of the
printing press.”[25]
The printed page is also the door by which the individual, in our own
time, enters the larger rooms of life. A good book, “the precious life blood
of a master spirit stored upon purpose to a life beyond life,”[26] is almost
always the channel through which uncommon minds get incitement and aid
to lift themselves into the higher thought that other uncommon minds have
created. “In study we hold converse with the wise, in action usually with the
foolish.”[27] While the mass of mankind about us is ever commonplace,
there is always, in our day, a more select society not far away for one who
craves it, and a man like Abraham Lincoln, whose birth would have meant
hopeless serfdom a few centuries ago, may get from half a dozen books
aspirations which lead him out to authority and beneficence.

While spoken language, along with the writing and printing by which it is
preserved and disseminated, is the main current of communication, there
are from the start many side channels.
Thus among savage or barbarous peoples we everywhere find, beside
gesture language, the use of a multitude of other symbols, such as the red
arrow for war, the pipe of peace, signal fires, notched sticks, knotted cords,
totems, and, among nations more advanced in culture, coats-of-arms, flags
and an infinite diversity of symbolic ritual. There is, indeed, a world of
signs outside of language, most of which, however, we may pass by, since
its general nature is obvious enough.
The arts of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, considered as
communication, have two somewhat different functions: First, as mere
picture or image writing, conveying ideas that could also be conveyed
(though with a difference) in words; and, second, as the vehicle of peculiar
phases of sentiment incommunicable in any other way. These two were
often, indeed usually, combined in the art of the past. In modern times the
former, because of the diffusion of literacy, has become of secondary
importance.
Of the picture-writing function the mosaics, in colors on a gold ground,
that cover the inner walls of St. Mark’s at Venice are a familiar instance.
They set forth in somewhat rude figures, helped out by symbols, the whole
system of Christian theology as it was then understood. They were thus an
illuminated book of sacred learning through which the people entered into
the religious tradition. The same tradition is illustrated in the sculpture of
the cathedrals of Chartres and Rheims, together with much other matter—
secular history, typified by figures of the kings of France; moral philosophy,
with virtues and vices, rewards and punishments; and emblems of
husbandry and handicraft. Along with these sculptures went the pictured
windows, the sacred relics—which, as Gibbon says, “fixed and inflamed the
devotion of the faithful”[28]—the music, and the elaborate pageants and
ritual; all working together as one rich sign, in which was incarnated the
ideal life of the times.
A subtler function of the non-verbal arts is to communicate matter that
could not go by any other road, especially certain sorts of sentiment which
are thus perpetuated and diffused.

One of the simplest and most fruitful examples of this is the depiction of
human forms and faces which embody, as if by living presence, the nobler
feelings and aspirations of the time. Such works, in painting or sculpture,
remain as symbols by the aid of which like sentiments grow up in the minds
of whomsoever become familiar with them. Sentiment is cumulative in
human history in the same manner as thought, though less definitely and
surely, and Christian feeling, as it grew and flourished in the Middle Ages,
was fostered by painting as much, perhaps, as by the Scriptures. And so
Greek sculpture, from the time of the humanists down through
Winckelmann and Goethe to the present day, has been a channel by which
Greek sentiment has flowed into modern life.
This record of human feeling in expressive forms and faces, as in the
madonnas and saints of Raphael, is called by some critics “illustration”; and
they distinguish it from “decoration,” which includes all those elements in a
work of art which exist not to transmit something else but for their own
more immediate value, such as beauty of color, form, composition and
suggested movement. This latter is communication also, appealing to vivid
but otherwise inarticulate phases of human instinct. Each art can convey a
unique kind of sentiment and has “its own peculiar and incommunicable
sensuous charm, its own special mode of reaching the imagination.” In a
picture the most characteristic thing is “that true pictorial quality ... the
inventive or creative handling of pure line and color, which, as almost
always in Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, is
quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it
accompanies” in music “the musical charm—that essential music, which
presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the
special form in which it is conveyed to us.”[29] And so with architecture, an
art peculiarly close to social organization, so that in many cases—as in the
Place of Venice—the spirit of a social system has been visibly raised up in
stone.
It needs no argument, I suppose, to show that these arts are no less
essential to the growth of the human spirit than literature or government.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] On the probability that song preceded speech, see Darwin, Descent of
Man, chap. 19.
[24] Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, i, 354.
[25] The Cambridge Modern History, i, 684, 685.
[26] Milton, Areopagitica.
[27] Bacon, Antitheta on Studies.
[28] Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, iii, 428.
[29] Walter Pater, Essay on the School of Giorgione.

CHAPTER VIII
MODERN COMMUNICATION: ENLARGEMENT AND

ANIMATION

Character of Recent Changes—Their General Effect—The Change in
the United States—Organized Gossip—Public Opinion, Democracy,
Internationalism—The Value of Diffusion—Enlargement of Feeling
—Conclusion.
The changes that have taken place since the beginning of the nineteenth
century are such as to constitute a new epoch in communication, and in the
whole system of society. They deserve, therefore, careful consideration, not
so much in their mechanical aspect, which is familiar to every one, as in
their operation upon the larger mind.
If one were to analyze the mechanism of intercourse, he might, perhaps,
distinguish four factors that mainly contribute to its efficiency, namely:
Expressiveness, or the range of ideas and feelings it is competent to
carry.
Permanence of record, or the overcoming of time.
Swiftness, or the overcoming of space.
Diffusion, or access to all classes of men.
Now while gains have no doubt been made in expressiveness, as in the
enlargement of our vocabulary to embrace the ideas of modern science; and
even in permanence of record, for scientific and other special purposes; yet
certainly the long steps of recent times have been made in the direction of
swiftness and diffusion. For most purposes our speech is no better than in
the age of Elizabeth, if so good; but what facility we have gained in the
application of it! The cheapening of printing, permitting an inundation of
popular books, magazines and newspapers, has been supplemented by the
rise of the modern postal system and the conquest of distance by railroads,

telegraphs and telephones. And along with these extensions of the spoken or
written word have come new arts of reproduction, such as photography,
photo-engraving, phonography and the like—of greater social import than
we realize—by which new kinds of impression from the visible or audible
world may be fixed and disseminated.
It is not too much to say that these changes are the basis, from a
mechanical standpoint, of nearly everything that is characteristic in the
psychology of modern life. In a general way they mean the expansion of
human nature, that is to say, of its power to express itself in social wholes.
They make it possible for society to be organized more and more on the
higher faculties of man, on intelligence and sympathy, rather than on
authority, caste, and routine. They mean freedom, outlook, indefinite
possibility. The public consciousness, instead of being confined as regards
its more active phases to local groups, extends by even steps with that give-
and-take of suggestions that the new intercourse makes possible, until wide
nations, and finally the world itself, may be included in one lively mental
whole.
The general character of this change is well expressed by the two words
enlargement and animation. Social contacts are extended in space and
quickened in time, and in the same degree the mental unity they imply
becomes wider and more alert. The individual is broadened by coming into
relation with a larger and more various life, and he is kept stirred up,
sometimes to excess, by the multitude of changing suggestions which this
life brings to him.
From whatever point of view we study modern society to compare it with
the past or to forecast the future, we ought to keep at least a
subconsciousness of this radical change in mechanism, without allowing for
which nothing else can be understood.
In the United States, for instance, at the close of the eighteenth century,
public consciousness of any active kind was confined to small localities.
Travel was slow, uncomfortable and costly, and people undertaking a
considerable journey often made their wills beforehand. The newspapers,
appearing weekly in the larger towns, were entirely lacking in what we
should call news; and the number of letters sent during a year in all the
thirteen states was much less than that now handled by the New York office

in a single day. People are far more alive to-day to what is going on in
China, if it happens to interest them, than they were then to events a
hundred miles away. The isolation of even large towns from the rest of the
world, and the consequent introversion of men’s minds upon local concerns,
was something we can hardly conceive. In the country “the environment of
the farm was the neighborhood; the environment of the village was the
encircling farms and the local tradition; ... few conventions assembled for
discussion and common action; educational centres did not radiate the
shock of a new intellectual life to every hamlet; federations and unions did
not bind men, near and remote, into that fellowship that makes one
composite type of many human sorts. It was an age of sects, intolerant from
lack of acquaintance.”[30]
The change to the present régime of railroads, telegraphs, daily papers,
telephones and the rest has involved a revolution in every phase of life; in
commerce, in politics, in education, even in mere sociability and gossip—
this revolution always consisting in an enlargement and quickening of the
kind of life in question.
Probably there is nothing in this new mechanism quite so pervasive and
characteristic as the daily newspaper, which is as vehemently praised as it is
abused, and in both cases with good reason. What a strange practice it is,
when you think of it, that a man should sit down to his breakfast table and,
instead of conversing with his wife, and children, hold before his face a sort
of screen on which is inscribed a world-wide gossip!
The essential function of the newspaper is, of course, to serve as a
bulletin of important news and a medium for the interchange of ideas,
through the printing of interviews, letters, speeches and editorial comment.
In this way it is indispensable to the organization of the public mind.
The bulk of its matter, however, is best described by the phrase organized
gossip. The sort of intercourse that people formerly carried on at cross-road
stores or over the back fence, has now attained the dignity of print and an
imposing system. That we absorb a flood of this does not necessarily mean
that our minds are degenerate, but merely that we are gratifying an old
appetite in a new way. Henry James speaks with a severity natural to
literary sensibility of “the ubiquitous newspaper face, with its mere
monstrosity and deformity of feature, and the vast open mouth, adjusted as

to the chatter of Bedlam, that flings the flood-gates of vulgarity farther back
[in America] than anywhere else on earth.”[31] But after all is it any more
vulgar than the older kind of gossip? No doubt it seems worse for venturing
to share with literature the use of the printed word.
That the bulk of the contents of the newspaper is of the nature of gossip
may be seen by noting three traits which together seem to make a fair
definition of that word. It is copious, designed to occupy, without exerting,
the mind. It consists mostly of personalities and appeals to superficial
emotion. It is untrustworthy—except upon a few matters of moment which
the public are likely to follow up and verify. These traits any one who is
curious may substantiate by a study of his own morning journal.
There is a better and a worse side to this enlargement of gossip. On the
former we may reckon the fact that it promotes a widespread sociability and
sense of community; we know that people all over the country are laughing
at the same jokes or thrilling with the same mild excitement over the foot-
ball game, and we absorb a conviction that they are good fellows much like
ourselves. It also tends powerfully, through the fear of publicity, to enforce
a popular, somewhat vulgar, but sound and human standard of morality. On
the other hand it fosters superficiality and commonplace in every sphere of
thought and feeling, and is, of course, the antithesis of literature and of all
high or fine spiritual achievement. It stands for diffusion as opposed to
distinction.
In politics communication makes possible public opinion, which, when
organized, is democracy. The whole growth of this, and of the popular
education and enlightenment that go with it, is immediately dependent upon
the telegraph, the newspaper and the fast mail, for there can be no popular
mind upon questions of the day, over wide areas, except as the people are
promptly informed of such questions and are enabled to exchange views
regarding them.
Our government, under the Constitution, was not originally a democracy,
and was not intended to be so by the men that framed it. It was expected to
be a representative republic, the people choosing men of character and
wisdom, who would proceed to the capital, inform themselves there upon
current questions, and deliberate and decide regarding them. That the
people might think and act more directly was not foreseen. The Constitution

is not democratic in spirit, and, as Mr. Bryce has noted,[32] might under
different conditions have become the basis of an aristocratic system.
That any system could have held even the original thirteen states in firm
union without the advent of modern communication is very doubtful.
Political philosophy, from Plato to Montesquieu, had taught that free states
must be small, and Frederick the Great is said to have ridiculed the idea of
one extending from Maine to Georgia. “A large empire,” says Montesquieu,
“supposes a despotic authority in the person who governs. It is necessary
that the quickness of the prince’s resolutions should supply the distance of
the places they are sent to.”[33]
Democracy has arisen here, as it seems to be arising everywhere in the
civilized world, not, chiefly, because of changes in the formal constitution,
but as the outcome of conditions which make it natural for the people to
have and to express a consciousness regarding questions of the day. It is
said by those who know China that while that country was at war with
Japan the majority of the Chinese were unaware that a war was in progress.
Such ignorance makes the sway of public opinion impossible; and,
conversely, it seems likely that no state, having a vigorous people, can long
escape that sway except by repressing the interchange of thought. When the
people have information and discussion they will have a will, and this must
sooner or later get hold of the institutions of society.
One is often impressed with the thought that there ought to be some
wider name for the modern movement than democracy, some name which
should more distinctly suggest the enlargement and quickening of the
general mind, of which the formal rule of the people is only one among
many manifestations. The current of new life that is sweeping with
augmenting force through the older structures of society, now carrying them
away, now leaving them outwardly undisturbed, has no adequate name.
Popular education is an inseparable part of all this: the individual must
have at least those arts of reading and writing without which he can hardly
be a vital member of the new organism. And that further development of
education, rapidly becoming a conscious aim of modern society, which
strives to give to every person a special training in preparation for whatever
function he may have aptitude for, is also a phase of the freer and more
flexible organization of mental energy. The same enlargement runs through

all life, including fashion and other trivial or fugitive kinds of intercourse.
And the widest phase of all, upon whose momentousness I need not dwell,
is that rise of an international consciousness, in literature, in science and,
finally, in politics, which holds out a trustworthy promise of the indefinite
enlargement of justice and amity.
This unification of life by a freer course of thought is not only
contemporaneous, overcoming space, but also historical, bringing the past
into the present, and making every notable achievement of the race a
possible factor in its current life—as when, by skilful reproduction the work
of a mediæval painter is brought home to people dwelling five hundred
years later on the other side of the globe. Our time is one of “large
discourse, looking before and after.”
There are remarkable possibilities in this diffusive vigor. Never, certainly,
were great masses of men so rapidly rising to higher levels as now. There
are the same facilities for disseminating improvement in mind and manners
as in material devices; and the new communication has spread like morning
light over the world, awakening, enlightening, enlarging, and filling with
expectation. Human nature desires the good, when it once perceives it, and
in all that is easily understood and imitated great headway is making.
Nor is there, as I shall try to show later, any good reason to think that the
conditions are permanently unfavorable to the rise of special and select
types of excellence. The same facility of communication which animates
millions with the emulation of common models, also makes it easy for more
discriminating minds to unite in small groups. The general fact is that
human nature is set free; in time it will no doubt justify its freedom.
The enlargement affects not only thought but feeling, favoring the growth
of a sense of common humanity, of moral unity, between nations, races and
classes. Among members of a communicating whole feeling may not
always be friendly, but it must be, in a sense, sympathetic, involving some
consciousness of the other’s point of view. Even the animosities of modern
nations are of a human and imaginative sort, not the blind animal hostility
of a more primitive age. They are resentments, and resentment, as Charles
Lamb says, is of the family of love.
The relations between persons or communities that are without mutual
understanding are necessarily on a low plane. There may be indifference, or

a blind anger due to interference, or there may be a good-natured tolerance;
but there is no consciousness of a common nature to warm up the kindly
sentiments. A really human fellow-feeling was anciently confined within
the tribe, men outside not being felt as members of a common whole. The
alien was commonly treated as a more or less useful or dangerous animal—
destroyed, despoiled or enslaved. Even in these days we care little about
people whose life is not brought home to us by some kind of sympathetic
contact. We may read statistics of the miserable life of the Italians and Jews
in New York and Chicago; of bad housing, sweatshops and tuberculosis; but
we care little more about them than we do about the sufferers from the
Black Death, unless their life is realized to us in some human way, either by
personal contact, or by pictures and imaginative description.
And we are getting this at the present time. The resources of modern
communication are used in stimulating and gratifying our interest in every
phase of human life. Russians, Japanese, Filipinos, fishermen, miners,
millionaires, criminals, tramps and opium-eaters are brought home to us.
The press well understands that nothing human is alien to us if it is only
made comprehensible.
With a mind enlarged and suppled by such training, the man of to-day
inclines to look for a common nature everywhere, and to demand that the
whole world shall be brought under the sway of common principles of
kindness and justice. He wants to see international strife allayed—in such a
way, however, as not to prevent the expansion of capable races and the
survival of better types; he wishes the friction of classes reduced and each
interest fairly treated—but without checking individuality and enterprise.
There was never so general an eagerness that righteousness should prevail;
the chief matter of dispute is upon the principles under which it may be
established.
The work of communication in enlarging human nature is partly
immediate, through facilitating contact, but even more it is indirect, through
favoring the increase of intelligence, the decline of mechanical and arbitrary
forms of organization, and the rise of a more humane type of society.
History may be regarded as a record of the struggle of man to realize his
aspirations through organization; and the new communication is an efficient
tool for this purpose. Assuming that the human heart and conscience,
restricted only by the difficulties of organization, is the arbiter of what

institutions are to become, we may expect the facility of intercourse to be
the starting-point of an era of moral progress.

FOOTNOTES:
[30] W. L. Anderson, The Country Town, 209, 210.
[31] The Manners of American Women, Harper’s Bazar, May, 1907.
[32] The American Commonwealth, chap. 26.
[33] The Spirit of Laws, book viii, chap. 19.

CHAPTER IX
MODERN COMMUNICATION: INDIVIDUALITY

The Question—Why Communication Should Foster Individuality—The
Contrary or Dead-Level Theory—Reconciliation of these Views—
The Outlook as Regards Individuality.
It is a question of utmost interest whether these changes do or do not
contribute to the independence and productivity of the individual mind. Do
they foster a self-reliant personality, capable at need of pursuing high and
rare aims, or have they rather a levelling tendency, repressive of what is
original and characteristic? There are in fact opposite opinions regarding
this matter, in support of either of which numerous expressions by writers
of some weight might be collected.
From one point of view it would appear that the new communication
ought to encourage individuality of all kinds; it makes it easier to get away
from a given environment and to find support in one more congenial. The
world has grown more various and at the same time more accessible, so that
one having a natural bent should be the more able to find influences to
nourish it. If he has a turn, say, for entomology, he can readily, through
journals, correspondence and meetings, get in touch with a group of men
similarly inclined, and with a congenial tradition. And so with any sect of
religion, or politics, or art, or what not; if there are in the civilized world a
few like-minded people it is comparatively easy for them to get together in
spirit and encourage one another in their peculiarity.
It is a simple and recognized principle of development that an enlarged
life in the organism commonly involves greater differentiation in its parts.
That the social enlargement of recent times has in general this character
seems plain, and has been set forth in much detail by some writers, notably
by Herbert Spencer. Many, indeed, find the characteristic evil of the new era
in an extreme individuality, a somewhat anarchic differentiation and
working at cross purposes. “Probably there was never any time,” says

Professor Mackenzie, “in which men tended to be so unintelligible to each
other as they are now, on account of the diversity of the objects with which
they are engaged, and of the points of view at which they stand.”[34]
On the other hand we have what we may call the dead-level theory, of
which De Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, was apparently the
chief author. Modern conditions, according to this, break down all limits to
the spread of ideas and customs. Great populations are brought into one
mental whole, through which movements of thought run by a contagion like
that of the mob; and instead of the individuality which was fostered by
former obstacles, we have a universal assimilation. Each locality, it is
pointed out, had formerly its peculiar accent and mode of dress; while now
dialects are disappearing, and almost the same fashions prevail throughout
the civilized world. This uniformity in externals is held to be only the
outward and visible sign of a corresponding levelling of ideas. People, it is
said, have a passion to be alike, which modern appliances enable them to
gratify. Already in the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson complained that
“commerce has left the people no singularities,” and in our day many hold
with John Burroughs that, “Constant intercommunication, the friction of
travel, of streets, of books, of newspapers, make us all alike; we are, as it
were, all pebbles upon the same shore, washed by the same waves.”[35]
The key to this matter, in my judgment, is to perceive that there are two
kinds of individuality, one of isolation and one of choice, and that modern
conditions foster the latter while they efface the former. They tend to make
life rational and free instead of local and accidental. They enlarge
indefinitely the competition of ideas, and whatever has owed its persistence
merely to lack of comparison is likely to go, while that which is really
congenial to the choosing mind will be all the more cherished and
increased. Human nature is enfranchised, and works on a larger scale as
regards both its conformities and its non-conformities.
Something of this may be seen in the contrast between town and country,
the latter having more of the individuality of isolation, the former of choice.
“The rural environment,” says Mr. R. L. Hartt, speaking of country villages
in New England, “is psychically extravagant. It tends to extremes. A man
carries himself out to his logical conclusions; he becomes a concentrated
essence of himself.”[36] I travelled some years ago among the mountains of

North Carolina, at that time wholly unreached by modern industry and
communication, and noticed that not only was the dialect of the region as a
whole distinct from that of neighboring parts of the country, but that even
adjoining valleys often showed marked differences. Evidently this sort of
local individuality, characteristic of an illiterate people living on their own
corn, pork and neighborhood traditions, can hardly survive the new
communication.
It must be said, however, that rural life has other conditions that foster
individuality in a more wholesome way than mere isolation, and are a real
advantage in the growth of character. Among these are control over the
immediate environment, the habit of face-to-face struggle with nature, and
comparative security of economic position. All these contribute to the self-
reliance upon which the farming people justly pride themselves.
In the city we find an individuality less picturesque but perhaps more
functional. There is more facility for the formation of specialized groups,
and so for the fostering of special capacities. Notwithstanding the din of
communication and trade, the cities are, for this reason, the chief seats of
productive originality in art, science and letters.
The difference is analogous to that between the development of natural
species on islands or other isolated areas, and on a wide and traversable
continent. The former produces many quaint species, like the kangaroos,
which disappear when brought into contact with more capable types; but the
continent by no means brings about uniformity. It engenders, rather, a
complex organism of related species and varieties, each of which is
comparatively perfect in its special way; and has become so through the
very fact of a wider struggle for existence.
So, easy communication of ideas favors differentiation of a rational and
functional sort, as distinguished from the random variations fostered by
isolation. And it must be remembered that any sort is rational and functional
that really commends itself to the human spirit. Even revolt from an
ascendant type is easier now than formerly, because the rebel can fortify
himself with the triumphant records of the non-conformers of the past.
It is, then, probable that local peculiarity of speech and manner, and other
curious and involuntary sorts of individuality, will diminish. And certainly a
great deal is thus lost in the way of local color and atmosphere, of the racy

flavor of isolated personalities and unconscious picturesqueness of social
types. The diversities of dress, language and culture, which were developed
in Europe during the Middle Ages, when each little barony was the channel
of peculiar traditions, can hardly reappear. Nor can we expect, in modern
cities, the sort of architectural individuality we find in those of Italy, built
when each village was a distinct political and social unit. Heine, speaking
of Scott, long ago referred to “the great pain caused by the loss of national
characteristics in consequence of the spread of the newer culture—a pain
which now quivers in the heart of all peoples.”
But the more vital individuality, the cultivation by special groups of
peculiar phases of knowledge, art or conduct, of anything under the heavens
in fact that a few people may agree to pursue, will apparently be increased.
Since uniformity is cheap and convenient, we may expect it in all matters
wherein men do not specially care to assert themselves. We have it in dress
and domestic architecture, for instance, just so far as we are willing to take
these things ready-made; but when we begin to put ourselves into them we
produce something distinctive.
Even languages and national characteristics, if the people really care
about them, can be, and in fact are, preserved in spite of political absorption
and the assimilating power of communication. There is nothing more
notable in recent history than the persistence of nationality, even when, as
in Poland, it has lost its political expression; and, as to languages, it is said
that many, such as Roumanian, Bulgarian, Servian, Finnish, Norsk and
Flemish, have revived and come into literary and popular use during the
nineteenth century. Mr. Lecky, in his “Democracy and Liberty”[37] declared
that “there has been in many forms a marked tendency to accentuate distinct
national and local types.”
To assume that a free concourse of ideas will produce uniformity is to
beg the whole question. If it be true that men have a natural diversity of
gifts, free intercourse should favor its development, especially when we
consider that strong instinct which causes man to take pleasure in
distinguishing himself, and to abhor to be lost in the crowd. And, as regards
the actual tendency of modern life, only an obstinate a priori reasoner will
maintain with any confidence the decline of individuality. Those who
charge that we possess it in extravagant excess have at least an equal show
of reason.

Nor, from the standpoint of sentiment, does the modern expansion of
feeling and larger sense of unity tend necessarily to a loss of individuality.
There is no prospect that self-feeling and ambition will be “lost in love’s
great unity.”[38] On the contrary these sentiments are fostered by freedom,
and are rather guided than repressed by sympathy.
In a truly organic life the individual is self-conscious and devoted to his
own work, but feels himself and that work as part of a large and joyous
whole. He is self-assertive, just because he is conscious of being a thread in
the great web of events, of serving effectually as a member of a family, a
state, of humanity, and of whatever greater whole his faith may picture. If
we have not yet an organic society in this sense, we have at least the
mechanical conditions that must underly it.

FOOTNOTES:
[34] Introduction to Social Philosophy, 110.
[35] Nature’s Way, Harper’s Magazine, July, 1904.
[36] A New England Hill Town. The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1899.
[37] I, 501.
[38] The concluding line of E. W. Sill’s poem, Dare You?

CHAPTER X
MODERN COMMUNICATION: SUPERFICIALITY AND STRAIN

Stimulating Effect of Modern Life—Superficiality—Strain—
Pathological Effects.
The action of the new communication is essentially stimulating, and so
may, in some of its phases, be injurious. It costs the individual more in the
way of mental function to take a normal part in the new order of things than
it did in the old. Not only is his outlook broader, so that he is incited to
think and feel about a wider range of matters, but he is required to be a
more thoroughgoing specialist in the mastery of his particular function;
both extension and intension have grown. General culture and technical
training are alike more exigent than they used to be, and their demands
visibly increase from year to year, not only in the schools but in life at large.
The man who does not meet them falls behind the procession, and becomes
in some sense a failure: either unable to make a living, or narrow and out of
touch with generous movements.
Fortunately, from this point of view, our mental functions are as a rule
rather sluggish, so that the spur of modern intercourse is for the most part
wholesome, awakening the mind, abating sensuality, and giving men idea
and purpose. Such ill effect as may be ascribed to it seems to fall chiefly
under the two heads, superficiality and strain, which the reader will
perceive to be another view of that enlargement and animation discussed in
the last chapter but one.
There is a rather general agreement among observers that, outside of his
specialty, the man of our somewhat hurried civilization is apt to have an
impatient, touch-and-go habit of mind as regards both thought and feeling.
We are trying to do many and various things, and are driven to versatility
and short cuts at some expense to truth and depth. “The habit of
inattention,” said De Tocqueville about 1835, “must be considered as the
greatest defect of the democratic character”[39]; and recently his judgment

has been confirmed by Ostrogorski, who thinks that deliverance from the
bonds of space and time has made the American a man of short views,
wedded to the present, accustomed to getting quick returns, and with no
deep root anywhere.[40] We have reduced ennui considerably; but a
moderate ennui is justly reckoned by Comte and others as one of the springs
of progress, and it is no unmixed good that we are too busy to be unhappy.
In this matter, as in so many others, we should discriminate, so far as we
can, between permanent conditions of modern life and what is due merely
to change, between democracy and confusion. There is nothing in the nature
of democracy to prevent its attaining, when transition has somewhat abated,
a diverse and stable organization of its own sort, with great advantage to our
spiritual composure and productivity.
In the meanwhile it is beyond doubt that the constant and varied stimulus
of a confused time makes sustained attention difficult. Certainly our popular
literature is written for those who run as they read, and carries the principle
of economy of attention beyond anything previously imagined. And in
feeling it seems to be true that we tend toward a somewhat superficial
kindliness and adaptability, rather than sustained passion of any kind.
Generally speaking, mind is spread out very thin over our civilization; a
good sort of mind, no doubt, but quite thin.
All this may be counteracted in various ways, especially by thoroughness
in education, and is perhaps to be regarded as lack of maturity rather than as
incurable defect.
Mental strain, in spite of the alarming opinions sometimes expressed, is
by no means a general condition in modern society, nor likely to become so;
it is confined to a relatively small number, in whom individual weakness, or
unusual stress, or both, has rendered life too much for the spirit. Yet this
number includes a great part of those who perform the more exacting
intellectual functions in business and the professions, as well as peculiarly
weak, or sensitive, or unfortunate individuals in all walks of life. In general
there is an increase of self-consciousness and choice; there is more
opportunity, more responsibility, more complexity, a greater burden upon
intelligence, will and character. The individual not only can but must deal
with a flood of urgent suggestions, or be swamped by them. “This age that

blots out life with question marks”[41] forces us to think and choose whether
we are ready or not.
Worse, probably, than anything in the way of work—though that is often
destructive—is the anxious insecurity in which our changing life keeps a
large part of the population, the well-to-do as well as the poor. And an
educated and imaginative people feels such anxieties more than one
deadened by ignorance. “In America,” said De Tocqueville, “I saw the
freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances
which the world affords; it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon
their brows, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their
pleasures.”[42]
Not long ago Mr. H. D. Sedgwick contributed to a magazine a study of
what he called “The New American Type,”[43] based on an exhibition of
English and American portraits, some recent, some a century old. He found
that the more recent were conspicuously marked by the signs of unrest and
strain. Speaking of Mr. Sargent’s subjects he says, “The obvious qualities in
his portraits are disquiet, lack of equilibrium, absence of principle, ... a
mind unoccupied by the rightful heirs, as if the home of principle and
dogma had been transformed into an inn for wayfarers. Sargent’s women
are more marked than his men; women, as physically more delicate, are the
first to reveal the strain of physical and psychical maladjustment. The thin
spirit of life shivers pathetically in its ‘fleshly dress’; in the intensity of its
eagerness it is all unconscious of its spiritual fidgeting on finding itself
astray—no path, no blazings, the old forgotten, the new not formed.” The
early Americans, he says, “were not limber minded men, not readily
agnostic, not nicely sceptical; they were ... eighteenth century Englishmen.”
Of Reynolds’ women he observes, “These ladies led lives unvexed; natural
affections, a few brief saws, a half-dozen principles, kept their brows
smooth, their cheeks ripe, their lips most wooable.” People had “a stable
physique and a well-ordered, logical, dogmatic philosophy.” The older
portraits “chant a chorus of praise for national character, for class
distinctions, for dogma and belief, for character, for good manners, for
honor, for contemplation, for vision to look upon life as a whole, for
appreciation that the world is to be enjoyed, for freedom from democracy,
for capacity in lighter mood to treat existence as a comedy told by
Goldoni.”[44]

This may or may not be dispassionately just, but it sets forth one side of
the case—a side the more pertinent for being unpopular—and suggests a
very real though intangible difference between the people of our time and
those of a century ago—one which all students must have felt. It is what we
feel in literature when we compare the people of Jane Austen with those, let
us say, of the author of The House of Mirth.
I do not propose to inquire how far the effects of strain may be seen in an
increase of certain distinctly pathological phenomena, such as neurasthenia,
the use of drugs, insanity and suicide. That it has an important working in
this way—difficult, however, to separate from that of other factors—is
generally conceded. In the growth of suicide we seem to have a statistical
demonstration of the destructive effect of social stress at its worst; and of
general paralysis, which is rapidly increasing and has been called the
disease of the century, we are told that “it is the disease of excess, of vice,
of overwork, of prolonged worry; it is especially the disease of great urban
centres, and its existence usually seems to show that the organism has
entered upon a competitive race for which it is not fully equipped.”

FOOTNOTES:
[39] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book iii, chap. 15.
[40] Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, ii, 579-588.
[41] J. R. Lowell, The Cathedral.
[42] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book ii, chap. 13.
[43] Since published in a book having this title.
[44] The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1904.

PART III
THE DEMOCRATIC MIND

CHAPTER XI
THE ENLARGEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Narrowness of Consciousness in Tribal Society—Importance of Face-to-
Face Assembly—Individuality—Subconscious Character of Wider
Relations—Enlargement of Consciousness—Irregularity in Growth
—Breadth of Modern Consciousness—Democracy.
In a life like that of the Teutonic tribes before they took on Roman
civilization, the social medium was small, limited for most purposes to the
family, clan or village group. Within this narrow circle there was a vivid
interchange of thought and feeling, a sphere of moral unity, of sympathy,
loyalty, honor and congenial intercourse. Here precious traditions were
cherished, and here also was the field for an active public opinion, for
suggestion and discussion, for leading and following, for conformity and
dissent. “In this kindly soil of the family,” says Professor Gummere in his
Germanic Origins, “flourished such growth of sentiment as that rough life
brought forth. Peace, good-will, the sense of honor, loyalty to friend and
kinsman, brotherly affection, all were plants that found in the Germanic
home that congenial warmth they needed for their earliest stages of
growth.... Originally the family or clan made a definite sphere or system of
life; outside of it the homeless man felt indeed that chaos had come
again.”[45]
When we say that public opinion is modern, we mean, of course, the
wider and more elaborate forms of it. On a smaller scale it has always
existed where people have had a chance to discuss and act upon matters of
common interest. Among our American Indians, for example, “Opinion was
a most potent factor in all tribes, and this would be largely directed by those
having popularity and power. Officers, in fact all persons, became
extremely well known in the small community of an Amerind tribe. Every
peculiarity of temperament was understood, and the individual was
respected or despised according to his predominating characteristics. Those
who were bold and fierce and full of strategy were made war-chiefs, while

those who possessed judgment and decision were made civil chiefs or
governors.”[46] The Germanic tribes were accustomed to assemble in those
village moots to which the historian recurs with such reverence, where “the
men from whom Englishmen were to spring learned the worth of public
opinion, of public discussion, the worth of the agreement, the ‘common-
sense’ to which discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force
from being expressions of that general conviction.”[47]
Discussion and public opinion of this simple sort, as every one knows,
takes place also among children wherever they mingle freely. Indeed, it
springs so directly from human nature, and is so difficult to suppress even
by the most inquisitorial methods, that we may assume it to exist locally in
all forms of society and at all periods of history. It grows by looks and
gestures where speech is forbidden, so that even in a prison there is public
opinion among the inmates. But in tribal life these local groups contained
all the vivid and conscious society there was, the lack of means of record
and of quick transmission making a wider unity impracticable.
In the absence of indirect communication people had to come into face-
to-face contact in order to feel social excitement and rise to the higher
phases of consciousness. Hence games, feasts and public assemblies of
every sort meant more to the general life than they do in our day. They were
the occasions of exaltation, the theatre for the display of eloquence—either
in discussing questions of the moment or recounting deeds of the past—and
for the practice of those rhythmic exercises that combined dancing, acting,
poetry and music in one comprehensive and communal art. Such assemblies
are possibly more ancient than human nature itself—since human nature
implies a preceding evolution of group life—and in some primitive form of
them speech itself is supposed by some to have been born. Just as children
invent words in the eagerness of play, and slang arises among gangs of boys
on the street, so the earliest men were perhaps incited to the invention of
language by a certain ecstasy and self-forgetting audacity, like that of the
poet, sprung from the excitement of festal meetings.[48]
Something of the spirit of these primitive assemblies is perhaps
reproduced in the social exaltation of those festal evenings around the
camp-fire which many of us can recall, with individual and group songs,
chants, “stunts” and the like; when there were not wanting original, almost

impromptu, compositions—celebrating notable deeds or satirizing
conspicuous individuals—which the common excitement generated in the
minds of one or more ingenious persons.
It is sometimes said that the individual counted for nothing in tribal life,
that the family or the clan was the unit of society, in which all personalities
were merged. From the standpoint of organization there is much truth in
this; that is the group of kindred was for many purposes (political,
economic, religious, etc.) a corporate unit, acting as a whole and
responsible as a whole to the rest of society; so that punishment of wrong-
doing, for example, would be exacted from the group rather than from the
particular offender. But taken psychologically, to mean that there was a lack
of self-assertion, the idea is without foundation. On the contrary, the
barbaric mind exalts an aggressive and even extravagant individuality.
Achilles is a fair sample of its heroes, mighty in valor and prowess, but
vain, arrogant and resentful—what we should be apt to call an individualist.
[49]
The men of the Niebelungenlied, of Beowulf, of Norse and Irish tales
and of our Indian legends are very much like him.
Consider, also, the personal initiative displayed in the formation of a war-
party among the Omahas, as described by Dorsey, and note how little it
differs from the way in which commercial and other enterprises are started
at the present day.
“It is generally a young man who decides to undertake an expedition
against the enemy. Having formed his plan he speaks thus to his friend: ‘My
friend, as I wish to go on the war path, let us go. Let us boil the food as for
a feast.’ The friend having consented, the two are the leaders ... if they can
induce others to follow them. So they find two young men whom they send
as messengers to invite those whom they name.... When all have assembled
the planner of the expedition addresses the company. ‘Ho! my friends, my
friend and I have invited you to a feast, because we wish to go on the war
path.’ Then each one who is willing to go replies thus: ‘Yes, my friend, I am
willing.’ But he who is unwilling replies, ‘My friend, I do not wish to go, I
am unwilling.’ Sometimes the host says, ‘Let us go by such a day. Prepare
yourselves.’”[50]
The whole proceeding reminds one also of the way games are initiated
among boys, the one who “gets it up” having the right to claim the best

position. No doubt the structure of some tribal societies permitted of less
initiative than others; but such differences exist at all stages of culture.
Self-feeling, self-assertion and the general relation of the individual to
the group are much the same at all epochs, and there was never a time since
man became human when, as we sometimes read, “personality emerged.”
Change has taken place chiefly in the extent and character of the group to
which the individual appeals, and in the ways in which he tries to
distinguish himself. The Germanic tribesman, the mediæval knight, the
Renaissance artist or scholar and the modern captain of industry are alike
ambitious: it is the object that differs. There has, indeed, been a
development of personality in history, but it has been correlative with that
of the general life, and has brought no essential change in the relation
between the two.
In tribal life, then, since the conditions did not admit of wider unification,
public consciousness could be only local in scope. Beyond its narrow range
the cords which held life together were of a subconscious character—
heredity, of course, with its freight of mental and social tendency; oral
tradition, often vague and devious, and a mass of custom that was revered
without being understood. These wider relations, not being surveyed and
discussed, could not be the objects of deliberate thought and will, but were
accepted as part of the necessary order of things, and usually ascribed to
some divine source. In this way language, laws, religion, forms of
government, social classes, traditional relations to other clans or tribes—all
of which we know to have been built up by the cumulative workings of the
human mind—were thought of as beyond the sphere of man’s control.
The wider unity existed, then as now; human development was
continuous in time and, after a blind fashion, coöperative among
contemporaries. The tools of life were progressively invented and spread by
imitation from tribe to tribe, the fittest always tending to survive; but only
the immediate details of such changes were matters of consciousness: as
processes they were beyond human cognizance. A man might adapt an
ancient custom to a fresh emergency, but he would be unaware that he was
shaping the growth of institutions.
There was even a tribal or national opinion, of a slow, subconscious sort;
a growth and consensus of ideas upon matters of general and enduring

interest, such as religion, marriage and government. And, under unusual
pressure, some more conscious unity of spirit might be aroused, as among
the Germans or Gauls confederated against Rome; but this was likely to be
transient.
The central fact of history, from a psychological point of view, may be
said to be the gradual enlargement of social consciousness and rational
coöperation. The mind constantly, though perhaps not regularly, extends the
sphere within which it makes its higher powers valid. Human nature,
possessed of ideals moulded in the family and the commune, is ever
striving, somewhat blindly for the most part, with those difficulties of
communication and organization which obstruct their realization on a larger
scale. Whether progress is general or not we need not now inquire; it is
certain that great gains have been made by the more vigorous or fortunate
races, and that these are regarded with emulation and hope by many of the
others.
Throughout modern European history, at least, there has been an evident
extension of the local areas within which communication and coöperation
prevail, and, on the whole, an advance in the quality of coöperation as
judged by an ideal moral unity. It has tended to become more free and
human, more adequately expressive of communal feeling.
Perhaps all apparent departures from this tendency may plausibly be
explained as cases of irregular growth. If we find that vast systems of
discipline, like the Roman Empire, have broken down, we find also that
these systems were of a low type, psychologically, that the best features of
them were after all preserved, and that the new systems that arose, though
perhaps less in extent, were on the whole a higher and fuller expression of
human nature.
In the later Empire, for example, it seems plain that social mechanism (in
its proper kind and measure one of the conditions of freedom) had grown in
such a way as to shackle the human mind. In order to achieve and maintain
an imperial reach of control, the state had gradually been forced to take on a
centralized bureaucratic structure, which left the individual and the local
group no sphere of self-reliant development. Public spirit and political
leadership were suppressed, and the habit of organized self-expression died
out, leaving the people without group vitality and as helpless as children.

They were not, in general, cowards or voluptuaries—it seems that the
decline of courage and domestic morals has been exaggerated—but they
had no trained and effective public capacity. Society, as Professor Dill says,
had been elaborately and deliberately stereotyped.
The decline of vitality and initiative pervaded all spheres of life. There
were no inventions and little industrial or agricultural progress of any kind.
Literature degenerated into rhetoric: “In the same manner,” says Longinus,
“as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been
too closely confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and
habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that
well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients, who, living
under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they
acted.”[51]
The growing states of the earlier world were confronted, whether they
knew it or not, with an irreconcilable opposition between freedom and
expansion. They might retain in small areas those simple and popular
institutions which nearly all the great peoples started with, and to which
they owed their vigor; or they could organize on a larger scale a more
mechanical unity. In the first case their careers were brief, because they
lacked the military force to ensure permanence in a hostile world. In the
latter they incurred, by the suppression of human nature, that degeneracy
which sooner or later overtook every great state of antiquity.
In some such way as this we may, perhaps, dispose of the innumerable
instances which history shows of the failure of free organization—as in the
decay of ancient and mediæval city republics. Not only was their freedom
of an imperfect nature at the best, but they were too small to hold their own
in a world that was necessarily, for the most part, autocratic or customary.
Freedom, though in itself a principle of strength, was on too little a scale to
defend itself. “If a republic be small,” said Montesquieu, “it is destroyed by
a foreign force; if it be large it is ruined by internal imperfection.”[52]
But how splendid, in literature, in art, and even in arms, were many of
these failures. How well did Athens, Florence and a hundred other cities
illustrate the intrinsic strength and fecundity of that free principle to which
modern conditions permit an indefinite expansion.

The present epoch, then, brings with it a larger and, potentially at least, a
higher and freer consciousness. In the individual aspect of life this means
that each one of us has, as a rule, a wider grasp of situations, and is thus in a
position to give a wider application to his intelligence, sympathy and
conscience. In proportion as he does this he ceases to be a blind agent and
becomes a rational member of the whole.
Because of this more conscious relation to the larger wholes—nations,
institutions, tendencies—he takes a more vital and personal part in them.
His self-feeling attaches itself, as its nature is, to the object of his free
activity, and he tends to feel that “love of the maker for his work,” that
spiritual identification of the member with the whole, which is the ideal of
organization.
De Tocqueville found that in the United States there was no proletariat.
“That numerous and turbulent multitude does not exist, who regarding the
law as their natural enemy look upon it with fear and distrust. It is
impossible, on the contrary, not to perceive that all classes ... are attached to
it by a kind of parental affection.”[53] And, notwithstanding a deep and well-
grounded “social unrest,” this remains essentially true at the present day,
and should be true of all real democracy. Where the state is directly and
obviously founded upon the thought of the people it is impossible to get up
much fundamental antagonism to it; the energies of discontent are absorbed
by moderate agitation.
The extension of reach and choice favors, in the long run, not only
political but every kind of opportunity and freedom. It opens to the
individual a more vital, self-determined and energetic part in all phases of
the whole.
At the same time, the limits of human faculty make it impossible that any
one of us should actually occupy all the field of thought thus open to him.
Although stimulated to greater activity than before, one must constantly
select and renounce; and most of his life will still be on the plane of custom
and mechanism. He is freer chiefly in that he can survey the larger whole
and choose in what relations he will express himself.
Indeed, an ever-present danger of the new order is that one will not select
and renounce enough, that he will swallow more than he can properly
digest, and fail of the benefits of a thorough subconscious assimilation. The

more one studies current life, the more he is inclined to look upon
superficiality as its least tractable defect.
The new conditions demand also a thorough, yet diversified and
adaptable, system of training for the individual who is to share in this freer
and more exigent society. While democracy as a spirit is spontaneous, only
the fullest development of personal faculty can make this spirit effectual on
a great scale. Our confidence in our instincts need not be shaken, but our
application of them must be enlarged and enlightened. We must be taught to
do some one thing well, and yet never allowed to lose our sense of the
relation of that one thing to the general endeavor.
The general or public phase of larger consciousness is what we call
Democracy. I mean by this primarily the organized sway of public opinion.
It works out also in a tendency to humanize the collective life, to make
institutions express the higher impulses of human nature, instead of brutal
or mechanical conditions. That which most inwardly distinguishes modern
life from ancient or mediæval is the conscious power of the common people
trying to effectuate their instincts. All systems rest, in a sense, upon public
opinion; but the peculiarity of our time is that this opinion is more and more
rational and self-determining. It is not, as in the past, a mere reflection of
conditions believed to be inevitable, but seeks principles, finds these
principles in human nature, and is determined to conform life to them or
know why not. In this all earnest people, in their diverse ways, are taking
part.
We find, of course, that but little can be carried out on the highest moral
plane; the mind cannot attend to many things with that concentration which
achieves adequate expression, and the principle of compensation is ever at
work. If one thing is well done, others are overlooked, so that we are
constantly being caught and ground in our own neglected mechanism.
On the whole, however, the larger mind involves a democratic and
humanistic trend in every phase of life. A right democracy is simply the
application on a large scale of principles which are universally felt to be
right as applied to a small group—principles of free coöperation motived by
a common spirit which each serves according to his capacity. Most of what
is characteristic of the time is evidently of this nature; as, for instance, our
sentiment of fair play, our growing kindliness, our cult of womanhood, our

respect for hand labor, and our endeavor to organize society economically
or on “business principles.” And it is perhaps equally evident that the ideas
which these replace—of caste, of domination, of military glory, of
“conspicuous leisure”[54] and the like—sprang from a secondary and
artificial system, based on conditions which forbade a large realization of
primary ideals.
May we not say, speaking largely, that there has always been a
democratic tendency, whose advance has been conditioned by the
possibility, under actual conditions, of organizing popular thought and will
on a wide scale? Free coöperation is natural and human; it takes place
spontaneously among children on the playground, among settlers in new
countries, and among the most primitive sorts of men—everywhere, in
short, where the secondary and artificial discipline has not supplanted it.
The latter, including every sort of coercive or mechanical control is, of
course, natural in the larger sense, and functional in human development;
but there must ever be some resistance to it, which will tend to become
effective when the control ceases to be maintained by the pressure of
expediency. Accordingly we see that throughout modern history, and
especially during the past century, there has been a progressive humanism, a
striving to clear away lower forms of coöperation no longer essential, and to
substitute something congenial to natural impulse.
Discussion regarding the comparative merits of monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy has come to be looked upon as scholastic. The world is
clearly democratizing; it is only a question of how fast the movement can
take place, and what, under various conditions, it really involves.
Democracy, instead of being a single and definite political type, proves to
be merely a principle of breadth in organization, naturally prevalent
wherever men have learned how to work it, under which life will be at least
as various in its forms as it was before.
It involves a change in the character of social discipline not confined to
politics, but as much at home in one sphere as another. With facility of
communication as its mechanical basis, it proceeds inevitably to discuss and
experiment with freer modes of action in religion, industry, education,
philanthropy and the family. The law of the survival of the fittest will
prevail in regard to social institutions, as it has in the past, but the

conditions of fitness have undergone a change the implications of which we
can but dimly foresee.

FOOTNOTES:
[45] Pages 169, 171.
[46] F. S. Dellenbaugh, The North Americans of Yesterday, 416.
[47] J. R. Green, History of the English People, i, 13.
[48] J. Donovan, The Festal Origin of Human Speech. Mind, October, 1891.
[49] “Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis.”—Horace, Ars Poet., 122.
[50] J. O. Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, 315, 316. A publication of the U. S.
Bureau of Ethnology.
[51] Quoted by Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, i, 194, 195.
[52] The Spirit of Laws, book ix, chap. 1.
[53] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 24.
[54] One of many illuminating phrases introduced by T. V. Veblen in his work
on The Theory of the Leisure Class.

CHAPTER XII
THE THEORY OF PUBLIC OPINION

Public Opinion as Organization—Agreement not Essential—Public
Opinion versus Popular Impression—Public Thought not an Average
—A Group is Capable of Expression through its most competent
members—General and Special Public Opinion—The Sphere of the
Former—Of the Latter—The Two are United in Personality—How
Public Opinion Rules—Effective Rule Based on Moral Unity.
Public opinion is no mere aggregate of separate individual judgments, but
an organization, a coöperative product of communication and reciprocal
influence. It may be as different from the sum of what the individuals could
have thought out in separation as a ship built by a hundred men is from a
hundred boats each built by one man.
A group “makes up its mind” in very much the same manner that the
individual makes up his. The latter must give time and attention to the
question, search his consciousness for pertinent ideas and sentiments, and
work them together into a whole, before he knows what his real thought
about it is. In the case of a nation the same thing must take place, only on a
larger scale. Each individual must make up his mind as before, but in doing
so he has to deal not only with what was already in his thought or memory,
but with fresh ideas that flow in from others whose minds are also aroused.
Every one who has any fact, or thought, or feeling, which he thinks is
unknown, or insufficiently regarded, tries to impart it; and thus not only one
mind but all minds are searched for pertinent material, which is poured into
the general stream of thought for each one to use as he can. In this manner
the minds in a communicating group become a single organic whole. Their
unity is not one of identity, but of life and action, a crystallization of diverse
but related ideas.
It is not at all necessary that there should be agreement; the essential
thing is a certain ripeness and stability of thought resulting from attention

and discussion. There may be quite as much difference of opinion as there
was before, but the differences now existing are comparatively intelligent
and lasting. People know what they really think about the matter, and what
other people think. Measures, platforms, candidates, creeds and other
symbols have been produced which serve to express and assist coöperation
and to define opposition. There has come to be a relatively complete
organization of thought, to which each individual or group contributes in its
own peculiar way.
Take, for instance, the state of opinion in the United States regarding
slavery at the outbreak of the civil war. No general agreement had been
reached; but the popular mind had become organized with reference to the
matter, which had been turned over and regarded from all points of view, by
all parts of the community, until a certain ripeness regarding it had been
reached; revealing in this case a radical conflict of thought between the
North and the South, and much local diversity in both sections.
One who would understand public opinion should distinguish clearly
between a true or mature opinion and a popular impression. The former
requires earnest attention and discussion for a considerable time, and when
reached is significant, even if mistaken. It rarely exists regarding matters of
temporary interest, and current talk or print is a most uncertain index of it.
A popular impression, on the other hand, is facile, shallow, transient, with
that fickleness and fatuity that used to be ascribed to the popular mind in
general. It is analogous to the unconsidered views and utterances of an
individual, and the more one studies it the less seriously he will take it. It
may happen that ninety-nine men in a hundred hold opinions to-day
contrary to those they will hold a month hence—partly because they have
not yet searched their own minds, partly because the few who have really
significant and well-grounded ideas have not had time to impress them
upon the rest.
It is not unreasonable, then, to combine a very slight regard for most of
what passes as public opinion with much confidence in the soundness of an
aroused, mature, organic social judgment.
There is a widespread, but as I believe a fallacious, idea that the public
thought or action must in some way express the working of an average or
commonplace mind, must be some kind of a mean between the higher and

lower intelligences making up the group. It would be more correct to say
that it is representative, meaning by this that the preponderant feeling of the
group seeks definite and effectual expression through individuals specially
competent to give it such expression. Take for instance the activities of one
of our colleges in intercollegiate athletics or debates. What belongs to the
group at large is a vague desire to participate and excel in such
competitions; but in realizing itself this desire seeks as its agents the best
athletes or debaters that are to be found. A little common-sense and
observation will show that the expression of a group is nearly always
superior, for the purpose in hand, to the average capacity of its members.
I do not mean morally superior, but simply more effective, in a direction
determined by the prevalent feeling. If a mob is in question, the brutal
nature, for the time-being ascendant, may act through the most brutal men
in the group; and in like manner a money-making enterprise is apt to put
forward the shrewdest agents it can find, without regard for any moral
qualities except fidelity to itself.
But if the life of the group is deliberate and sympathetic, its expression
may be morally high, on a level not merely of the average member, but of
the most competent, of the best. The average theory as applied to public
consciousness is wholly out of place. The public mind may be on a lower
plane than that of the individual thinking in separation, or it may be on a
higher, but is almost sure to be on a different plane; and no inkling of its
probable character can be had by taking a mean. One mind in the right,
whether on statesmanship, science, morals, or what not, may raise all other
minds to its own point of view—because of the general capacity for
recognition and deference—just as through our aptitude for sudden rage or
fear one mind in the wrong may debase all the rest.
This is the way in which right social judgments are reached in matters so
beyond commonplace capacity as science, philosophy, and much of
literature and art. All good critics tell us that the judgment of mankind, in
the long run, is sure and sound. The world makes no mistake as to Plato,
though, as Emerson said, there are never enough understanding readers
alive to pay for an edition of his works. This, to be sure, is a judgment of
the few; and so, in a sense, are all finer judgments. The point is that the
many have the sense to adopt them.

And let us note that those collective judgments in literature, art and
science which have exalted Plato and Dante and Leonardo and
Michelangelo and Beethoven and Newton and Darwin, are democratic
judgments, in the sense that every man has been free to take a part in
proportion to his capacity, precisely as the citizen of a democracy is free to
take a part in politics. Wealth and station have occasionally tried to dictate
in these matters, but have failed.
It is natural for an organism to use its appropriate organ, and it would be
as reasonable to say that the capacity of the body for seeing is found by
taking an average of the visual power of the hand, nose, liver, etc., along
with that of the eye, as that the capacity of a group for a special purpose is
that of its average member. If a group does not function through its most
competent instruments, it is simply because of imperfect organization.
It is strange that people who apply the average theory to democracy do
not see that if it were sound it must apply to all the social phenomena of
history, which is a record of the works of the collective mind. Since the
main difference between democracy and ancient or mediæval systems is
merely that the former is less restricted by time, space and caste, is
essentially an appeal to free human power as against what is merely
mechanical or conventional; by what magic is this appeal to deprive us of
our ancient privilege of acting through our efficient individuals?
One who ponders these things will see that the principles of collective
expression are the same now as ever, and that the special difficulties of our
time arise partly from confusion, due to the pace of change, and partly from
the greater demands which a free system makes upon human capacity. The
question is, whether, in practice, democracy is capable of the effective
expression to which no very serious theoretical obstacle can be discerned. It
is a matter of doing a rather simple thing on a vaster and more complicated
scale than in the past.
Public opinion is no uniform thing, as we are apt to assume, but has its
multifarious differentiations. We may roughly distinguish a general opinion,
in which almost everybody in the community has a part, and an infinite
diversity of special or class opinions—of the family, the club, the school-
room, the party, the union, and so on.

And there is an equal diversity in the kind of thought with which the
public mind may be concerned: the content may be of almost any sort. Thus
there are group ideals, like the American ideal of indissoluble unity among
the states, the French ideal of national glory, or the ideals of honor and
good-breeding cherished in many families; and there are group beliefs,
regarding religion, trade, agriculture, marriage, education and the like.
Upon all matters in which the mind has, in the past, taken a lively interest
there are latent inclinations and prepossessions, and when these are aroused
and organized by discussion they combine with other elements to form
public opinion. Mr. Higginson, recounting his experience in the
Massachusetts legislature, speaks of “certain vast and inscrutable
undercurrents of prejudice ... which could never be comprehended by
academic minds, or even city-bred minds,” but which were usually
irresistible. They related to the rights of towns, the public school system,
the law of settlement, roads, navigable streams, breadth of wheels, close
time of fishing, etc. “Every good debater in the House, and every one of its
recognized legal authorities, might be on one side, and yet the smallest
contest with one of these latent prejudices would land them in a
minority.”[55]
This diversity merely reflects the complexity of organization, current
opinion and discussion being a pervasive activity, essential to growth, that
takes place throughout the system at large and in each particular member.
General opinion existing alone, without special types of thought as in the
various departments of science and art, would indicate a low type of
structure, more like a mob than a rational society. It is upon these special
types, and the individuals that speak for them, that we rely for the guidance
of general opinion (as, for instance, we rely upon economists to teach us
what to think about the currency), and the absence of mature speciality
involves weakness and flatness of general achievement. This fault is often
charged to democracy, but it should rather be said that democracy is
substituting a free type of speciality, based upon choice, for the old type
based upon caste, and that whatever deficiency exists in this regard is due
chiefly to the confused conditions that accompany transition.
General public opinion has less scope than is commonly imagined. It is
true that with the new communication, the whole people, if they are enough
interested, may form public judgments even upon transient questions. But it

is not possible, nor indeed desirable, that they should be enough interested
in many questions to form such judgments. A likeness of spirit and principle
is essential to moral unity, but as regards details differentiation is and
should be the rule. The work of the world is mostly of a special character,
and it is quite as important that a man should mind his own business—that
is, his own particular kind of general service—as that he should have public
spirit. Perhaps we may say that the main thing is to mind his private
business in a public spirit—always remembering that men who are in a
position to do so should make it their private business to attend to public
affairs. It is not indolence and routine, altogether, but also an inevitable
conflict of claims, that makes men slow to exert their minds upon general
questions, and underlies, the political maxim that you cannot arouse public
opinion upon more than one matter at a time. It is better that the public, like
the general-in-chief of an army, should be relieved of details and free to
concentrate its thought on essential choices.
I have only a limited belief in the efficacy of the referendum and similar
devices for increased participation of the people at large in the details of
legislation. In so far as these facilitate the formation and expression of
public will upon matters to which the public is prepared to give earnest and
continuous attention, they are serviceable; but if many questions are
submitted, or those of a technical character, the people become confused or
indifferent, and the real power falls into the hands of the few who manage
the machinery.
The questions which can profitably be decided by this direct and general
judgment of the public are chiefly those of organic change or readjustment,
such, for instance, as the contemporary question of what part the
government is to take in relation to the consolidation of industries. These
the people must decide, since no lesser power will be submitted to, but
routine activities, in society as in individuals, are carried on without
arousing a general consciousness. The people are also, as I shall shortly
point out, peculiarly fit to make choice among conspicuous personalities.
Specialists of all sorts—masons, soldiers, chemists, lawyers, bankers,
even statesmen and public officials—are ruled for the most part by the
opinion of their special group, and have little immediate dependence upon
the general public, which will not concern itself with them so long as their
work is not palpably inefficient or in some way distasteful.

Yet special phases of thought are not really independent, but are to be
looked upon as the work of the public mind acting with a less general
consciousness—partly automatic like the action of the legs in walking.
They are still responsible to the general state of opinion; and it is usually a
general need of the special product, as shoes, banks, education, medical aid
and so on, that gives the special group its pecuniary support and social
standing. Moreover, the general interest in a particular group is likely to
become awakened and critical when the function is disturbed, as with the
building trades or the coal-mine operators in case of a strike; or when it
becomes peculiarly important, as with the army in time of war. Then is the
day of reckoning when the specialist has to render an account of the talents
entrusted to him.
The separateness of the special group is also limited by personality, by
the fact that the men who perform the specialty do not in other matters think
apart from the rest of the society, but, in so far as it is a moral whole, share
its general spirit and are the same men who, all taken together, are the seat
of public opinion. How far the different departments of a man’s mind,
corresponding to general and special opinion, may be ruled by different
principles, is a matter of interest from the fact that every one of us is the
theatre of a conflict of moral standards arising in this way. It is evident by
general observation and confession that we usually accept without much
criticism the principles we become accustomed to in each sphere of activity,
whether consistent with one another or not. Yet this is not rational, and there
is and must ever be a striving of conscience to redress such conflicts, which
are really divisions in society itself, and tend toward anarchy. It is an easy
but weak defence of low principles of conduct, in business, in politics, in
war, in paying taxes, to say that a special standard prevails in this sphere,
and that our behavior is justified by custom. We cannot wholly escape from
the customary, but conscience should require of ourselves and others an
honest effort to raise its standard, even at much sacrifice of lower aims.
Such efforts are the only source of betterment, and without them society
must deteriorate.
In other words, it is the chief and perhaps the only method of moral and
intellectual progress that the thought and sentiment pertaining to the various
activities should mingle in the mind, and that whatever is higher or more
rational in each should raise the standard of the others. If one finds that as a

business man he tends to be greedy and narrow, he should call into that
sphere his sentiments as a patriot, a member of a family and a student, and
he may enrich these latter provinces by the system and shrewdness he
learns in business. The keeping of closed compartments is a principle of
stagnation and decay.
The rule of public opinion, then, means for the most part a latent
authority which the public will exercise when sufficiently dissatisfied with
the specialist who is in immediate charge of a particular function. It cannot
extend to the immediate participation of the group as a whole in the details
of public business.
This principle holds good in the conduct of government as well as
elsewhere, experience showing that the politics of an intricate state is
always a specialty, closer to the public interest, perhaps, than most
specialties, but ordinarily controlled by those who, for whatever reason, put
their main energy into it. Professional politicians, in this sense, are sure to
win as against the amateur; and if politics is badly managed the chief
remedy is to raise the level of the profession.
De Tocqueville says that “the people reign in the American political
world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of
all things; everything comes from them and is absorbed by them.”[56] And
we may add that, also like the Deity, they do things through agents in whom
the supposed attributes of their master are much obscured.
There are some who say we have no democracy, because much is done,
in government as elsewhere, in neglect or defiance of general sentiment.
But the same is true under any form of sovereignty; indeed, much more true
under monarchy or oligarchy than under our form. The rule of the people is
surely more real and pervasive than that of Louis XIV or Henry VIII. No
sovereign possesses completely its instruments, but democracy perhaps
does so more nearly than any other.
When an important function, such as government, or trade or education,
is not performed to the satisfaction of watchful consciences, the remedy is
somewhat as follows. A rather general moral sentiment regarding the matter
must be aroused by publishing the facts and exposing their inconsistency
with underlying standards of right. This sentiment will effect little so long
as it is merely general, but if vigorous it rapidly begets organs through

which to work. It is the nature of such a sentiment to stimulate particular
individuals or groups to organize and effectuate it. The press has a motive
to exploit and increase it by vivid exposition of the state of affairs;
enthusiasm, seeking for an outlet, finds it in this direction; ambition and
even pecuniary interest are enlisted to gratify the demand. Effective
leadership thus arises, and organization, which thrives in the warmth of
public attention, is not long wanting. Civic leagues and the like—supposing
that it is a matter of politics—unite with trusted leaders and the independent
press to guide the voter in choosing between honesty and corruption. The
moral standard of the professional group begins to rise: a few offenders are
punished, many are alarmed, and things which every one has been doing or
conniving at are felt as wrong. In a vigorous democracy like that of the
United States, this process is ever going on, on a great scale and in
innumerable minor groups: the public mind, like a careful farmer, moves
about its domain, hoeing weeds, mending fences and otherwise setting
things to rights, undeterred by the fact that the work will not stay done.
Such regeneration implies the existence of a real, though perhaps latent,
moral unity in the group whose standards are thus revived and applied. It is,
for instance, of untold advantage to all righteous movements in the United
States, that the nation traditionally exists to the ends of justice, freedom and
humanity. This tradition means that there is already a noble and cherished
ideal, no sincere appeal to which is vain; and we could as well dispense
with the wisdom of the Constitution as with the sentiment of the
Declaration of Independence.
On the same principle, it is a chief factor in the misgovernment of our
cities that they are mostly too new and heterogeneous to have an established
consciousness. As soon as the people feel their unity, we may hopefully
look for civic virtue and devotion, because these things require a social
medium in which to work. A man will not devote himself, ordinarily, where
there is no distinct and human whole to devote himself to, no mind in which
his devotion will be recognized and valued. But to a vital and enduring
group devotion is natural, and we may expect that a self-conscious city,
state, university or profession will prove to be a theatre of the magnanimous
virtues.

FOOTNOTES:
[55] On the Outskirts of Public Life, The Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1898.
[56] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 4.

CHAPTER XIII
WHAT THE MASSES CONTRIBUTE

The Masses the Initiators of Sentiment—They Live in the Central
Current of Experience—Distinction or Privilege Apt to Cause
Isolation—Institutional Character of Upper Classes—The Masses
Shrewd Judges of Persons—This the Main Ground for Expecting
that the People Will Be Right in the Long Run—Democracy Always
Representative—Conclusion.
The function of leaders in defining and organizing the confused
tendencies of the public mind is evident enough, but just what the masses
themselves contribute is perhaps not so apparent.[57] The thought of the
undistinguished many is, however, not less important, not necessarily less
original, than that of the conspicuous few; the originality of the latter, just
because it is more conspicuous, being easy to overestimate. Leadership is
only salient initiative; and among the many there may well be increments of
initiative which though not salient are yet momentous as a whole.
The originality of the masses is to be found not so much in formulated
idea as in sentiment. In capacity to feel and to trust those sentiments which
it is the proper aim of social development to express, they are, perhaps,
commonly superior to the more distinguished or privileged classes. The
reason is that their experience usually keeps them closer to the springs of
human nature, and so more under the control of its primary impulses.
Radical movements aiming to extend the application of higher sentiment
have generally been pushed on by the common people, rather than by
privileged orders, or by conspicuous leadership of any sort.[58] This seems
to be true of Christianity in all ages, and of the many phases of modern
democracy and enfranchisement. In American history, particularly, both the
revolution which gave us independence and the civil war which abolished
slavery and reunited the country, were more generally and steadfastly
supported by the masses than by people of education or wealth. Mr.

Higginson, writing on the Cowardice of Culture,[59] asserts that at the
opening of the Revolution the men of wealth and standing who took the
side of liberty were so few that they could be counted, and that “there was
never a period in our history, since the American Nation was independent,
when it would not have been a calamity to have it controlled by its highly
educated men alone.” And in England also it was the masses who upheld
abolition in the colonies and sympathized with the North in the American
struggle.
The common people, as a rule, live more in the central current of human
experience than men of wealth or distinction. Domestic morality, religious
sentiment, faith in man and God, loyalty to country and the like, are the
fruit of the human heart growing in homely conditions, and they easily
wither when these conditions are lost. To be one among many, without
individual pretension, is in one way a position of security and grandeur.
One stands, as it were, with the human race at his back, sharing its claim on
truth, justice and God. Qui quœrit habere privata amittit communia;[60] the
plain man has not conspicuously gained private things, and should be all the
richer in things that are common, in faith and fellowship. Nothing, perhaps,
is healthy that isolates us from the common destiny of men, that is merely
appropriative and not functional, that is not such as all might rejoice in if
they understood it.
Miss Jane Addams has advanced a theory,[61] far from absurd, that the
confused and deprived masses of our cities, collected from all lands by
immigration, are likely to be the initiators of new and higher ideals for our
civilization. Since “ideals are born of situations,” they are perhaps well
situated for such a function by the almost complete destruction, so far as
they are concerned, of old traditions and systems. In this promiscuous
mingling of elements everything is cancelled but human nature, and they
are thrown back upon that for a new start. They are an “unencumbered
proletariat” notable for primary faith and kindness, “simple people who
carry in their hearts a desire for mere goodness. They regularly deplete their
scanty livelihood in response to a primitive pity, and, independent of the
religions they have professed, of the wrongs they have suffered, and of the
fixed morality they have been taught, they have an unquenchable desire that
charity and simple justice shall regulate men’s relations.”[62]

Some tendency to isolation and spiritual impoverishment is likely to go
with any sort of distinction or privilege. Wealth, culture, reputation, bring
special gratifications. These foster special tastes, and these in turn give rise
to special ways of living and thinking which imperceptibly separate one
from common sympathy and put him in a special class. If one has a good
income, for instance, how natural it is to spend it, and how naturally, also,
that expenditure withdraws one from familiar intercourse with people who
have not a good income. Success means possessions, and possessions are
apt to imprison the spirit.
It has always been held that worldly goods, which of course include
reputation as well as wealth, make the highest life of the mind difficult if
not impossible, devotional orders in nearly all religions requiring personal
poverty and lowliness as the condition of edification. Tantum homo
impeditur et distrahitur, quantum sibi res attrahit.[63] “Sloth or cowardice,”
says a psychologist, “creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard
... lives based on having are less free than lives based on either doing or
being.”[64] “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” Not
for nothing have men of insight agreed upon such propositions as these.
Distinction, also, is apt to go with an exaggerated self-consciousness
little favorable to a natural and hearty participation in the deeper currents of
the general life. Ambition and the passion for difference are good in their
way, but like most good things they are bought at a price, in this case a
preoccupation with ideas that separate one from immediate fellowship. It is
right to have high and unusual aims and activities, but hard to keep them
free from pride, mistrust, gloom and other vices of isolation. Only a very
sane mind can carry distinction and fellowship without spilling either.
In the social regard paid to wealth and standing we symbolize our vague
sense of the value of personal faculty working in the service of the whole,
but it requires an unusual purity and depth of social feeling for the
possessor of faculty not to be demoralized by this regard, which is—
perhaps necessarily—almost disassociated from definite and cogent
responsibility. I mean that the eminent usually get the credit of virtue as it
were ex officio, whether they really have it or not. We find therefore that
power, instead of being simply higher service, is generally more or less
corrupt or selfish, and those who are raised up are so much the more cast

down. At the best they make some sacrifice of innocence to function; at the
worst they destroy themselves and debauch society.
Even vulgarity (by etymology the vice of the crowd) if we take it to mean
undisciplined selfishness and pretension, flourishes at least as much among
the prosperous as among the hand-working people. Wealth which is not
dominated by noble tradition or by rare personal inspiration falls into
vulgarity because it permits the inflation of those crude impulses which are
much kept down in the poor by the discipline of hardship. Whatever is
severely necessary can never be vulgar, while only nobleness can prevent
the superfluous from being so. And a superficial, functionless education and
refinement is nearly as vulgar as uninspired wealth. So it has been remarked
that when artists paint our contemporary life they are apt to choose it as
humble as possible in order “to get down below the strata which vulgarity
permeates.”[65]
Moreover, conspicuous and successful persons are more likely than the
commonalty to be institutionized, to have sacrificed human nature to
speciality. To succeed in the hour one must be a man of the hour, and must
ordinarily harness his very soul to some sort of contemporary activity which
may after all be of no real worth. An upper class is institutional in its very
essence, since it is control of institutions that makes it an upper class, and
men can hardly keep this control except as they put their hearts into it.
Successful business men, lawyers, politicians, clergymen, editors and the
like are such through identifying their minds, for better or worse, with the
present activities and ideals of commercial and other institutions. “Seldom
does the new conscience, when it seeks a teacher to declare to men what is
wrong, find him in the dignitaries of the church, the state, the culture, that
is. The higher the rank the closer the tie that binds those to what is but
ought not to be.”[66]
The humbler classes are somewhat less entangled in spirit. It is better to
have the hand subdued to what it works in than the soul; and the mechanic
who sells to the times only his ten hours a day of muscular work is perhaps
more free to think humanly the rest of the time than his employer. He can
also more easily keep the habit of simple look and speech, since he does not
have to learn to conceal his thoughts in the same degree that the lawyer, the
merchant and the statesman do. Even among students I have observed, in
the matter of openness of countenance, a marked difference, on the whole,

between the graduates of an engineering school and those of a law school,
very much in favor of the former.[67] Again, the hand laborer is used to
reckoning his wages by the hour—so much time so much pay—and would
feel dishonest if he did anything else. But in the professions, and still more
in commerce and finance, there is, as a rule, no definite measure of service,
and men insensibly come to base their charges on their view of what the
other man will pay; thus perilously accustoming themselves to exploit the
wealth or weakness of others.
The life of special institutions is often transient in proportion to its
speciality, and it is only natural that commercial and professional activity
should deal largely with evanescent interests of little dignity in themselves.
The “demand” of the public which the merchant has to meet, is in great part
a thing of vanity, if not of degradation, which it can hardly be edifying to
supply. Indeed, many, if not most, business men play their occupation as a
game, rather than in a spirit of service, and are widely infected by the
fallacy that they are justified in selling anything that the people will buy.
Simple minds are revolted by the lack of tangible human service in many of
the higher-paid occupations, and young men enter them for the pay alone
when their better impulses would lead them to prefer hand labor.
The sentiment of the people is most readily and successfully exercised in
their judgment of persons. Montesquieu, in discussing republican
government, advocated on this ground an almost universal manhood
suffrage in the choosing of representatives. “For,” says he, “though few can
tell the exact degree of men’s capacities, yet there are none but are capable
of knowing in general whether the person they choose is better qualified
than most of his neighbors.”[68] The plainest men have an inbred
shrewdness in judging human nature which makes them good critics of
persons even when impenetrable to ideas. This shrewdness is fostered by a
free society, in which every one has to make and hold his own place among
his fellows; and it is used with much effect in politics and elsewhere as a
guide to sound ideas.
Some years ago, for instance, occurred a national election in which the
main issue was whether silver should or should not be coined freely at a
rate much above its bullion value. Two facts were impressed upon the
observer of this campaign: first, the inability of most men, even of
education, to reason clearly on a somewhat abstract question lying outside

of their daily experience, and, second, the sound instinct which all sorts of
people showed in choosing sides through leadership. The flow of nonsense
on both parts was remarkable, but personality was the determining
influence. It was common to hear men say that they should vote for or
against the proposition because they did or did not trust its conspicuous
advocates; and it was evident that many were controlled in this way who
did not acknowledge it, even to themselves. The general result was that the
more conservative men were united on one side, and the more radical and
shifting elements on the other.
The real interest of the voter at our elections is usually in personality.
One likes or dislikes A, who is running for alderman, and votes accordingly,
without knowing or caring what he is likely to do if elected. Or one opposes
B, because he is believed to be in league with the obnoxious C, and so on. It
is next to impossible to get a large or intelligent vote on an impersonal
matter, such as the constitutional amendments which, in most of our states,
have to be submitted to the people. The newspapers, reflecting the public
taste, say little about them, and the ordinary voter learns of them for the
first time when he comes to the polls. Only a measure which directly affects
the interests or passions of the people, like prohibition of the liquor traffic,
will call out a large vote.
On this shrewd judgment of persons the advocate of democracy chiefly
grounds his faith that the people will be right in the long run. The old
argument against him runs as follows: democracy is the rule of the many;
the many are incompetent to understand public questions; hence democracy
is the rule of incompetence. Thus Macaulay held that institutions purely
democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty or civilization or both; and
expected a day of spoliation in the United States, “for with you the majority
is the government and has the rich absolutely at its mercy.”[69] More recent
writers of standing have taken the same view, like Lecky, who declares that
the rule of the majority is the rule of ignorance, since the poor and the
ignorant are the largest proportion of the population.[70]
To this our democrat will answer, “The many, whether rich or poor, are
incompetent to grasp the truth in its abstractness, but they reach it through
personal symbols, they feel their way by sympathy, and their conclusions
are at least as apt to be right as those of any artificially selected class.” And
he will perhaps turn to American history, which is, on the whole, a fairly

convincing demonstration that the masses are not incapable of temperate
and wise decision, even on matters of much difficulty. That our antecedents
and training have been peculiarly fortunate must be conceded.
The crudely pessimistic view is superficial not only in underestimating
the masses and overestimating wealth—which is, in our times at least,
almost the only possible basis of a privileged class—but in failing to
understand the organic character of a mature public judgment. Is it not a
rather obvious fallacy to say that because the ignorant outnumber the
educated, therefore the rule of the majority is the rule of ignorance? If fifty
men consult together, forty of whom are ignorant regarding the matter in
hand and ten informed, will their conclusions necessarily be those of
ignorance? Evidently not, unless in some improbable manner the forty
separate from the ten and refuse to be guided by them. Savages and gangs
of boys on the street choose the most sagacious to lead in counsel, and even
pirates will put the best navigators in charge of the ship. The natural thing,
as we have seen, is for a group to defer to its most competent members.
Lecky would himself have maintained this in the case of Parliament, and
why should it not be true of other groups? I see no reason why the rule of
the majority should be the rule of ignorance, unless they are not only
ignorant but fools; and I do not suppose the common people of any capable
race are that.
I was born and have lived nearly all my life in the shadow of an
institution of higher learning, a university, supported out of the taxes of a
democratic state and governed by a board elected directly by the people. So
far back as I can remember there have not been wanting pessimists to say
that the institution could not prosper on such a basis. “What,” they said, “do
the farmers know or care about the university? how can we expect that they
should support astronomy and Sanscrit and the higher mathematics?” In
fact there have been troublous times, especially in the earlier days, but the
higher learning has steadily won its way in open discussion, and the
university is now far larger, higher in its standards, better supported and
apparently more firmly established in popular approval than ever before.
What more exacting test of the power of democracy to pursue and
effectuate high and rather abstract ideals could there well be than this? One
who lives in the midst of such facts cannot but discover something rather
doctrinaire in the views of Macaulay and Lecky.

If it be true that most people judge men rather than ideas, we may say
that democratic society is representative not only in politics but in all its
thought. Everywhere a few are allowed to think and act for the rest, and the
essence of democratic method is not in the direct choice of the people in
many matters, but in their retaining a conscious power to change their
representatives, or to exercise direct choice, when they wish to do so. All
tolerable government is representative, but democracy is voluntarily so, and
differs from oligarchy in preserving the definite responsibility of the few to
the many. It may even happen, as in England, that a hereditary ruling class
retains much of its power by the consent of a democratized electorate, or, as
in France, that a conception of the state, generated under absolute
monarchy, is cherished under the rule of the people.
As for popular suffrage, it is a crude but practical device for ascertaining
the preponderant bent of opinion on a definite issue. It is in a sense
superficial, mechanical, almost absurd, when we consider the difference in
real significance among the units; but it is simple, educative, and has that
palpable sort of justice that allays contention. No doubt spiritual weight is
the great thing, but as there is no accepted way to measure this, we count
one man one vote, and trust that spiritual differences will be expressed
through persuasion.
There is, then, no essential conflict between democracy and
specialization in any sphere. It is true that as the vital unity of a group
becomes more conscious each member tends to feel a claim on everything
the group does. Thus the citizen not only wishes the government—of the
village, the state or the nation—to be an expression of himself; but he
wishes the same regarding the schools, manufactures, trade, religion and the
advance of knowledge. He desires all these things to go on in the best way
possible, so as to express to the fullest that human nature that is in himself.
And as a guaranty of this he demands that they shall be conducted on an
open principle, which shall give control of them to the fittest individuals.
Hating all privilege not based on function, he desires power to suppress
such privilege when it becomes flagrant. And to make everything amenable,
directly or indirectly, to popular suffrage, seems to him a practical step in
this direction.
Something like this is in the mind of the plain man of our time; but he is
quite aware of his incompetence to carry on these varied activities directly,

either in government or elsewhere, and common-sense teaches him to seek
his end by a shrewd choice of representatives, and by developing a system
of open and just competition for all functions. The picture of the democratic
citizen as one who thinks he can do anything as well as anybody is, of
course, a caricature, and in the United States, at least, there is a great and
increasing respect for special capacity, and a tendency to trust it as far as it
deserves. If people are sometimes sceptical of the specialist—in political
economy let us say—and inclined to prefer their own common-sense, it is
perhaps because they have had unfortunate experience with the former. On
the whole, our time is one of the “rise of the expert,” when, on account of
the rapid elaboration of nearly all activities, there is an ever greater demand
for trained capacity. Far from being undemocratic, this is a phase of that
effective organization of the public intelligence which real democracy calls
for. In short, as already suggested, to be democratic, or even to be ignorant,
is not necessarily to be a fool.
So in answer to the question, Just what do the undistinguished masses of
the people contribute to the general thought? we may say, They contribute
sentiment and common-sense, which gives momentum and general
direction to progress, and, as regards particulars, finds its way by a shrewd
choice of leaders. It is into the obscure and inarticulate sense of the
multitude that the man of genius looks in order to find those vital tendencies
whose utterance is his originality. As men in business get rich by divining
and supplying a potential want, so it is a great part of all leadership to
perceive and express what the people have already felt.

FOOTNOTES:
[57] Some discussion of leadership will be found in Human Nature and the
Social Order, chaps. 8 and 9.
[58] So Mr. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, chap. 76. Some emphasis
should be given to the phrase “pushed on,” as distinguished from “initiated.”
[59] In the Atlantic Monthly, Oct., 1905.
[60] Who seeks to have private things loses common things. Thomas à
Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, book iii, chap. 13, sec. 1.
[61] In her book, Newer Ideals of Peace.

[62] Newer Ideals of Peace, chap. 1.
[63] De Imitatione Christi, book ii, chap. 1, sec. 7.
[64] William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 319.
[65] P. G. Hamerton, Thoughts About Art, 222.
[66] Henry D. Lloyd, Man the Social Creator, 101.
[67] I mean merely that the law graduates look sophisticated—not dishonest.
They have learned to use voice and facial expression as weapons of controversy.
[68] The Spirit of Laws, book xi, chap. 6.
[69] From a letter written to an American correspondent in 1857 and printed
in the appendix to Trevelyan’s Macaulay.
[70] Democracy and Liberty, vol. i, chap. 1, page 25 and passim. Some of
Lecky’s expressions, however, are more favorable to democracy.

CHAPTER XIV
DEMOCRACY AND CROWD EXCITEMENT

The Crowd-Theory of Modern Life—The Psychology of Crowds—
Modern Conditions Favor Psychological Contagion—Democracy a
Training in Self-Control—The Crowd not Always in the Wrong—
Conclusion; the Case of France.
Certain writers, impressed with the rise of vast democracies within which
space is almost eliminated by ease of communication, hold that we are
falling under the rule of Crowds, that is to say, of bodies of men subject by
their proximity to waves of impulsive sentiment and action, quite like
multitudes in physical contiguity. A crowd is well known to be emotional,
irrational and suppressive of individuality: democracy, being the rule of the
crowd, will show the same traits.
The psychology of crowds has been treated at length by Sighele,[71] Le
Bon[72] and other authors who, having made a specialty of the man in the
throng, are perhaps somewhat inclined to exaggerate the degree in which he
departs from ordinary personality. The crowd mind is not, as is sometimes
said, a quite different thing from that of the individual (unless by individual
is meant the higher self), but is merely a collective mind of a low order
which stimulates and unifies the cruder impulses of its members. The men
are there but they “descend to meet.” The loss of rational control and
liability to be stampeded which are its main traits are no greater than attend
almost any state of excitement—the anger, fear, love and the like, of the
man not in the crowd.
And the intimidating effect of a throng on the individual—the stage-
fright, let us say, of an inexperienced speaker—is nothing unique, but
closely resembles that which we have all felt on first approaching an
imposing person; seeming to spring from that vague dread of unknown
power which pervades all conscious life. And like the latter, it readily wears

off, so that the practised orator is never more self-possessed than with the
crowd before him.
The peculiarity of the crowd-mind is mainly in the readiness with which
any communicable feeling is spread and augmented. Just as a heap of
firebrands will blaze when one or two alone will chill and go out, so the
units of a crowd “inflame each other by mutual sympathy and mutual
consciousness of it.”[73] This is much facilitated by the circumstance that
habitual activities are usually in abeyance, the man in a throng being like
one fallen overboard in that he is removed from his ordinary surroundings
and plunged into a strange and alarming element. At once excited and
intimidated, he readily takes on a suggested emotion—as of panic, anger or
self-devotion—and proceeds to reckless action.
It must be admitted that modern conditions enable such contagion to
work upon a larger scale than ever before, so that a wave of feeling now
passes through the people, by the aid of the newspaper, very much as if they
were physically a crowd—like the wave of resentment, for instance, that
swept over America when the battle-ship Maine was destroyed in Havana
harbor. The popular excitement over athletic contests is a familiar example.
During the foot-ball season the emotion of the crowd actually present at a
famous game is diffused throughout the country by prompt and ingenious
devices that depict the progress of the play; and, indeed, it is just to get into
this excitement, and out of themselves and the humdrum of routine, that
thousands of people, most of whom know next to nothing of the game, read
the newspapers and stand about the bulletin boards. And when a war breaks
out, the people read the papers in quite the same spirit that the Roman
populace went to the arena, not so much from any depraved taste for blood,
as to be in the thrill. Even the so-called “individualism” of our time, and the
unresting pursuit of “business,” are in great part due to a contagion of the
crowd. People become excited by the game and want to be in it, whether
they have any definite object or not; and once in they think they must keep
up the pace or go under.
Is democracy, then, the rule of the crowd, and is there a tendency in
modern times toward the subjection of society to an irrational and
degenerate phase of the mind? This question, like others relating to the
trend of modern life, looks differently according to the points of view from
which it is approached. In general we may say that the very changes which

are drawing modern populations together into denser wholes bring also a
discipline in organization and self-control which should remove them
further and further from the mob state.
It is agreed by writers on the crowd that men are little likely to be
stampeded in matters regarding which they have a trained habit of thought
—as a fireman, for instance, will be apt to keep his head when the fire-
alarm sounds. And it is just the absence of this that is the mark of a crowd,
which is not made by mere numbers and contiguity, but by group
excitability arising from lack of stable organization. A veteran army is not a
crowd, however numerous and concentrated; and no more perhaps is a
veteran democracy, though it number twenty million voters.
A healthy democracy is indeed a training in judgment and self-control as
applied to political action; and just as a fireman is at home on trembling
ladders and amidst choking fumes, so the free citizen learns to keep his
head amid the contending passions and opinions of a “fierce democratie.”
Having passed safely through many disturbances, he has acquired a
confidence in cool judgment and in the underlying stability of things
impossible to men who, living under a stricter control, have had no such
education. He knows well how to discount superficial sentiment and “the
spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour.” It is, then, the nature of
ordered freedom to train veterans of politics, secure against the wild
impulses of a rabble—such as made havoc in Paris at the close of the
Franco-Prussian war—and in modern times, when power cannot be kept
away from the people, such a training is the main guaranty of social
stability. Is it not apparent to judicious observers that our tough-fibred,
loose-jointed society takes agitation more safely than the more rigid
structures of Europe?
Nor is it merely in politics that this is true, for it is the whole tendency of
a free system to train men to stand on their own feet and resist the rush. In a
fixed order, with little opening for initiative or differentiated development,
they scarcely realize themselves as distinct and self-directing individuals,
and from them one may expect the traits of Le Bon’s foules; hardly from the
shrewd farmers and mechanics of American democracy.
It looks at first sight as if, because of their dense humanity, the great
cities in which the majority of the population are apparently to live must

tend to a mob like state of mind; but except in so far as cities attract the
worse elements of the people this is probably not the case. Mob phenomena
generally come from crowd excitement ensuing upon a sluggish habit of life
and serving as an outlet to the passions which such a life stores up. We find
the mob and the mob-like religious revival in the back counties rather than
among the cheerful and animated people that throng the open places of New
York or Chicago.
Moreover, it is hardly true that “the multitude is always in the wrong”;[74]
and conclusions may be no less sound and vital for being reached under a
certain exaltation of popular enthusiasm. The individual engaged in private
affairs and without the thrill of the common life is not more apt to be at the
height of his mental being than the man in the crowd. A mingling of these
influences seems to produce the best results, and the highest rationality,
while it involves much plodding thought in its preparation, is likely to come
to definite consciousness and expression in moments of some excitement.
As it is the common experience of artists, poets and saints that their best
achievements are the outcome of long brooding culminating in a kind of
ecstasy, so the clearest notes of democracy may be struck in times of
exaltation like that which, in the Northern United States, followed the attack
on Fort Sumter. The impulsiveness which marks popular feeling may
express some brutal or trivial phase of human nature, or some profound
moral intuition, the only definite test being the persistence of the sentiment
which thus comes to light; and if it proves to have the lasting warrant of the
general conscience it may be one of those voices of the people in which
posterity will discover the voice of God.
The view that the crowd is irrational and degenerate is characteristic of
an intricate society where reading has largely taken the place of assembly as
a stimulus to thought. In primitive times the social excitement of religious
and other festivals represented the higher life; as it still does in backwoods
communities, and to sluggish temperaments everywhere. Even in the towns
our higher sentiments are largely formed in social meetings of one sort or
another, accompanied by music, acting, dancing or speech-making, which
draw one out of the more solitary currents of his thought and bring him into
livelier unity with his fellows.
There is really no solid basis in fact or theory for the view that
established democracy is the rule of an irresponsible crowd. If not true of

America, it fails as a general principle; and no authoritative observer has
found it to be the case here. Those who hold the crowd-theory seem to be
chiefly writers, whether French or not, who generalize from the history of
France. Without attempting any discussion of this, I may suggest one or two
points that we are perhaps apt to overlook. It is, for one thing, by no means
clear that French democracy has shown itself to lack the power of self-
control and deliberate progress. Its difficulties—the presence of ancient
class divisions, of inevitable militarism, and the like—have been
immeasurably greater than ours, and its spirit one with which we do not
readily sympathize. France, I suppose, is little understood in England or the
United States, and we probably get our views too much from a school of
French writers whose zeal to correct her faults may tend to exaggerate
them. The more notorious excesses of the French or Parisian populace—
such as are real and not a fiction of hostile critics—seem to have sprung
from that exercise of power without training inevitable in a country where
democracy had to come by revolution. And, again, a certain tendency to act
in masses, and lack of vigorous local and private initiative, which appears
to characterize France, is much older than the Revolution, and seems due
partly to race traits and partly to such historical conditions as the centralized
structure inherited from absolute monarchy.

FOOTNOTES:
[71] Scipio Sighele, La folla delinquente. French translation La foule
criminelle.
[72] Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules. English translation The Crowd.
The whole subject, including the question of “prophylactics” against the mob-
mind, is well discussed in Professor E. A. Ross’s Social Psychology.
[73] Whately in his note to Bacon’s essay on Discourse.
[74] Attributed to the Earl of Roscommon. See Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
Sir Thomas Browne characteristically describes the multitude as “that
numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the
reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great beast,
and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.” Religio Medici, part ii, sec. 1.
This is the very man that urged the burning of witches after the multitude was
ready to give it up.

CHAPTER XV
DEMOCRACY AND DISTINCTION

The Problem—Democracy Should be Distinguished from Transition—
The Dead-Level Theory of Democracy—Confusion and Its Effects
—“Individualism” May not be Favorable to Distinguished
Individuality—Contemporary Uniformity—Relative Advantages of
America and Europe—Haste, Superficiality, Strain—Spiritual
Economy of a Settled Order—Commercialism—Zeal for Diffusion
—Conclusion.
What shall we say of the democratic trend of the modern world as it
affects the finer sort of intellectual achievement? While the conscious sway
of the masses seems not uncongenial to the more popular and obvious kinds
of eminence, as of statesmen, inventors, soldiers, financiers and the like,
there are many who believe it to be hostile to distinction in literature, art or
science. Is there hope for this also, or must we be content to offset the
dearth of greatness by the abundance of mediocrity?
This, I take it, is a matter for a priori psychological reasoning rather than
for close induction from fact. The present democratic movement is so
different from anything in the past that historical comparison of any large
sort is nearly or quite worthless. And, moreover, it is so bound up with other
conditions which are not essential to it and may well prove transient, that
even contemporary fact gives us very little secure guidance. All that is
really practicable is a survey of the broad principles at work and a rough
attempt to forecast how they may work out. An inquiry of this sort seems to
me to lead to conclusions somewhat as follows.
First, there is, I believe, no sound reason for thinking that the democratic
spirit or organization is in its essential nature hostile to distinguished
production. Indeed, one who holds that the opposite is the case, while he
will not be able to silence the pessimist, will find little in fact or theory to
shake his own faith.

Second, although democracy itself is not hostile, so far as we can make
out its nature by general reasoning, there is much that is so in the present
state of thought, both in the world at large and, more particularly, in the
United States.
In this, as in all discussions regarding contemporary tendency, we need to
discriminate between democracy and transition. At present the two go
together because democracy is new; but there is no reason in the nature of
things why they should remain together. As popular rule becomes
established it proves capable of developing a stability, even a rigidity, of its
own; and it is already apparent that the United States, for instance, just
because democracy has had its way there, is less liable to sudden transitions
than perhaps any other of the great nations.
It is true that democracy involves some elements of permanent unrest.
Thus, by demanding open opportunity and resisting hereditary stratification,
it will probably maintain a competition of persons more general, and as
regards personal status more unsettling, than anything the world has been
used to in the past. But personal competition alone is the cause of only a
small part of the stress and disorder of our time; much more being due to
general changes in the social system, particularly in industry, which we may
describe as transition. And moreover, competition itself is in a specially
disordered or transitional state at present, and will be less disquieting when
a more settled state of society permits it to be carried on under established
rules of justice, and when a discriminating education shall do a large part of
its work. In short, democracy is not necessarily confusion, and we shall find
reason to think that it is the latter, chiefly, that is opposed to distinction.
The view that popular rule is in its nature unsuited to foster genius rests
chiefly on the dead-level theory. Equality not distinction is said to be the
passion of the masses, diffusion not concentration. Everything moves on a
vast and vaster scale: the facility of intercourse is melting the world into
one fluid whole in which the single individual is more and more submerged.
The era of salient personalities is passing away, and the principle of
equality, which ensures the elevation of men in general, is fatal to particular
greatness. “In modern society,” said De Tocqueville, the chief begetter of
this doctrine, “everything threatens to become so much alike that the
peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely lost in the

general aspect of the world.”[75] Shall we agree with this or maintain with
Plato that a democracy will have the greatest variety of human nature?[76]
Perhaps the most plausible basis for this theory is the levelling effect
ascribed by many to the facilities for communication that have grown up so
surprisingly within the past century. In a former chapter I have said much
upon this matter, holding that we must distinguish between the individuality
of choice and that of isolation, and giving reasons why the modern facility
of intercourse should be favorable to the former.
To this we may add that the mere fact of popular rule has no inevitable
connection, either friendly or hostile, with variety and vigor of
individuality. If France is somewhat lacking in these, it is not because she is
democratic, but because of the race traits of her people and her peculiar
antecedents; if America abounds in a certain kind of individuality, it is
chiefly because she inherited it from England and developed it in a frontier
life. In either case democracy, in the sense of popular government, is a
secondary matter.
Certainly, America is a rather convincing proof that democracy does not
necessarily suppress salient personality. So far as individuality of spirit is
concerned, our life leaves little to be desired, and no trait impresses itself
more than this upon observers from the continent of Europe. “All things
grow clear in the United States,” says Paul Bourget, “when one understands
them as an immense act of faith in the social beneficence of individual
energy left to itself.”[77] The “individualism” of our social system is a
commonplace of contemporary writers. Nowhere else, not even in England,
I suppose, is there more respect for non-conformity or more disposition to
assert it. In our intensely competitive life men learn to value character
above similarity, and one who has character may hold what opinions he
pleases. Personality, as Mr. Brownell points out in contrasting the
Americans with the French, is the one thing of universal interest here: our
conversation, our newspapers, our elections are dominated by it, and our
great commercial transactions are largely a struggle for supremacy among
rival leaders.[78] The augmenting numbers of the people, far from obscuring
the salient individual, only make for him a larger theatre of success; and
personal reputation—whether for wealth, statesmanship, literary
achievement, or for mere singularity—is organized on a greater scale than

ever before. One who is familiar with any province of American life, as for
example, that of charitable and penal reform, is aware that almost every
advance is made through the embodiment of timely ideas in one or a few
energetic individuals who set an example for the country to follow.
Experience with numbers, instead of showing the insignificance of the
individual, proves that if he has faith and a worthy aim there is no limit to
what he may do; and we find, accordingly, plenty of courage in starting new
projects. The country is full of men who find the joys of self-assertion, if
not always of outward success, in the bold pursuit of hazardous enterprises.
If there is a deficiency of literary and artistic achievement in a democracy
of this kind, it is due to some other cause than a general submergence of the
individual in the mass.
The dead-level theory, then, is sufficiently discredited as a general law by
the undiminished ascendency of salient individualities in every province of
activity. The enlargement of social consciousness does not alter the essential
relation of individuality to life, but simply gives it a greater field of success
or failure. The man of genius may meet with more competition, but if he is
truly great a larger world is his. To imagine that the mass will submerge the
individual is to suppose that one aspect of society will stand still while the
other grows. It rests upon a superficial, numerical way of thinking, which
regards individuals as fixed units each of which must become less
conspicuous the more they are multiplied. But if the man of genius
represents a spiritual principle his influence is not fixed but grows with the
growth of life itself, and is limited only by the vitality of what he stands for.
Surely the great men of the past—Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and the rest—
are not submerged, nor in danger of being; nor is it apparent why their
successors should be.
The real cause of literary and artistic weakness (in so far as it exists) I
take to be chiefly the spiritual disorganization incident to a time of rather
sudden transition. How this condition, and others closely associated with it,
are unfavorable to great æsthetic production, I shall try to point out under
the four heads, confusion, commercialism, haste and zeal for diffusion.
With reference to the higher products of culture, not only the United
States, but in some degree contemporary civilization in general, is a
confused, a raw, society, not as being democratic but as being new. It is our

whole newspaper and factory epoch that is crude, and scarcely more so in
America than in England or Germany; the main difference in favor of
European countries being that the present cannot so easily be separated
from the conditions of an earlier culture. It is a general trait of the time that
social types are disintegrated, old ones going to pieces and new ones not
perfected, leaving the individual without adequate discipline either in the
old or in the new.
Now works of enduring greatness seem to depend, among other things,
on a certain ripeness of historical conditions. No matter how gifted an
individual may be, he is in no way apart from his time, but has to take that
and make the best of it he can; the man of genius is in one point of view
only a twig upon which a mature tendency bears its perfect fruit. In the new
epoch the vast things in process are as yet so unfinished that individual gifts
are scarce sufficient to bring anything to a classical completeness; so that
our life remains somewhat inarticulate, our literature, and still more our
plastic art, being inadequate exponents of what is most vital in the modern
spirit.
The psychological effect of confusion is a lack of mature culture groups,
and of what they only can do for intellectual or æsthetic production. What
this means may, perhaps, be made clearer by a comparison drawn from
athletic sports. We find in our colleges that to produce a winning foot-ball
team, or distinguished performance in running or jumping, it is essential
first of all to have a spirit of intense interest in these things, which shall
arouse the ambition of those having natural gifts, support them in their
training and reward their success. Without this group spirit no efficient
organization, no high standard of achievement, can exist, and a small
institution that has this will easily surpass a large one that lacks it. And
experience shows that it takes much time to perfect such a spirit and the
organizations through which it is expressed.
In quite the same way any ripe development of productive power in
literary or other art implies not merely capable individuals but the
perfection of a social group, whose traditions and spirit the individual
absorbs, and which floats him up to a point whence he can reach unique
achievement. The unity of this group or type is spiritual, not necessarily
local or temporal, and so may be difficult to trace, but its reality is as sure as
the principle that man is a social being and cannot think sanely and

steadfastly except in some sort of sympathy with his fellows. There must be
others whom we can conceive as sharing, corroborating and enhancing our
ideals, and to no one is such association more necessary than the man of
genius.
The group is likely to be more apparent or tangible in some arts than in
others: it is generally quite evident in painting, sculpture, architecture and
music, where a regular development by the passage of inspiration from one
artist to another can almost always be traced. In literature the connections
are less obvious, chiefly because this art is in its methods more disengaged
from time and place, so that it is easier to draw inspiration from distant
sources. It is also partly a matter of temperament, men of somewhat solitary
imagination being able to form their group out of remote personalities, and
so to be almost independent of time and place. Thus Thoreau lived with the
Greek and Hindoo classics, with the old English poets, and with the
suggestions of nature; but even he owed much to contemporary influences,
and the more he is studied the less solitary he appears. Is not this the case
also with Wordsworth, with Dante, with all men who are supposed to have
stood alone?
The most competent of all authorities on this question—Goethe—was a
full believer in the dependence of genius on influences. “People are always
talking about originality,” he says, “but what do they mean? As soon as we
are born the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end. And
after all what can we call our own except energy, strength and will? If I
could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and
contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.”[79] He
even held that men of genius are more dependent upon their environment
than others; for, being thinner-skinned, they are more suggestible, more
perturbable, and peculiarly in need of the right sort of surroundings to keep
their delicate machinery in fruitful action.
No doubt such questions afford ground for infinite debate, but the
underlying principle that the thought of every man is one with that of a
group, visible or invisible, is sure, I think, to prove sound; and if so it is
indispensable that a great capacity should find access to a group whose
ideals and standards are of a sort to make the most of it.

Another reason why the rawness of the modern world is unfavorable to
great production is that the ideals themselves which a great art should
express share in the general incompleteness of things and do not present
themselves to the mind clearly defined and incarnate in vivid symbols.
Perhaps a certain fragmentariness and pettiness in contemporary art and
literature is due more to this cause than to any other—to the fact that the
aspirations of the time, large enough, certainly, are too much obscured in
smoke to be clearly and steadily regarded. We may believe, for example, in
democracy, but it can hardly be said that we see democracy, as the middle
ages, in their art, saw the Christian religion.
From this point of view of groups and organization it is easy to
understand why the “individualism” of our epoch does not necessarily
produce great individuals. Individuality may easily be aggressive and yet
futile, because not based on the training afforded by well-organized types—
like the fruitless valor of an isolated soldier. Mr. Brownell points out that
the prevalence of this sort of individuality in our art and life is a point of
contrast between us and the French. Paris, compared with New York, has
the “organic quality which results from variety of types,” as distinguished
from variety of individuals. “We do far better in the production of striking
artistic personalities than we do in the general medium of taste and culture.
We figure well, invariably, at the Salon.... Comparatively speaking, of
course, we have no milieu.”[80]
The same conditions underlie that comparative uniformity of American
life which wearies the visitor and implants in the native such a passion for
Europe. When a populous society springs up rapidly from a few
transplanted seeds, its structure, however vast, is necessarily somewhat
simple and monotonous. A thousand towns, ten thousand churches, a
million houses, are built on the same models, and the people and the social
institutions do not altogether escape a similar poverty of types. No doubt
this is sometimes exaggerated, and America does present many picturesque
variations, but only a reckless enthusiasm will equal them with those of
Europe. How unspeakably inferior in exterior aspect and in many inner
conditions of culture must any recent civilization be to that, let us say, of
Italy, whose accumulated riches represent the deposit of several thousand
years.

Such deposits, however, belong to the past; and as regards contemporary
accretions the sameness of London or Rome is hardly less than that of
Chicago. It is a matter of the epoch, more conspicuous here chiefly because
it has had fuller sweep. A heavy fall of crude commercialism is rapidly
obscuring the contours of history.
In comparison with Europe America has the advantages that come from
being more completely in the newer current of things. It is nearer, perhaps,
to the spirit of the coming order, and so perhaps more likely, in due time, to
give it adequate utterance in art. Another benefit of being new is the attitude
of confidence that it fosters. If America could hardly have sustained the
assured mastery of Tennyson, neither, perhaps, could England an optimism
like that of Emerson. In contrast to the latter, Carlyle, Ruskin and Tolstoi—
prophets of an older world—are shadowed by a feeling of the ascendency
and inertia of ancient and somewhat decadent institutions. They are afraid
of them, and so are apt to be rather shrill in protest. An American,
accustomed to see human nature have pretty much its own way, has seldom
any serious mistrust of the outcome. Nearly all of our writers—as Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Thoreau, Whitman, even Hawthorne
—have been of a cheerful and wholesome personality.[81]
On the other hand, an old civilization has from its mere antiquity a
richness and complexity of spiritual life that cannot be transplanted to a
new world. The immigrants bring with them the traditions of which they
feel in immediate need, such as those necessary to found the state, the
church and the family; but even these lose something of their original
flavor, while much of what is subtler and less evidently useful is left
behind. We must remember, too, that the culture of the Old World is chiefly
a class culture, and that the immigrants have mostly come from a class that
had no great part in it.
With this goes loss of the visible monuments of culture inherited from the
past—architecture, painting, sculpture, ancient universities and the like.
Burne-Jones, the English painter, speaking of the commercial city in which
he spent his youth, says: ... “if there had been one cast from ancient Greek
sculpture, or one faithful copy of a great Italian picture, to be seen in
Birmingham when I was a boy, I should have begun to paint ten years
before I did ... even the silent presence of great works in your town will
produce an impression on those who see them, and the next generation will,

without knowing how or why, find it easier to learn than this one does
whose surroundings are so unlovely.”[82]
Nor is American life favorable to the rapid crystallization of a new
artistic culture; it is too transient and restless; transatlantic migration is
followed by internal movements from east to west and from city to country;
while on top of these we have a continuous subversion of industrial
relations.[83]
Another element of special confusion in our life is the headlong mixture
of races, temperaments and traditions that comes from the new
immigration, from the irruption by millions of peoples from the south and
east of the Old World. If they were wholly inferior, as we sometimes
imagine, it would perhaps not matter so much; but the truth is that they
contest every intellectual function with the older stock, and, in the
universities for instance, are shortly found teaching our children their own
history and literature. They assimilate, but always with a difference, and in
the northern United States, formerly dominated by New England influences,
a revolution from this cause is well under way. It is as if a kettle of broth
were cooking quietly on the fire, when some one should come in and add
suddenly a great pailful of raw meats, vegetables and spices—a rich
combination, possibly, but likely to require much boiling. That fine English
sentiment that came down to us through the colonists more purely, perhaps,
than to the English in the old country, is passing away—as a distinct
current, that is—lost in a flood of cosmopolitan life. Before us, no doubt, is
a larger humanity, but behind is a cherished spirit that can hardly live again;
and, like the boy who leaves home, we must turn our thoughts from an
irrevocable past and go hopefully on to we know not what.
In short, our world lacks maturity of culture organization. What we
sometimes call—truly enough as regards its economic life—our complex
civilization, is simple to the point of poverty in spiritual structure. We have
cast off much rubbish and decay and are preparing, we may reasonably
hope, to produce an art and literature worthy of our vigor and aspiration, but
in the past, certainly, we have hardly done so.
Haste and the superficiality and strain which attend upon it are widely
and insidiously destructive of good work in our day. No other condition of
mind or of society—not ignorance, poverty, oppression or hate—kills art as

haste does. Almost any phase of life may be ennobled if there is only calm
enough in which the brooding mind may do its perfect work upon it; but out
of hurry nothing noble ever did or can emerge. In art human nature should
come to a total, adequate expression; a spiritual tendency should be
perfected and recorded in calmness and joy. But ours is, on the whole, a
time of stress, of the habit of incomplete work; its products are unlovely
and unrestful and such as the future will have no joy in. The pace is suited
only to turn out mediocre goods on a vast scale.
It is, to put the matter otherwise, a loud time. The newspapers, the
advertising, the general insistence of suggestion, have an effect of din, so
that one feels that he must raise his voice to be heard, and the whispers of
the gods are hard to catch. Men whose voices are naturally low and fine
easily lose this trait in the world and begin to shout like the rest. That is to
say, they exaggerate and repeat and advertise and caricature, saying too
much in the hope that a little may be heard. Of course, in the long run this is
a fatal delusion; nothing will really be listened to except that whose quiet
truth makes it worth hearing; but it is one so rooted in the general state of
things that few escape it. Even those who preserve the lower tone do so
with an effort which is in itself disquieting.
A strenuous state of mind is always partial and special, sacrificing scope
to intensity and more fitted for execution than insight. It is useful at times,
but if habitual cuts us off from that sea of subconscious spirit from which
all original power flows. “The world of art,” says Paul Bourget, speaking of
America, “requires less self-consciousness—an impulse of life which
forgets itself, the alternations of dreamy idleness with fervid execution.”[84]
So Henry James[85] remarks that we have practically lost the faculty of
attention, meaning, I suppose, that unstrenuous, brooding sort of attention
required to produce or appreciate works of art—and as regards the prevalent
type of business or professional mind this seems quite true.
It comes mainly from having too many things to think of, from the
urgency and distraction of an epoch and a country in which the traditional
structures that support the mind and save its energy have largely gone to
pieces. The endeavor to supply by will functions that in other conditions
would be automatic creates a rush which imitation renders epidemic, and
from which it is not easy to escape in order to mature one’s powers in
fruitful quiet.

There is an immense spiritual economy in any settled state of society,
sufficient, so far as production is concerned, to offset much that is stagnant
or oppressive; the will is saved and concentrated; while freedom, as De
Tocqueville noted, sometimes produces “a small, distressing motion, a sort
of incessant jostling of men, which annoys and disturbs the mind without
exciting or elevating it.”[86] The modern artist has too much choice. If he
attempts to deal largely with life, his will is overworked at the expense of
æsthetic synthesis. Freedom and opportunity are without limit, all cultures
within his reach and splendid service awaiting performance. But the task of
creating a glad whole seems beyond any ordinary measure of talent. The
result in most cases—as has been said of architecture—is “confusion of
types, illiterate combinations, an evident breathlessness of effort and
striving for effect, with the inevitable loss of repose, dignity and style.”[87]
A mediæval cathedral or a Greek temple was the culmination of a long
social growth, a gradual, deliberate, corporate achievement, to which the
individual talent added only the finishing touch. The modern architect has,
no doubt, as much personal ability, but the demands upon it are excessive; it
would seem that only a transcendent synthetic genius of the calibre of
Dante could deal adequately with our scattered conditions.
The cause of strain is radical and somewhat feverish change, not
democracy as such. A large part of the people, particularly the farming
class, are little affected by it, and there are indications that in America,
where it has been greater than elsewhere, the worst is now over.
By commercialism, in this connection, we may understand a
preoccupation of the ability of the people with material production and with
the trade and finance based upon it. This again is in part a trait of the period,
in part a peculiarity of America, in its character as a new country with
stumps to get out and material civilization to erect from the ground up.
The result of it is that ability finds constant opportunity and incitement to
take a commercial direction, and little to follow pure art or letters. A man
likes to succeed in something, and if he is conscious of the capacity to make
his way in business or professional life, he is indisposed to endure the
poverty, uncertainty and indifference which attend the pursuit of an artistic
calling. Less prosperous societies owe something to that very lack of
opportunity which makes it less easy for artistic ability to take another
direction.

An even greater peril is the debasing of art by an uncultured market.
There seem to be plenty of artists of every kind, but their standard of
success is mostly low. The beginner too early gets commercial employment
in which he is not held up to any high ideal. This brings us back to the lack
of a well-knit artistic tradition to educate both the artist and the public, the
lack of a type, “the non-existence,” as Mr. Russell Sturgis says, “of an
artistic community with a mind of its own and a certain general agreement
as to what a work of art ought to be.” This lack involves the weakness of
the criticism which is required to make the artist see himself as he ought to
be. “That criticism is nowhere in proportion to the need of it,” says Henry
James, “is the visiting observer’s first and last impression—an impression
so constant that it at times swallows up or elbows out every other.”
The antipathy between art and the commercial spirit, however, is often
much overstated. As a matter of history art and literature have flourished
most conspicuously in prosperous commercial societies, such as Athens,
Florence, Venice, the communes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
the trading cities of Germany, the Dutch Republic and the England of
Elizabeth. Nothing does more than commerce to awaken intelligence,
enterprise and a free spirit, and these are favorable to ideal production. It is
only the extreme one-sidedness of our civilization in this regard that is
prejudicial.
It is also true—and here we touch upon something pertaining more to the
very nature of democracy than the matters so far mentioned—that the zeal
for diffusion which springs from communication and sympathy has in it
much that is not directly favorable to the finer sorts of production.
Which is the better, fellowship or distinction? There is much to be said
on both sides, but the finer spirits of our day lean toward the former, and
find it more human and exhilarating to spread abroad the good things the
world already has than to prosecute a lonesome search for new ones. I
notice among the choicest people I know—those who seem to me most
representative of the inner trend of democracy—a certain generous
contempt for distinction and a passion to cast their lives heartily on the
general current. But the highest things are largely those which do not
immediately yield fellowship or diffuse joy. Though making in the end for a
general good, they are as private in their direct action as selfishness itself,
from which they are not always easily distinguished. They involve intense

self-consciousness. Probably men who follow the whispers of genius will
always be more or less at odds with their fellows.
Ours, then, is an Age of Diffusion. The best minds and hearts seek joy
and self-forgetfulness in active service, as in another time they might seek it
in solitary worship; God, as we often hear, being sought more through
human fellowship and less by way of isolate self-consciousness than was
the case a short time since.
I need hardly particularize the educational and philanthropic zeal that, in
one form or another, incites the better minds among our contemporaries and
makes them feel guilty when they are not in some way exerting themselves
to spread abroad material or spiritual goods. No one would wish to see this
zeal diminished; and perhaps it makes in the long run for every kind of
worthy achievement; but its immediate effect is often to multiply the
commonplace, giving point to De Tocqueville’s reflection that “in
aristocracies a few great pictures are produced, in democratic countries a
vast number of insignificant ones.”[88] In a spiritual as well as a material
sense there is a tendency to fabricate cheap goods for an uncritical market.

“Men and gods are too extense.”[89]

Finally, all theories that aim to deduce from social conditions the limits
of personal achievement must be received with much caution. It is the very
nature of a virile sense of self to revolt from the usual and the expected and
pursue a lonesome road. Of course it must have support, but it may find this
in literature and imaginative intercourse. So, in spite of everything, we have
had in America men of signal distinction—such, for instance, as Emerson,
Thoreau and Whitman—and we shall no doubt have more. We need fear no
dearth of inspiring issues; for if old ones disappear energetic minds will
always create new ones by making greater demands upon life.
The very fact that our time has so largely cast off all sorts of structure is
in one way favorable to enduring production, since it means that we have
fallen back upon human nature, upon that which is permanent and essential,
the adequate record of which is the chief agent in giving life to any product
of the mind.

FOOTNOTES:
[75] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book iv, chap. 7. But elsewhere he
expresses the opinion that this levelling and confusion is only temporary. See,
for example, book iii, chap. 21.
[76] Republic, book viii.
[77] Outre-Mer. English Translation, 306.
[78] See the final chapter of his French Traits.
[79] Conversation with Eckermann, May 12, 1825.
[80] French Traits, 385, 387, 393.
[81] Poe is the only notable exception that occurs to me.
[82] Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, ii, 100, 101.
[83] Our most notable group of writers—flourishing at Concord and Boston
about 1850—is, of course, connected with the maturing, in partial isolation, of a
local type of culture, now disintegrated and dispersed on the wider currents of
the time.
[84] Outre-Mer, 25.
[85] In his essay on Balzac.
[86] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 10.
[87] Henry Van Brunt, Greek Lines, 225. Some of these phrases, such as
“illiterate combinations,” could never apply to the work of good architects.
[88] Democracy in America, vol. ii, book i, chap. 11.
[89] Emerson, Alphonso of Castile.

CHAPTER XVI
THE TREND OF SENTIMENT

Meaning and General Trend of Sentiment—Attenuation—Refinement—
Sense of Justice—Truth as Justice—As Realism—As Expediency—
As Economy of Attention—Hopefulness.
By sentiment I mean socialized feeling, feeling which has been raised by
thought and intercourse out of its merely instinctive state and become
properly human. It implies imagination, and the medium in which it chiefly
lives is sympathetic contact with the minds of others. Thus love is a
sentiment, while lust is not; resentment is, but not rage; the fear of disgrace
or ridicule, but not animal terror, and so on. Sentiment is the chief motive-
power of life, and as a rule lies deeper in our minds and is less subject to
essential change than thought, from which, however, it is not to be too
sharply separated.
Two traits in the growth of sentiment are perhaps characteristic of
modern life, both of which, as will appear, are closely bound up with the
other psychological changes that have already been discussed.
First a trend toward diversification: under the impulse of a growing
diversity of suggestion and intercourse many new varieties and shades of
sentiment are developed. Like a stream which is distributed for irrigation,
the general current of social feeling is drawn off into many small channels.
Second a trend toward humanism, meaning by this a wider reach and
application of the sentiments that naturally prevail in the familiar
intercourse of primary groups. Following a tendency evident in all phases
of the social mind, these expand and organize themselves at the expense of
sentiments that go with the more formal or oppressive structures of an
earlier epoch.
The diversification of sentiment seems to involve some degree of
attenuation, or decline in volume, and also some growth of refinement.

By the former I mean that the constant and varied demands upon feeling
which modern life makes—in contrast to the occasional but often severe
demands of a more primitive society—give rise, very much as in the case of
the irrigating stream, to the need and practice of more economy and
regularity in the flow, so that “animated moderation”[90] in feeling succeeds
the alternations of apathy and explosion characteristic of a ruder condition.
Thus our emotional experience is made up of diverse but for the most part
rather mild excitements, so that the man most at home in our civilization,
though more nimble in sentiment than the man of an earlier order, is
perhaps somewhat inferior in depth. Something of the same difference can
be seen between the city man and the farmer; while the latter is inferior in
versatility and readiness of feeling, he has a greater store of it laid up,
which is apt to give superior depth and momentum to such sentiment as he
does cherish. Who has not experienced the long-minded faithfulness and
kindness, or perhaps resentment, of country people, and contrasted them
with the less stable feelings of those who live a more urbane life?
In saying that life tends toward refinement it is only a general trend that
is asserted. We must admit that many phases of refined sentiment have been
more perfectly felt and expressed in the past than they are now; but this is a
matter of the maturity of special types of culture, rather than of general
progress. Thus the Italian Renaissance produced wonders of refinement in
art, as in the painting, let us say, of Botticelli; but it was, on the whole, a
bloody, harsh and sensual time compared with ours, a time when
assassination, torture and rape were matters of every day. So, also, there is a
refinement of the sense of language in Shakespeare and his contemporaries
which we can only admire, while their plays depict a rather gross state of
feeling. A course of reading in English fiction, beginning with Chaucer and
ending with James, Howells and Mrs. Ward, would certainly leave the
impression that our sensibilities had, on the whole, grown finer.
And this is even more true of the common people than of the well-to-do
class with which literature is chiefly occupied: the tendency to the diffusion
of refinement being more marked than its increase in a favored order. The
sharp contrast in manners and feelings between the “gentleman,” as
formerly understood, and the peasant, artisan and trading classes has partly
disappeared. Differences in wealth and occupation no longer necessitate
differences in real culture, the opportunities for which are coming to be

open to all classes, and in America, at least, the native-bred farmer or hand-
worker is not uncommonly, in essential qualities, a gentleman.
The general fact is that the activities of life, to which feeling responds,
have become more various and subtle and less crudely determined by
animal conditions. Material variety and comfort is one phase of this: we
become habituated to a comparatively delicate existence and so are trained
to shun coarseness. Communication, by giving abundance and choice of
social contacts, also acts to diversify and refine sentiment; the growth of
order disaccustoms us to violence, and democracy tends to remove the
degrading spectacle of personal or class oppression.
This modern refinement has the advantage that, being a general rise in
level rather than the achievement of a class or a nation, it is probably
secure. It is not, like the refinement of Greece, the somewhat precarious
fruit of transient conditions, but a possession of the race, in no more danger
of dying out than the steam-engine.
To the trend toward humanism and the sentiments—such as justice, truth,
kindness and service—that go with it, I shall devote the rest of this chapter
and the one that follows:
The basis of all sentiment of this kind is the sense of community, or of
sharing in a common social or spiritual whole, membership in which gives
to all a kind of inner equality, no matter what their special parts may be. It
is felt, however, that the differences among men should be functional and
intrinsic, not arbitrary or accidental. The sense of justice is usually strong
among the members of a sympathetic group, the basis for determining what
is just being the perception of some purpose which every one is to serve,
each in his own way, so that he who rightly holds a higher place is the one
who can function best for the common good. It does not hurt my self-
respect or my allegiance to remain a common seaman while another
becomes captain of the ship, provided I recognize that he is the fitter man
for the place; and if the distribution of stations in society were evidently of
this sort there would be no serious protest against it. What makes trouble is
the growth of an ideal of fair play which the actual system of things does
not satisfy.
The widening of sympathy and the consciousness of larger unity have
brought the hope and demand for a corresponding extension of justice; and

all sorts of humanity—not to speak of the lower animals—profit by this
wider sentiment. Classes seek to understand each other; the personality of
women and children is recognized and fostered; there is some attempt to
sympathize with alien nations and races, civilized or savage, and to help
them to their just place in the common life of mankind.
Our conception of international rights reflects the same view, and the
American, at least, desires that his country should treat other countries as
one just man treats another, and is proud when he can believe that she has
done so. It is surely of some significance that in the most powerful of
democracies national selfishness, in the judgment of a competent European
observer, is less cynical and obtrusive than in any of the great states of
Europe.[91]
Truth is a kind of justice, and wherever there is identification of oneself
with the life of the group it is fostered, and lying tends to be felt as mean
and impolitic. Serious falsehood among friends is, I believe, universally
abhorred—by savages and children as well as by civilized adults. To lie to a
friend is to hit him from behind, to trip him up in the dark, and so the moral
sentiment of every group attempts to suppress falsehood among its
members, however it may be encouraged as against outsiders. “Wherefore,”
says St. Paul, “putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor,
for we are members one of another.”[92]
Our democratic system aims to be a larger organization of moral unity,
and so far as it is so, in the feeling of the individual, it fosters this open and
downright attitude toward his fellows. In idea, and largely in fact, we are a
commonwealth, of which each one is a member by his will and intelligence,
as well as by necessity, and with which, accordingly, the human sentiment
of loyalty among those who are members one of another is naturally in
force. The very disgust with which, in a matter like assessment for taxation,
men contemplate the incompatibility that sometimes exists between truth
and fairness, is a tribute to the prevailing sentiment of sincerity.
An artificial system, that is one which, however solid its hidden
foundations—and of course all systems rest on fact of some sort—does not
visibly flow from principles of truth and fairness, fails to arouse this loyalty
of partnership. One may be devoted to it, but his devotion will be based
rather on reverence for something above him than on a sense of

participation, and will call for submission rather than for straightforward
dealing. It would seem that lying and servility are natural in the attitude of a
subject toward a master, that is toward a superior but uncomprehending
power; while truth is generated in sympathy. Tyranny may be said to make
falsehood a virtue, and in contemporary Russia, for instance, stealth and
evasion are the necessary and justifiable means of pursuing the aims of
human nature.
Another reason for the association of freedom with truth is that the
former is a training in the sense of social cause and effect; the free play of
human forces being a constant demonstration of the power of reality as
against sham. The more men experiment intelligently with life, the more
they come to believe in definite causation and the less in trickery. Freedom
means continuous experiment, a constant testing of the individual and of all
kinds of social ideas and arrangements. It tends, then, to a social realism;
“Her open eyes desire the truth.” The best people I know are pervaded by
the feeling that life is so real that it is not worth while to make believe.
“Knights of the unshielded heart,” they desire nothing so much as to escape
from all pretense and prudery and confront things as they really are—
confident that they are not irremediably bad. I read in a current newspaper
that “brutal, unvarnished, careless frankness is the pose of the new type of
girl. She has not been developed in a school of evasion. To pretend you
gave a hundred dollars for a gown when you really gave fifty for it, is a
sorry jest for her and a waste of time.... If she owns to the new gown she
tells you its cost, the name of the inexpensive dressmaker who made it, and
just where she economized in its price.”
There is a tribute to truth in the very cynicism and shamelessness with
which flagitious politicians and financiers declare and defend their
practices. Like Napoleon or Macchiavelli they have at least cast off
superstition and are dealing with reality, though they apprehend it only in a
low and partial aspect. If they lie, they do so deliberately, scientifically, with
a view to producing a certain effect upon people whom they regard as fools.
It only needs that this rational spirit should ally itself with higher sentiment
and deeper insight in order that it should become a source of virtue.
I will not here inquire minutely how far or in what sense honesty is the
best policy, but it is safe to say that the more life is organized upon a basis
of freedom and justice the more truth there is in the proverb. When the

general state of things is anarchical, as in the time of Macchiavelli,
rationalism may lead to the cynical use of falsehood as the tool suited to the
material; nor is it deniable that this is often the case at the present day. But
modern democracy aims to organize justice, and in so far as it succeeds it
creates a medium in which truth tends to survive and falsehood to perish.
We all wish to live in such a medium: there is nothing more grateful than
the conviction that the order of things is sincere, is founded on reality of
some sort; and in a good measure the American, for instance, does have this
conviction. It makes democracy a soft couch for the soul: one can let
himself go and does not have to make believe; pretence is no part of the
system; be your real self and you will find your right place.

“I know how the great basement of all power
Is frankness, and a true tongue to the world;
And how intriguing secrecy is proof
Of fear and weakness, and a hollow state.”

An artificial system must maintain itself by suppressing the free play of
social forces and inculcating its own artificial ideas in place of those
derived from experience. Free association, free speech, free thinking, in so
far as they touch upon matters vital to authority, are and always have been
put down under such systems, and this means that the whole mind of the
people is emasculated, as the mind of Italy was by Spanish rule and
religious reaction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Oriental
mendacity” is ascribed to the insecurity of life and property under arbitrary
rule; but it is not merely life and property that are affected. The very idea of
truth and reason in human affairs can hardly prevail under a system which
affords no observation to corroborate it. The fact that in diplomacy, for
instance, there is a growing belief that it pays to be simple and honest, I
take to be a reflection of the fact that the international system, based more
and more on intelligent public opinion, is gradually coming to be a medium
in which truth is fit to live.
Perhaps something of this hostility to truth will linger in all
establishments, however they may be humanized: they all involve a kind of
vested interest in certain ideas which is not favorable to entire frankness. It
sometimes appears that one who would be quite honest and stand for human
nature should avoid not only religious, political and educational allegiance,

but law, journalism, and all positions where one has to speak as part of an
institution. As a rule the great seers and thinkers have stood as much aside
from institutions as the nature of the human mind permits.
Still another reason for the keener sense of truth in our day is the need to
economize attention. In societies where life is dull, fiction, circumlocution
and elaborate forms of intercourse serve as a sort of pastime; and the first
arouses no resentment unless some definite injury is attempted by it.
Although the Chinese are upright in keeping their pecuniary engagements,
we are told that mere truth is not valued by them, and is not inculcated by
their classic moralists. So in Italy the people seem to think that a courteous
and encouraging lie is kinder than the bare truth, as when a man will
pretend to give you information when he knows nothing about the matter. A
strenuous civilization like ours makes one intolerant of all this. It is not that
we are always hurried; but we are so often made to feel the limitations of
our attention that we dislike to waste it. Thought is life, and we wish to get
the most reality for a given outlay of it that is to be had. We wish to come at
once to the Real Thing, whether it be a business proposition or the most
subtle theory.
Another sentiment favored by the times is social courage and
hopefulness, a disposition to push forward with confidence regarding the
future both of the individual and of society at large. That this attitude is the
prevalent one, in American democracy at least, nearly all observers are
agreed. “Let any one,” says Dr. Lyman Abbott, “stand on one of our great
highways and watch the countenances of the passers-by; the language
written on most of them is that of eagerness, ambition, expectation,
hope.”[93] There is something ruthless about this headlong optimism, which
is apt to deny and neglect failure and despair, as certain religious sects of
the day deny and neglect physical injury; but it answers its purpose of
sustaining the combatants. It springs from a condition in which the
individual, not supported in any one place by a rigid system, is impelled
from childhood to trust himself to the common current of life, to make
experiments, to acquire a habit of venture and a working knowledge of
social forces. The state of things instigates endeavor, and, as a rule, rewards
it sufficiently to keep up one’s courage, while occasional failure at least
takes away that vague dread of the unknown which is often worse than the
reality. Life is natural and vivid, not the wax-works of an artificial order,

and has that enlivening effect that comes from being thrown back upon
human nature. A real pessimism—one which despairs of the general trend
of things—is rare and without much influence, even the revolutionary sects
maintaining that the changes they desire are in the line of a natural
evolution. Discontent is affirmative and constructive rather than stagnant: it
works out programmes and hopefully agitates for their realization. There is
a kind of piety and trust in God to be seen in the confidence with which
small bodies of men anticipate the success of principles they believe to be
right.

FOOTNOTES:
[90] Bagehot’s phrase. See his Physics and Politics.
[91] See James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, chap. 87.
[92] Ephesians, iv, 25.
[93] In Shaler’s United States, ii, 594.

CHAPTER XVII
THE TREND OF SENTIMENT—Continued

Nature of the Sentiment of Brotherhood—Favored by Communication
and Settled Principles—How Far Contemporary Life Fosters It—
How Far Uncongenial To It—General Outcome in this Regard—
The Spirit of Service—The Trend of Manners—Brotherhood in
Relation to Conflict—Blame—Democracy and Christianity.
The sentiment of mutual kindness or brotherhood is a simple and
widespread thing, belonging not only to man in every stage of his
development, but extending, in a crude form, over a great part of animal
life. Prince Kropotkin, in his Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution, has
collected illustrations of its universality and significance. “... the necessity
of communicating impressions,” he says, “of playing, of chattering, or of
simply feeling the proximity of other kindred living beings pervades nature,
and is, as much as any other physiological function, a distinctive feature of
life and impressionability.”[94] Darwin perceived, what Kropotkin and
others have illustrated with convincing fulness, that this fusing kindliness
underlies all higher phases of evolution, and is essential to the coöperative
life in which thought and power are developed. The popular notion that
kindly sentiment can only be a hindrance to the survival of the fittest is a
somewhat pernicious misapprehension.
This sentiment flourishes most in primary groups, where, as we have
seen, it contributes to an ideal of moral unity of which kindness is a main
part. Under its influence the I-feeling becomes a we-feeling, which seeks no
good that is not also the good of the group. And the humanism of our time
strives with renewed energy to make the we-feeling prevail also in the
larger phases of life. “We must demand,” says a writer who lives very close
to the heart of the people,[95] “that the individual shall be willing to lose the
sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity
only in connection with the activity of the many.” Huxley at one time felt

this so strongly as to say, “If I had 400 pounds a year I would never let my
name appear to anything I did or shall do.”[96]
Such utterances, though significant, are one-sided, and it is perhaps more
in the way of real progress to demand, not that the sense of personal
achievement shall be given up, but that it shall be more allied with fellow-
feeling. The sort of ambition congenial to the we-feeling is one directed
toward those common aims in which the success of one is the success of all,
not toward admiration or riches. Material goods, one feels, should not be
appropriated for pride or luxury, but, being limited in amount, should be
used in a consciousness of the general need, and apportioned by rules of
justice framed to promote a higher life in the whole.
Much might be said of the we-feeling as joy:

Perchè quanto si dice piu li nostro,
Tanto possiede piu di ben ciascuno,
E piu di caritate arde in quel chiostro.[97]

For there, as much the more as one says Our,
So much the more of good each one possesseth,
And more of charity in that cloister burns.[98]

There is nothing more wholesome or less pursued by compunction. To
mingle our emotions with fellowship enlarges and soothes them; even
resentment on behalf of us is less rankling than on behalf of only me, and
there is something cheerful in suffering wrong in friendly company. One of
the most obvious things about selfishness is the unhappiness of it, the lack
of imaginative expatiation, of the inspiration of working consciously with a
vast whole, of “the exhilaration and uplift which come when the individual
sympathy and intelligence is caught into the forward intuitive movement of
the mass.”[99] Fellowship is thus a good kind of joy in that it is indefinitely
diffusible; though by no means incapable of abuse, since it may be
cultivated at the expense of truth, sanity and individuality.
Everything that tends to bring mankind together in larger wholes of
sympathy and understanding tends to enlarge the reach of kindly feeling.
Among the conditions that most evidently have this effect are facility of
communication and the acceptance of common principles. These permit the

contact and fusion of minds and tend to mould the group into a moral
whole.
In times of settled principles and of progress in the arts of
communication the idea of the brotherhood of man has a natural growth; as
it had under the Roman Empire. On the other hand, it is dissipated by
whatever breaks up the moral unity and makes human interests seem
inconsistent. Not only war, but all kinds of destructive or unregulated
competition, in which the good of one party appears to be a private good
gained by the harm of another, are reflected in the mind by unkindly
feeling. What human nature needs is—not the disappearance of opposition,
which would be death—but the suppression of destructive forms, and the
control of all forms by principles of justice and kindness, so that men may
feel that the good survives.
As regards the bearing of contemporary conditions upon the spirit of
brotherhood, we find forces at work so conflicting that it is easy to reach
opposite conclusions, according to the bias of the observer.
The enlargement of consciousness has brought a broadening of sentiment
in all directions. As a rule kindly feeling follows understanding, and there
was never such opportunity and encouragement to understand as there is
now. Distant peoples—Russians, Chinese and South Sea Islanders;
alienated classes—criminals, vagrants, idiots and the insane, are brought
close to us, and the natural curiosity of man about his fellows is exploited
and stimulated by the press. Indeed, the decried habit of reading the
newspapers contributes much to a general we-feeling, since the newspaper
is a reservoir of commonplace thought of which every one partakes—and
which he knows he may impute to every one else—pervading the world
with a conscious community of sentiment which tends toward kindliness.
Even more potent, perhaps, is the indirect action of communication in
making it possible to organize all phases of life on a larger scale and on a
more human basis; in promoting democracy and breaking down caste.
Under a democratic system the masses have means of self-expression; they
vote, strike, and print their views. They have power, and this, at bottom, is
the source of all respect and consideration. People of other classes have to
think of them, feel with them and recognize them as of a common
humanity. Moreover, in tending to wipe out conventional distinctions and

leave only those that are functional, democracy fosters the notion of an
organic whole, from which all derive and in which they find their value. A
sense of common nature and purpose is thus nourished, a conscious unity of
action which gives the sense of fellowship. It comes to be assumed that men
are of the same stuff, and a kind of universal sympathy—not incompatible
with opposition—is spread abroad. It is realized that “there are diversities
of gifts but the same spirit.”
On the other hand, our life is full of a confusion which often leaves the
individual conscious only of his separateness, engaged in a struggle which,
so far as he sees, has no more relation to justice and the common good than
a dog-fight. Whether he win or lose makes, in this case, little difference as
to the effect upon his general view of life: he infers that the world is a place
where one must either eat or be eaten; the idea of the brotherhood of man
appears to be an enervating sentimentalism, and the true philosophy that of
the struggle for existence, which he understands in a brutal sense opposite
to the real teaching of science. Nothing could be more uncongenial to the
we-feeling than this view, which unfortunate experience has prepared many
to embrace, taking from life, as it does, its breadth and hopefulness, the joy
and inspiration of working in a vast and friendly whole.
Probably most of us are under the sway of both of these tendencies. We
feel the new idealism, the sweep and exhilaration of democracy, but we
practise, nevertheless, a thrifty exploitation of all the private advantages we
can decently lay our hands on; nor have we the moral vigor to work out any
reconciliation of these principles. Experience shows, I think, that until a
higher sentiment, like brotherly kindness, attains some definite organization
and programme, so that men are held up to it, it is remarkably ineffective in
checking selfish activities. People drift on and on in lower courses, which at
bottom they despise and dislike, simply because they lack energy and
initiative to get out of them. How true it is that many of us would like to be
made to be better than we are. I have seen promising idealists grow narrow,
greedy and sensual—and of course unhappy—as they prospered in the
world; for no reason, apparently, but lack of definite stimulation to a higher
life. There is firm ground for the opinion that human nature is prepared for
a higher organization than we have worked out.
Certainly there is, on the whole, a more lively and hopeful pursuit of the
brotherhood of man in modern democracy than there ever was, on a large

scale, before. One who is not deaf to the voices of literature, of social
agitation, of ordinary intercourse, can hardly doubt this. The social
settlement and similar movements express it, and so, more and more, does
the whole feeling of our society regarding richer and poorer. Philanthropy is
not only extending, but undergoing a revolution of principle from alms to
justice and from condescension to fellowship. The wealthy and the educated
classes feel, however vaguely, that they must justify their advantages to
their fellow men and their own consciences by making some public use of
them. Gifts—well meant if not always wise—to education, science and
philanthropy are increasing, and there was never, perhaps, a more prevalent
disposition to make unusual mental acquirements available toward general
culture.
Even the love of publicity and display, said to mark our rich people, has
its amiable side as indicating a desire to impress general opinion, rather
than that of an exclusive class. Indeed, if there is anywhere in American
society an exclusive and self-sufficient kind of people, they are not a kind
who have much influence upon the general spirit.
The same sentiment incites us, in our better moments, to shun habits,
modes of dress and the like that are not good in themselves and merely
accentuate class lines; to save on private and material objects so as to have
the more energy to be humanly, spiritually, alive. This, for example, is the
teaching of Thoreau, whose works, especially his Walden, have latterly a
wide circulation. If Thoreau seems a little too aloof and fastidious to
represent democracy, this is not the case with Whitman, who had joy in the
press of cities, and whose passion was to “utter the word Democratic, the
word En Masse.”[100] His chants express a great gusto in common life: “All
this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine; I am the man, I
suffered, I was there.”[101] “Whoever degrades another degrades me.”[102]
“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of
on the same terms.”[103] “I believe the main purport of these states is to
found a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown.”[104]
On the whole, Americans may surely claim that there was never before a
great nation in which the people felt so much like a family, had so kindly
and cheerful a sense of a common life. It is not only that the sentiment has a
wider range; there is also more faith in its future, more belief that

government and other institutions can be made to express it. And the
popular agitation of all countries manifests the same belief—socialism, and
even anarchism, as well as the labor movement and the struggle against
monopoly and corruption.
A larger spirit of service is the active side of democratic feeling. A life of
service of some sort—in behalf of the clan or tribe, of the chief, of the
sovereign, of the mistress, of the Church, of God—has always been the
ideal life, since no imaginative and truly human mind contents itself with a
separate good: what is new is that the object of this service tends to become
wider, with the modern expansion of the imagination, and to include all
classes, all nations and races, in its ideal scope. The narrower boundaries do
not disappear, but as they become less distinct the greater whole becomes
more so. As the child grows until he can see over the hedges bounding his
early playground, so the democratized individual has outgrown the limits of
the clan or the caste.
In the United States, at least, the feeling that everybody ought to be doing
something useful is so established that there is no influential class within
which idleness is respectable. Whatever narrowness there may be in this
spirit, in the way of undervaluing activities whose usefulness is of an
inobvious sort, it is sound on the whole and does incalculable service in
redeeming riches from vulgarity and corruption. If it be true, as is asserted,
that the children of the wealthy, with us, are on the whole less given to sloth
and vice than the same class in older countries, the reason is to be found in
a healthier, more organic state of public opinion which penetrates all classes
with the perception that the significance of the individual lies in his service
to the whole. That this sentiment is gaining in our colleges is evident to
those who know anything of these institutions. Studies that throw light on
the nature and working of society, past or present, and upon the
opportunities of service or distinction which it offers to the individual, are
rapidly taking the place, for purposes of culture, of studies whose human
value is less, or not so apparent. Classes in history—political, industrial and
social—in economics, in government and administration, in sociology and
ethics, in charities and penology, are larger year by year. And the young
people, chiefly from the well-to-do classes, who seek these studies, are one
and all adherents of the democratic idea that privilege must be earned by
function.

The tendency of manners well expresses that of sentiment, and seems to
be toward a spontaneous courtesy, expressing truth and equality as against
the concealment and, sometimes, the arrogance, of mere polish. The best
practice appears to be to put yourself, on approaching another, into as open
and kindly a frame of mind toward him as you can, but not to try to express
more than you feel, preferring coldness to affected warmth. Democracy is
too busy and too fond of truth and human nature to like formality, except as
an occasional amusement. A merely formal politeness goes with a
crystallized society, indicating a certain distrust of human nature and desire
to cloak or supplant it by propriety. Thus a Chinese teacher, having a rare
opportunity to send a message to his old mother, called one of his pupils
saying, “Here, take this paper and write me a letter to my mother.” This
proceeding struck the observer as singular, and he enquired if the lad was
acquainted with the teacher’s mother, learning that the boy did not even
know there was such a person. “How, then, was he to know what to say, not
having been told?” To this the schoolmaster made reply: “Doesn’t he know
quite well what to say? For more than a year he has been studying literary
composition, and he is acquainted with a number of elegant formulas. Do
you think he does not know perfectly well how a son ought to write to a
mother?” The letter would have answered equally well for any other mother
in the Empire.[105] Here is one extreme, and the kindly frontiersman with
“no manners at all” is at the other.
No doubt form, in manners as well as elsewhere, is capable of a beauty
and refinement of its own, and probably raw democracy goes to an anarchic
excess in depreciating it; but the sentiment of reality which demands that
form and content should agree, is perhaps a permanent factor in the best
manners.
Conflict, of some sort, is the life of society, and progress emerges from a
struggle in which each individual, class or institution seeks to realize its
own idea of good. The intensity of this struggle varies directly as the vigor
of the people, and its cessation, if conceivable, would be death. There is,
then, no prospect of an amiable unanimity, and the question arises, What
change, if any, in the nature of opposition and of hostility, accompanies the
alleged growth of the sense of brotherhood?
The answer to this is probably best sought by asking ourselves what is
the difference between the opposition of friends and that of enemies.

Evidently the former may be as energetic as the latter, but it is less personal:
that is, it is not directed against the opponent as a whole, but against certain
views or purposes which the opponent—toward whom a kindly feeling is
still cherished—for the time being represents. The opposition of enemies,
on the other hand, involves a personal antagonism and is gratified by a
personal injury.
Well-conducted sports are a lesson to every one that fair and orderly
opposition may even promote good fellowship; and familiarity with them,
in primary groups, is an excellent preparation for the friendly competition
that ought to prevail in society at large. Indeed it is only through opposition
that we learn to understand one another. In the moment of struggle the
opposing agent may arouse anger, but afterward the mind, more at ease,
views with respect and interest that which has exhibited so much force. It
seems evident, for instance, that the self-assertion of the wage-earning
class, so far as it is orderly and pursuant of ideals which all classes share,
has commanded not only the respect but the good will of the people at
large. Weakness—intrinsic weakness, the failure of the member to assert its
function—is instinctively despised. I am so far in sympathy with the
struggle for existence as to think that passive kindliness alone, apart from
self-assertion, is a demoralizing ideal, or would be if it were likely to
become ascendant. But the self which is asserted, the ideal fought for, must
be a generous one—involving perhaps self-sacrifice as that is ordinarily
understood—or the struggle is degrading.
The wider contact which marks modern life, the suppling of the
imagination which enables it to appreciate diverse phases of human nature,
the more instructed sense of justice, brings in a larger good will which
economizes personal hostility without necessarily diminishing opposition.
In primitive life the reaction of man against man is crude, impulsive,
wasteful. Violent anger is felt against the opponent as a whole and
expressed by a general assault. Civilized man, trained to be more
discriminating, strikes at tendencies rather than persons, and avoids so far
as possible hostile emotion, which he finds painful and exhausting. As an
opponent he is at once kinder and more formidable than the savage.
Perhaps the most urgent need of the present time, so far as regards the
assuaging of antipathy, is some clearer consciousness of what may be
called, in the widest sense, the rules of the game; that is, for accepted ideals

of justice which conscience and public opinion may impose upon
reasonable men, and law upon the unreasonable. In the lack of clear notions
of right and duty the orderly test of strength degenerates into a scuffle, in
which the worst passions are released and low forms of power tend to
prevail—just as brutal and tricky methods prevail in ill-regulated sports. We
need a popular ethics which is at once Christian and evolutionary,
recognizing unity of spirit alongside of diversity of standpoint; a
coöperative competition, giving each individual, group or race a fair chance
for higher self-assertion under conditions so just as to give the least possible
occasion for ill-feeling. Something of this sort is in fact the ideal in
accordance with which modern democracy hopes to reconstruct a somewhat
disordered world.
There is a French maxim, much quoted of late, to the effect that to
understand all is to pardon all: all animosity, as some interpret this, is a
mistake; when we fully understand we cease to blame. This, however, is
only a half-truth, and becomes a harmful fallacy when it is made to stand
for the whole. It is true that if we wholly lose ourselves in another’s state of
mind blame must disappear: perhaps nothing is felt as wrong by him who
does it at the very instant it is done. But this is more than we have a right to
do: it involves that we renounce our moral individuality, the highest part of
our being, and become a mere intelligence. The fact that every choice is
natural to the mind that chooses does not make it right.
The truth is that we must distinguish, in such questions as this, two
attitudes of mind, the active and the contemplative, both natural and having
important functions, but neither by itself sufficient. Pure contemplation sees
things and their relations as a picture and with no sense of better or worse; it
does not care; it is the ideal of science and speculative philosophy. If one
could be completely in this state of mind he would cease to be a self
altogether. All active personality, and especially all sense of right and
wrong, of duty, responsibility, blame, praise and the like, depend upon the
mind taking sides and having particular desires and purposes.
The unhappiness of bad men, maintained by Socrates, depends upon their
badness being brought home to them in conscience. If, because of their
insensibility or lack of proper reproof, the error of their way is not
impressed upon them, they have no motive to reform. The fact that the evil-
doer has become such gradually, and does not realize the evil in him, is no

reason why we should not blame him; it is the function of blame to make
him and others realize it, to define evil and declare it in the sight of men.
We may pardon the evil-doer when he is dead, or has sincerely and openly
repented, not while he remains a force for wrong.
It seems that the right way lies between the old vindictiveness and the
view now somewhat prevalent that crime should be regarded without
resentment, quite like a disease of the flesh. The resentment of society, if
just and moderate, is a moral force, and definite forms of punishment are
required to impress it upon the general mind. If crime is a disease it is a
moral disease and calls for moral remedies, among which is effective
resentment. It is right that one who harms the state should go to prison in
the sight of all; but it is right also that all should understand that this is done
for the defence of society, and not because the offender is imagined to be
another kind of man from the rest of us.
The democratic movement, insomuch as it feels a common spirit in all
men, is of the same nature as Christianity; and it is said with truth that while
the world was never so careless as now of the mechanism of religion, it was
never so Christian in feeling. A deeper sense of a common life, both as
incarnated in the men about us and as inferred in some larger whole behind
and above them—in God—belongs to the higher spirit of democracy as it
does to the teaching of Jesus.
He calls the mind out of the narrow and transient self of sensual appetites
and visible appurtenances, which all of us in our awakened moments feel to
be inferior, and fills it with the incorrupt good of higher sentiment. We are
to love men as brothers, to fix our attention upon the best that is in them,
and to make their good our own ambition.
Such ideals are perennial in the human heart and as sound in psychology
as in religion. The mind, in its best moments, is naturally Christian; because
when we are most fully alive to the life about us the sympathetic becomes
the rational; what is good for you is good for me because I share your life;
and I need no urging to do by you as I would have you do by me. Justice
and kindness are matters of course, and also humility, which comes from
being aware of something superior to your ordinary self. To one in whom
human nature is fully awake “Love your enemies and do good to them that
despitefully use you” is natural and easy, because despiteful people are seen

to be in a state of unhappy aberration from the higher life of kindness, and
there is an impulse to help them to get back. The awakened mind identifies
itself with other persons, living the sympathetic life and following the
golden rule by impulse.
To put it otherwise, Christ and modern democracy alike represent a
protest against whatever is dead in institutions, and an attempt to bring life
closer to the higher impulses of human nature. There is a common
aspiration to effectuate homely ideals of justice and kindness. The modern
democrat is a plain man and Jesus was another. It is no wonder, then, that
the characteristic thought of the day is preponderantly Christian, in the
sense of sharing the ideals of Christ, and that in so far as it distrusts the
Church it is on the ground that the Church is not Christian enough.
But how far, after all, is this brotherly and peaceful sentiment, ancient or
modern, applicable to life as we know it? Is it feasible, is it really right, is it
not a sentiment of submission in a world that grows by strife? After what
has already been said on this, it is perhaps enough to add here that neither in
the life of Christ nor in modern democracy do we find sanction for
submission to essential, moral wrong. Christ brought a sword which the
good man of our day can by no means sheathe: his counsels of submission
seem to refer to merely personal injuries, which it may be better to overlook
in order to keep the conflict on a higher plane. If we mean by Christianity
an understanding and brotherly spirit toward all men and a reverence for the
higher Life behind them, expressed in an infinite variety of conduct
according to conditions, it would seem to be always right, and always
feasible, so far as we have strength to rise to it.
The most notable reaction of democracy upon religious sentiment is no
doubt a tendency to secularize it, to fix it upon human life rather than upon
a vague other world. So soon as men come to feel that society is not a
machine, controlled chiefly by the powers of darkness, but an expression of
human nature, capable of reflecting whatever good human nature can rise
to; so soon, that is, as there comes to be a public will, the religious spirit is
drawn into social idealism. Why dream of a world to come when there is
hopeful activity in this? God, it seems, is to be found in human life as well
as beyond it, and social service is a method of his worship. “If ye love not
your brother whom ye have seen, how can ye love God whom ye have not
seen?”

An ideal democracy is in its nature religious, and its true sovereign may
be said to be the higher nature, or God, which it aspires to incarnate in
human institutions.

FOOTNOTES:
[94] Page 55.
[95] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 275.
[96] Quoted in The Commons, October, 1903.
[97] Dante, Purgatorio, 15, 55-57. He is speaking of Paradise.
[98] Longfellow’s Translation.
[99] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 272.
[100] Leaves of Grass (1884), page 9.
[101] Idem, 59.
[102] Idem, 48.
[103] Idem, 48.
[104] Idem, 110.
[105] Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 181.

PART IV
SOCIAL CLASSES

CHAPTER XVIII
THE HEREDITARY OR CASTE PRINCIPLE

Nature and Use of Classes—Inheritance and Competition the Two
Principles upon which Classes are Based—Conditions in Human
Nature Making for Hereditary Classes—Caste Spirit.
Speaking roughly, we may call any persistent social group, other than the
family, existing within a larger group, a class. And every society, except
possibly the most primitive, is more or less distinctly composed of classes.
Even in savage tribes there are, besides families and clans, almost always
other associations: of warriors, of magicians and so on; and these continue
throughout all phases of development until we reach the intricate group
structure of our own time. Individuals never achieve their life in separation,
but always in coöperation with a group of other minds, and in proportion as
these coöperating groups stand out from one another with some distinctness
they constitute social classes.
We may say of this differentiation, speaking generally, that it is useful.
The various functions of life require special influences and organization,
and without some class spirit, some speciality in traditions and standards,
nothing is well performed. Thus, if our physicians were not, as regards their
professional activities, something of a psychological unit, building up
knowledge and sentiment by communication, desiring the approval and
dreading the censure of their colleagues, it would be worse not only for
them but for the rest of us. There are no doubt class divisions that are
useless or harmful, but something of this nature there should be, and I have
already tried to show that our own society suffers considerably from a lack
of adequate group differentiation in its higher mental activities.
Fundamental to all study of classes are the two principles, of inheritance
and of competition, according to which their membership is determined.
The rule of descent, as in the hereditary nobility of England or Germany,
gives a fixed system, the alternative to which is some kind of selection—by
election or appointment as in our politics; by purchase, as formerly in the

British army and navy; or by the informal action of preference, opportunity
and endeavor, as in the case of most trades and professions at the present
day.
Evidently these two principles are very much intermingled in their
working. The hereditary distinctions must have a beginning in some sort of
selective struggle, such as the military and commercial competition from
which privileged families have emerged in the past, and never become so
rigid as not to be modified by similar processes. On the other hand,
inherited advantages, even in the freest society, enter powerfully into every
kind of competition.
Another consideration of much interest is that the strict rule of descent is
a biological principle, making the social organization subordinate to
physical continuity of life, while selection or competition brings in
psychical elements, of the most various qualities to be sure, but capable at
the best of forming society on a truly rational method.
Finally it is well to recognize that there is a vast sum of influences
governed by no ascertainable principle at all, which go to assign the
individual his place in the class system. After allowing for inheritance and
for everything which can fairly be called selection (that is, for all definite
and orderly interaction between the man and the system), there remains a
large part which can be assigned only to chance. This is particularly true in
the somewhat tumultuous changes of modern life.
When a class is somewhat strictly hereditary, we may call it a caste—a
name originally applied to the hereditary classes of India, but to which it is
common, and certainly convenient, to give a wider meaning.
Perhaps the best way to understand caste is to open our eyes and note
those forces at work among ourselves which might conceivably give rise to
it.
On every side we may see that differences arise, and that these tend to be
perpetuated through inherited associations, opportunities and culture. The
endeavor to secure for one’s children whatever desirable thing one has
gained for oneself is a perennial source of caste, and this endeavor flows
from human nature and the moral unity of the family. If a man has been
able to save money, he anxiously invests it to yield an income after his

death; if he has built up a business, it is his hope that his children may
succeed him in it; if he has a good handicraft, he wishes his boys to learn it.
And so with less tangible goods—education, culture, religious and moral
ideas—there is no good parent but desires his children to have more than
the common inheritance of what is best in these things. It is, perhaps, safe to
say that if the good of his children could be set on one side and the good of
all the rest of the world over against it on the other, the average parent
would desire that evil might befall the latter rather than the former. And
much of the wider social spirit of recent times comes from the belief that
we cannot make this separation, and that to secure the real good of our
children we must work for the common advancement.
That this endeavor to secure a succession in desirable function is not
confined to the rich we may see, for instance, in the fact that labor unions
often have regulations tending to secure to the children of members a
complete or partial monopoly of the opportunities of apprenticeship. In
Chicago, not long since, only the son of a plumber could learn the
plumber’s trade.
As being the actual possessor of the advantages in question, the parent is
usually in a position either to hand them over directly to his children, or to
make their acquisition comparatively easy. Wealth, the most obvious and
tangible source of caste, is transmissible, even in the freest societies, under
the sanction and protection of law. And wealth is convertible not only into
material goods but, if the holder has a little tact and sense, into other and
finer advantages—educational opportunities, business and professional
openings, travel and intercourse with people of refinement and culture.
Against this we must, of course, offset the diminished motive to exertion,
the lack of rough-and-tumble experience, and other disadvantages which
inherited wealth, especially if large, is apt to bring with it; but that it does,
as a rule, perpetuate the more conventional sorts of superiority is
undeniable.
And such intangible advantages as culture, manners, good associations
and the like, whether associated with wealth or not, are practically heritable,
since they are chiefly derived by children from a social environment
determined by the personality and standing of their parents.

Indeed, irrespective of any intention toward or from inheritance, there is
a strong drift toward it due to mere familiarity. It is commonly the line of
least resistance. The father knows much about his own trade and those
closely related to it, little about others; and the son shares his point of view.
So when the latter comes to fix upon a career he is likely, in the absence of
any decided individuality of preference, to take the way that lies most open
to him. Of course he may lack the ability to carry the paternal function; but
this, though common enough, does not affect the majority of cases. The
functions that require a peculiar type of natural ability, while of the first
importance, since they include all marked originality, are not very
numerous, sound character and training, with fair intelligence, being
ordinarily sufficient. Even in the learned professions, such as law, medicine,
teaching and the ministry, the great majority of practitioners hold their own
by common sense and assiduity rather than by special aptitude. To the best
of my observation, there are many men serving as foremen in various sorts
of handicraft, or as farmers, who have natural capacity adequate for success
in law, commerce or politics. A man of good, all-round ability will succeed
in that line of work which he finds ready to his hand, but only a few will
break away from their antecedents and seek a wholly different line. And if
their work affords them health, thought and mastery, why should they wish
to change it if they could?
I would not have it supposed, however (because I dwell thus upon
opportunity), that I agree with those whose zeal for education and training
leads them to depreciate natural differences. I do not know how to talk with
men who believe in native equality: it seems to me that they lack common
sense and observation. How can they fail to see that children in the same
family, even twins, as Mr. Galton has shown,[106] are often widely divergent
in ability, one destined to leadership and another to obscurity?
The two variables of personality, “nature and nurture,” are without doubt
of equal diversity and importance, and they must work together to bring
about any notable achievement. Natural ability is essential; but, no matter
how great, it cannot know or develop its power without opportunity. Indeed,
great natural faculty is often more dependent on circumstance than is
mediocrity—because of some trait, like extreme sensitiveness, that unfits it
for miscellaneous competition. Opportunity, moreover, means different
things in different cases, and is not to be identified with wealth or facile

circumstances of any sort. Some degrees and kinds of difficulty are helpful,
others not.
And yet, leaving out, on the one hand, unusual talent or energy, and, on
the other, decided weakness or dulness, the mass of men are guided chiefly
by early surroundings and training, which determine for them, in a general
way, what sort of life they will take up, and contribute much to their success
or failure in it. Society, even in a comparatively free country, is thus
vaguely divided into hereditary strata or sections, from which the majority
do not depart.
If the transmission of function from father to son has become established,
a caste spirit, a sentiment in favor of such transmission and opposed to the
passage from one class into another, may arise and be shared even by the
unprivileged classes. The individual then thinks of himself and his family as
identified with his caste, and sympathizes with others who have the same
feeling. The caste thus becomes a psychical organism, consolidated by
community of sentiment and tradition. In some measure the ruling class in
England, for example, has hung together in this way, and the same is partly
true of the lower orders. No doubt there is generally some protest against a
hereditary system on the part of restless members of the lower castes—
certainly this was always the case in Europe—but it may be practically
insignificant.
And out of caste sentiment arise institutions, social, political and
economic—like the mediæval system in Europe, much of which still
survives—whose tendency is to define and perpetuate hereditary
distinctions.
I have, perhaps, said enough to make it clear that an impulse toward caste
is found in human nature itself. Whether it spreads through and dominates
the system of life, as in India, or remains subordinate, as with us, depends
upon the strength or weakness of other impulses which limit its operation.
As certain types of vegetation, like the ferns, which at one time were
dominant in the forests, are now overshadowed by plants of higher
organization, so caste, which we must, on the whole, reckon to be an
inferior principle, tends to be supplanted by something freer and more
rational.

FOOTNOTES:
[106] See the memoir on the subject in his Inquiries into Human Faculty.

CHAPTER XIX
CONDITIONS FAVORING OR OPPOSING THE GROWTH OF

CASTE

Three Conditions Affecting the Increase or Diminution of Caste—Race
Caste—Immigration and Conquest—Gradual Differentiation of
Functions; Mediæval Caste; India—Influence of Settled Conditions
—Influence of the State of Communication and Enlightenment—
Conclusion.
There seem to be three conditions which, chiefly, make for the increase
or diminution of the caste principle. These are, first, likeness or unlikeness
in the constituents of the population; second, the rate of social change
(whether we have to do with a settled or a shifting system), and, finally, the
state of communication and enlightenment. Unlikeness in the constituents, a
settled system and a low state of communication and enlightenment favor
the growth of caste, and vice versa. The first provides natural lines of
cleavage and so makes it easier to split into hereditary groups; the second
gives inheritance time to consolidate its power, while the third means the
absence of those conscious and rational forces which are its chief rivals.
The most important sorts of unlikeness in the constituents of the
population are perhaps three: differences in race; differences, apart from
race, due to immigration or conquest, and unlikeness due to the gradual
differentiation of social functions within a population originally
homogeneous.
Two races of different temperament and capacity, distinct to the eye and
living side by side in the same community, tend strongly to become castes,
no matter how equal the social system may otherwise be. The difference, as
being hereditary, answers in its nature to the idea of caste, and the external
sign serves to make it conscious and definite.

The race caste existing in the Southern United States illustrates the
impotence of democratic traditions to overcome the caste spirit when
fostered by obvious physical and psychical differences. This spirit is
immeasurably strong on the part of the whites, and there is no apparent
prospect of its diminution.
The specially caste nature of the division—as distinguished from those
personal differences which democratic tradition recognizes—is seen in the
feeling, universal among the whites, that the Negro must be held apart and
subordinate not merely as an individual, or any number of individuals, but
as a race, a social whole. That is, the fact that many individuals of this race
are equal, and some superior, to the majority of whites does not, in the
opinion of the latter, make it just or expedient to treat them apart from the
mass of their race. To dine with a Negro, to work or play by his side, or to
associate in any relation where superiority cannot be asserted, is held to be
degrading and of evil example, no matter what kind of Negro he may be. It
is the practice and policy of the dominant race to impress upon the Negro
that he belongs by birth to a distinct order out of which he can in no way
depart. There or nowhere he must find his destiny. If he wishes to mingle
with whites it must be as an acknowledged inferior. As a servant he may
ride in the same railway car, but as a citizen he may not do so.
Thoughtful whites justify this attitude on the ground, substantially, that a
race is an organic whole—bound together by heredity and social connection
—and that it is practically necessary to recognize this in dealing with race
questions. The integrity of the white race and of white civilization, they say,
requires Negro subordination (separation being impracticable), and the only
available line of distinction is the definite one of color. A division on this
line is even held to be less invidious—as involving no judgment of
individuals—as well as more feasible, than one based on personal traits.
Particular persons cannot, in practice, be separated from their families and
other antecedents, and if they could be the example of mixture on an equal
footing would be demoralizing.
This argument is probably sound in so far as it requires the recognition of
the two races as being, for some purposes, distinct organisms. In this regard
it is perhaps better sociology than the view that every one should be
considered solely on his merits as an individual.

At the same time it is only too apparent that our application of this
doctrine is deeply colored with that caste arrogance which does not
recognize in the Negro a spiritual brotherhood underlying all race difference
and possible “inferiority.” The matter of unequal ability, in races as in
individuals, is quite distinct from that sharing in a common spirit and
service from which no human being can rightly or Christianly be excluded.
The idea that he is fundamentally a man like the rest of us cannot and
should not be kept from the Negro any more than from other lowly orders
of people. Science, religion and the democratic spirit all give him a right to
it; and the white man cannot deny it to him without being false to his own
best self. Anything in our present attitude which does deny it we must hope
to be transitory, since it is calculated, in a modern atmosphere, to generate
continuing disquiet and hatred. It belonged with slavery and is incongruous
with the newer world.
These may be subtleties, but subtlety is the very substance of the race
question, the most vital matter being not so much what is done as the spirit
in which it is done.
The practical question here is not that of abolishing castes but of securing
just and kindly relations between them, of reconciling the fact of caste with
ideals of freedom and right. This is difficult but not evidently impossible,
and a right spirit, together with a government firmly repressive of the lower
passions of both races, should go far to achieve it. There seems to be no
reason in the nature of things why divergent races, like divergent
individuals, should not unite in a common service of the ideals to which all
human nature bears allegiance—I mean ideals of kindness, fair play and so
on. And the white man, in claiming superiority, assumes the chief
responsibility for bringing this state of things to pass.
When peoples of the same race mingle by migration, the effect, as
regards classes, depends chiefly on their states of civilization and the
character of the migration, as hostile or friendly. The peaceful advent of
kindred settlers, like the English immigrants to the United States, creates no
class divisions. If they differ in language and customs, like the Germans, or
are extremely poor and ignorant, like many of the Irish, they are held apart
for a time and looked down upon, but as they establish themselves and
gradually prove their substantial equality with the natives, they may become
indistinguishable from the latter. Of recent years, however, the arrival by

millions of peoples somewhat more divergent—especially Italians, Slavs
and Jews—has introduced distinctions in which race as well as culture plays
an appreciable part.
Much depends, of course, upon the special character of the institutions
and traditions that thus come into contact. Some societies are rigid and
repellent in their structure, while others, like the United States, are almost
ideally constituted to invite and hasten assimilation.
Conquest has been one of the main sources of caste the world over. The
hostile tradition it leaves may continue indefinitely; servile functions are
commonly forced upon the conquered, and the consciousness of superiority
leads the conquerors to regard intermarriage as shameful. A servile caste,
strictly hereditary, existed even among the primitive German tribes from
which most of us are descended, and intermarriage with freemen was
severely punished. “The Lombard,” says Mr. Gummere, “killed a serf who
ventured to marry a free woman, ... West Goths and Burgundians scourged
and burnt them both, while the Saxons punished an unequal marriage of any
sort with death of man and wife.”[107]
The unlikeness out of which caste grows may not be original, as in the
case of race difference or conquest, but may arise gradually by the
differentiation of a homogeneous people. Any distinct social group, having
its special group sympathies and traditions, has some tendency to pass on its
functions and ideas to the children of its members, promoting association
and intermarriage among them, and thus taking on a caste character.
Accordingly, any increase in the complexity of social functions—
political, religious, military or industrial—such as necessarily accompanies
the enlargement of a social system, may have a caste tendency, because it
separates the population into groups corresponding to the several functions;
and this alone may without doubt produce caste if the conditions are
otherwise favorable.
Something of this sort seems to have followed upon the conquest by the
Germanic tribes of Roman territory, and the consequent necessity of
administering a more complex system than their own. As the new order
took shape it showed a tendency toward more definite inheritance of rank
and function than existed in the tribal society. This was due partly, no doubt,
to the influence of Roman traditions, but the very nature of the civilization

required it. That is, functions became more diverse and of such a character
as to separate the citizens into distinct classes, the principal ones being
warriors of various degrees (combining military functions with the control
of land), clergy, artisans and peasants. The military and landholding class,
uniting the force of arms with that of wealth, naturally dominated the
others; the artisans, especially in the towns, maintained a free status which
served later as the nucleus of a democratic tendency; the peasants became
serfs. As the conditions did not permit organization on any free or open
principle—there being little facility of travel, diffusion of knowledge or
unfixed wealth—the hereditary principle naturally prevailed. Only the
clergy, monopolizing most of the knowledge and communication of the
time and fortified by celibacy against inheritance, maintained a
comparatively open organization. It is well known that lands, and the local
rule that went with them, held at first as a personal trust, gradually became
a family property, and we are told that when the Emperor Conrad, in 1037,
issued his edict making chiefs hereditary in Italy, he only did for the south
“by a single stroke what gradual custom and policy had slowly procured for
the north.”[108] Offices, armorial devices and other privileges generally
followed the same course, and the servile status of serfs was also
transmitted to children.
The feudal system was based on inheritance of function, and had two
well-defined castes, the knightly, consisting originally of those whose
ability to maintain a horse and equipment placed them in the rank of
effective warriors, and the servile. Between these marriage was impossible.
Intercourse of any kind was scanty and, on the part of the superior order,
contemptuous. “A boy of knightly birth was reared in ceremony. From his
earliest childhood he learnt to look upon himself and his equals as of a
different degree and almost of a different nature from his fellow creatures
who were not of gentle condition. Heraldic pride and the distinction of
degree were among his first impressions.”[109] Socially and psychologically
the mediæval nobility lived in their caste, not in the world at large. It was
the sphere of the social self; the knight looked to it and not to a general
public for sympathy and recognition: he was far closer in spirit to the
chivalry of hostile nations than to the commons of his own. But the plain
people were out of all this, and were regarded with a contempt at least as
great as that felt in our day for the Negro at the South. The whole institution

of chivalry, with its attendant ideas, ideals and literature, was a thing of
caste which recognized no common humanity in the lower orders of society,
and whatever it did for the world in the way of developing the knightly
ideal of valor, devotion and courtesy—an ideal later transformed into that of
the gentleman and now coming to pervade all classes—was a product of
caste spirit.
The feudal courts, large and small, the tournaments, festivals and military
expeditions, including the crusades, were facilities of communication
through which this caste, not only in single countries but throughout
Europe, was enabled to have a common thought and sentiment.
Without doubt, however, the lower caste had also its unity and
organization, its group traditions, customs and standards; mostly lost to us
because they never achieved a literary record. This was an inarticulate
caste; but it is probable that village communities were the spheres of a
vigorous coöperative life in which the best traits of human nature were
fostered.
In India also the elaborate caste systems, although due in part to
conquest, seem also to have come about by the hardening of occupation-
classes. The priests, powerful because of their supposed intercourse with
superhuman powers, taught their mystic traditions to their children and so
built up a hereditary corporation, known, finally, as the Brahman caste. The
military caste was apparently formed in a similar manner, while in industry
“veneration for parental example and the need of an exact transmission of
methods”[110] rendered all employments hereditary. In fact, says one writer,
the caste system was in its origin “simply an instinctive effort for the
organization of labor.”[111] In the case of so intricate a caste society as that
of India much may also be ascribed to the reaction of the theory upon the
system. When the idea that caste is natural had become prevalent and
sanctified, it tended to create caste where it would not otherwise have
existed.
A settled state of society is favorable, and change hostile, to the growth
of caste, because it is necessary that functions should be continuous through
several generations before the principle of inheritance can become fixed.
Whatever breaks up existing customs and traditions tends to abolish
hereditary privilege and throw men into a rough struggle, out of which

strong, coarse natures emerge as victors, to found, perhaps, a new
aristocracy. Thus the conquest of southern Europe by northern tribes led to
a period of somewhat confused readjustment, in which men of natural
power bettered their status. The classes which emerged were as much the
result of competition as derived by inheritance from those of tribal society.
And so the openness of classes in our own day may be due as much to
confusion as to a permanent decline in the caste principle.
That a low state of communication and of enlightenment are favorable to
caste, while intelligence—especially political intelligence—and facility of
intercourse antagonize it, becomes evident when we consider what,
psychologically speaking, caste is. It is an organization of the social mind
on a biological principle. That functions should follow the line of descent
instead of adjusting themselves to individual capacity and preference,
evidently means the subordination of reason to convenience, of freedom to
order. The ideal principle is not biological but moral, based, that is, on the
spiritual gifts of individuals without regard to descent. Caste, then, is
something which, we may assume, will give way to this higher principle
whenever the conditions are such as to permit the latter to work
successfully; and this will be the case when the population is so mobilized
by free training and institutions that just and orderly selection is practicable.
The diffusion of intelligence, rapid communication, the mobilization of
wealth by means of money, and the like, mark the ascendency of the human
mind over material and biological conditions. Popular government becomes
possible, commercial and industrial functions—other things equal—come
under more open competition, and free personal development of all sorts is
fostered. The general sentiment also, perceiving the superiority of free
organization to caste, becomes definitely hostile to the latter and
antagonizes it by public educational and other opportunities. The most
effective agent in keeping classes comparatively open is an adequate system
of free training for the young, tending to make all careers accessible to
those who are naturally fit for them. In so far as there is such a system early
education becomes a process of selection and discipline which permits
ability to serve its possessor and the world in its proper place. In our own
society—we may note in passing—this calls for a great development of
public education, especially in the way of trade schools and the like, and

also for an effective campaign against child-labor, bad housing and
whatever else shuts off opportunity.
But before this mobility is achieved, caste is perhaps the only possible
basis for an elaborate social structure; the main flow of thought is then
necessarily in local channels. The people cannot grasp the life of which they
are a part in any large way, or have a free and responsible share in it, but are
somewhat mechanically held in place by habit and tradition. Those special
relations to the system of government, religion or industry which are
implied in classes, since they cannot be determined by rational selection,
must be fixed in some traditional way, and the most available is the
inheritance of functions.
We may expect, then, that complex, stationary societies of low mental
organization will tend toward caste. That this is true, in a general way, is
shown by the prevalence of caste in Oriental nations to-day, and in the later
history of the great empires of antiquity. It goes without saying that each
society has its peculiarities which only special study could elucidate.

FOOTNOTES:
[107] Germanic Origins, 154.
[108] Tout, The Empire and The Papacy, 59.
[109] Cornish, Chivalry, 183.
[110] Samuel Johnson, Oriental Religions, India, 241.
[111] Ibid.

CHAPTER XX
THE OUTLOOK REGARDING CASTE

The Question—How Far the Inheritance Principle Actually Prevails—
Influences Favoring Its Growth—Those Antagonizing It—The
Principles of Inheritance and Equal Opportunity as Affecting Social
Efficiency—Conclusion.
A very pertinent question is that of the part which the hereditary or caste
principle is likely to play in the coming life; whether it is probable that
caste, other than that due to race, will arise in modern society; or that the
hereditary principle will, to any degree, have increased ascendency.
The answer should probably be that the principle is always powerful, and
may gain somewhat as conditions become more settled, but certainly can
never produce true caste in the modern world.
As regards the power, in general, of the inheritance tendency, I have
perhaps said enough already. The inheritance of property, notwithstanding
the perennial agitation of communism, is probably as secure as any
institution can be—because there is apparently nothing practicable to take
its place as a means to economic stability. And with inheritance of property
goes, in all prosperous countries, a class of people who come without effort
into wealth and all its advantages: their number and riches are certainly on
the rapid increase. The less formal inheritance of culture, opportunity and
position is equally real.
As to occupation, even now a census would perhaps show that the
majority of young men follow that of their father, or one cognate to it. Most
farmers’ sons probably remain farmers (in spite of the well-known drift to
the towns), most mechanics’ sons become mechanics, and a large
proportion of the children of professional men enter the professions. The
child of a well-to-do parent is given, as a matter of course, the education,
often long and expensive, which is required for entrance upon a profession,
and is coming to be necessary also for commerce. Not only this, but he is

made to feel from childhood that success in achieving a professional or
business position is expected of him; he must get it or lose the respect of his
family and friends. In the majority of cases—though the minority on the
other side is no small one—these opportunities and incitements, together
with the power to wait and choose which judicious paternal support gives
him, are effective in drawing out his energies and directing them
continuously upon the desired point. Certainly they will not make a good
lawyer or a captain of industry out of a fool, nor will the lack of them keep
decisive natural ability from exercising these functions; but with the
common run of men, having fair capacity not very definitely inclined in a
special direction, they are potent. Paternal suggestion and backing must be
used with great discretion and often fail entirely, but no man of the world,
so far as I know, regards them as unimportant.
If we ask whether the influence of inheritance is likely to increase or
diminish, we find, on studying the situation as a whole, a conflict of
tendencies the precise outcome of which can only be guessed at.
As favoring the growth of the principle and the crystallization of classes,
we have chiefly two considerations: the probability of more settled
conditions, and the influence of that sharper differentiation of functions
which modern life involves.
Social change, as already pointed out, is a main force in breaking up the
inheritance of function, and to this must largely be attributed the
comparative weakness of the principle in the United States. The changes
incident to the settlement of a new country, coinciding with those incident
to an economic revolution, have set everything afloat and brought in a
somewhat confused and disorderly sort of competition. Our cities,
especially, are aggregates of immigrants, most of whom have broken away
from early associations, and a large part of whom are performing functions
unheard of by their fathers. It is hardly possible that trades should become
hereditary when most of them endure less than one man’s lifetime. And
something of the same uncertainty runs through commerce and the
professions.
Without predicting any great decline in the pace of invention, we may yet
expect that the next fifty years will see a great deal of the consolidation that
comes with maturity. The population will be comparatively established, in

place at least, and the forces making for inheritance will have a chance to
work. An immense body of transmitted wealth will exist, and democratic
influences will have all they can do to keep it from generating an
aristocratic spirit. Industries, professions and trades can hardly fail to be
more stable than they have been, and the rural population, as always, will
be a stronghold of the forces that favor inheritance.
The sentiment of regard for ancestry, of which caste is the extreme
expression, is likely to increase in this and in all new countries. As
communities grow older the family line comes more and more under public
observation. It is seen, and displayed in memory, wherever any sort of
continuity is preserved, and, being seen, it is judged, and the individual
shares the credit or discredit of his kin. While this influence is now weak in
the United States, on the whole, and is almost absent in the recent and
confused life of our cities, it is gaining rapidly wherever—as is generally
the case in the East and Southeast outside of large towns—the conditions
are settled enough to make the family as a whole a matter of observation.
And there can be little doubt that it is increasing in the West wherever it has
a similar chance.
In some ways this greater recognition of descent is wholesome. A sense
of being part of a kindred, of bearing the honor of a continuing group as
well as of a perishing individual, tends to make one a better man; and from
this point of view our somewhat disintegrated society might well have more
of it.
As to the sharper differentiation that goes with modern life, we see it on
all hands. The city is more clearly marked off from the country, in its
functions, and is itself broken up into quarters the inhabitants of which have
often little or no intercourse with those of other quarters. Trades and
professions subdivide into specialties, and, a more elaborate training being
demanded, it is more necessary than formerly that a man should know from
the start what he wants to do and assiduously prepare himself to do it. Not
forgetting that there is another side to this, a side of unification implied in
these differences, one may yet say that in themselves they tend to separate
people more sharply into social groups which might conceivably become
hereditary.

The forces antagonizing inheritance of function come chiefly under two
heads, the opposition of ambitious young men and the general current of
democratic sentiment.
Caste means restriction of opportunity, and consequently lies across the
path of the most energetic part of the people. Its rule can prevail only where
individual self-assertion is restrained by ignorance and formal institutions.
Under our flexible modern conditions, it is safe to say, no system can
endure that does not make a point of propitiating the formidable ambition of
youth by at least an apparent freedom of opportunity. Even the inheritance
of property is constantly questioned in the minds of the young, and nothing
but the lack of a plausible alternative prevents its being more seriously
assailed. And since this stronghold of inequality can hardly be shaken, there
is all the more demand that it be offset by opening every other kind of
advantage, especially in the way of education and training, to whomsoever
may be fit to profit by it.
Somewhat vaguer but perhaps even more effective than the resistance of
young men is the opposition of the general current of sentiment to any
growth of inheritance at the expense of opportunity. To abolish extrinsic
inequalities and give each a chance to serve all in his own fit way, is
undoubtedly the democratic ideal. In politics this is expressed by doing
away with hereditary privilege and basing everything on popular suffrage;
in education it is seeking an expression quite as vital by striving to open to
every one the training to any function for which he may show fitness. But
the spirit of unity and brotherhood is far from satisfied with what has been
achieved in these directions, and aspires to bring home to every child that
fair access to the fruits of progress which, in spite of theoretical liberty, is
now widely lacking. It calls for social democracy, the real presence of
freedom and justice in every fibre of the social fabric. To this spirit any
increase of the privileges, already unavoidably great, which come by
inheritance, is evidently hateful.
In America at least this sentiment is not that of a struggling lower class
but of, practically, the whole community. With reference to so vital a part of
our traditional ideal there are no classes; all the people feel substantially
alike; and there is no public purpose for which wealth is so freely spent as
in the support of institutions whose purpose is to keep open the path of
opportunity from any condition of life to any other.

There is also, back of this sentiment, a belief that equal opportunity
makes for the general good, since that system of society will be most
efficient, other things equal, in which each individual is required to prove
that he has more fitness than others for his special function. Every one can
see, at times, the deteriorating effect of family influence—as upon business
establishments when a less competent son succeeds his father, or upon
military service, as in the British army at the outbreak of the Boer war.
On the other hand, the results of a confused competition may be worse
than those of order, even if the latter rests upon an artificial principle.
Thus it is said with some truth—and this is perhaps the most considerable
argument for caste in modern life—that a class having hereditary wealth
and position, like the English aristocracy, makes a permanent channel for
high traditions of culture and public service, and that it is well to preserve
such traditions even at the cost of a somewhat exclusive order to contain
and cherish them. De Tocqueville, himself imbued with the best traditions
of the old French aristocracy, held this view, and ascribed the lack of
intellectual distinction in the America of his day largely to the fact that there
was no class “in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with
hereditary fortune and leisure, and by which the labors of the intellect are
held in honor.”[112]
The answer, of course, is that there are other means than caste for
securing the continuity of special traditions, and, more particularly, that
voluntary associations are capable of supplanting inherited wealth as
channels of culture. In the various branches of science, for example, we
have vigorous and continuing groups, with plenty of esprit de corps, by
which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. If libraries, associations
and educational institutions can do this for one phase of culture, why not for
others?
It would be unfair, however, not to acknowledge that great services are
constantly rendered to society by persons whom inherited wealth enables to
devote themselves earlier and more independently to high aims than would
otherwise be possible. There is certainly something favorable to originality
in an inherited competence, without which one is more apt to be coerced
into seeking a kind of success already in vogue, and so having a market
value. And the movement to foster originality by endowments depending

upon merit rather than birth will be most difficult to make effectual, since
such endowments almost inevitably fall into the control of an institutional
sort of men who cannot be expected to subsidize heresy. Funds for this
purpose will probably aid only those sorts of originality already recognized,
and in a manner established; not the radical innovations from which
important movements usually start. It is hard to see how they can do much
outside of experimental science, in which there is a sort of conventional test
of originality.
On the whole, whatever is good in the principle of descent may be
appropriated by a democratic society without going back to formal rank or
exclusive opportunity. Freedom offers no bar to continuity of function in the
family, so long as efficiency is maintained, but merely requires this, like
everything else, to meet the test of service. There is no adequate reason why
a hereditary group, transmitting special culture and fitness, should not
continue their functions under a democratic system—as is actually the case
to a certain extent with the political families of England. They will do their
work all the better for not being too sure of their position. I see nothing but
good in the fact that a military career has become traditional in a number of
American families who have rendered distinguished service of this sort. The
more special family ambitions we have, of a noble kind, the better for the
country.
No sober observer will imagine that the opposing forces are to abolish
the power of inheritance; they merely set reasonable limits to its scope.
When the way of ambition is opened to the most energetic individuals, the
sharpest teeth of discontent are drawn, and the mass of men very willingly
avoid trouble to themselves and to society by keeping on in the paternal
road. The family is after all too natural and too convenient a channel of
social continuity not to play a great part in every phase of organization, and
there seems little reason to depart from the opinion of Comte that it must
ordinarily be the main influence in determining occupation.
I am inclined to expect that, owing to somewhat more settled conditions
of life, inheritance of function will be rather more common, and the
tendency to see the individual as one of a stock rather greater, in the future
than in the immediate past. On the other hand it is nearly certain that
educational opportunities will become more open and varied, making it

easier than now for special aptitude to find its place. These things are not
inconsistent, and both will make for order and contentment.
Also much more endeavor will be directed to the welfare of the less
privileged classes as classes—that is, of those who are content to remain in
the ancestral status instead of trying to get into one more favored.
Heretofore we have given too much thought, relatively, to the one man who
aims at distinction, and too little to the ninety and nine who do not.

FOOTNOTES:
[112] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 3.

CHAPTER XXI
OPEN CLASSES

The Nature of Open Classes—Whether Class-Consciousness is Desirable
—Fellowship and Coöperation Deficient in Our Society—Class
Organization in Relation to Freedom.
With the growth of freedom classes come to be more open, that is, more
based on individual traits and less upon descent. Competition comes
actively into play and more or less efficiently fulfils its function[113] of
assigning to each one an appropriate place in the whole. The theory of a
free order is that every one is born to serve mankind in a certain way, that
he finds out through a wise system of education and experiment what that
way is, and is trained to enter upon it. In following it he does the best
possible both for the service of society and his own happiness. So far as
classes exist they are merely groups for the furtherance of efficiency
through coöperation, and their membership is determined entirely by
natural fitness.
This ideal condition is never attained on a large scale. In practice the men
who find work exactly suited to them and at the same time acceptable to
society are at the best somewhat exceptional—though habit reconciles most
of us—and classes are never wholly open or wholly devoted to the general
good.
The problem of finding where men belong, of adapting personal gifts to a
complex system, is indeed one of extreme difficulty, and is in no way
solved by facile schemes of any sort. There are, fundamentally, only two
principles available to meet it, that of inheritance or caste and that of
competition. While the former is a low principle, the latter is also, in many
of its phases, objectionable, involving waste of energy and apt to degenerate
into anarchy. There are always difficulties on either hand, and the actual
organization of life is ever a compromise between the aspiration toward
freedom and the convenience of status.

We may assume, then, that in contemporary life we have to do with a
society in which the constitution of classes, so far as we have them, is partly
determined by inheritance and partly by a more or less open competition,
which is, again, more or less effective in placing men where they rightly
belong.
If classes are open and men make their way from one into another, it is
plain that they cannot be separate mental wholes as may be the case with
castes. The general state of things becomes one of facile intercourse, and
those who change class will not forget the ideas and associations of youth.
Non-hereditary classes may have plenty of solidarity and class spirit—
consider, for instance, the mediæval clergy—and their activity may also be
of a special and remote sort, like that of an astronomical society, but after
all there will be something democratic about them; they will share the
general spirit of the whole in which they are rooted. They mean only
specialization in consciousness, where caste means separation.
The question whether there is or ought to be “class-consciousness” in a
democratic society is a matter of definitions. If we mean a division of
feeling that goes deeper than the sense of national unity and separates the
people into alien sections, then there is no such thing in the United States on
any important scale (leaving aside the race question), and we may hope
there never will be. But if we mean that along with an underlying unity of
sentiment and ideals there are currents of thought and feeling somewhat
distinct and often antagonistic, the answer is that class-consciousness in this
sense exists and is more likely to increase than to diminish. A country of
newspapers, popular education and manhood suffrage has passed the stage
in which sentiments or interests can flow in separate channels; but there is
nothing to prevent the people forming self-assertive groups in reference to
economic and social questions, as they do in politics.
Class-consciousness along these lines will probably increase with
growing interest in the underlying controversies, but I do not anticipate that
this increase will prove the dreadful thing which some imagine. A “class-
war” would indeed be a calamity, but why expect it? I see no reason unless
it be a guilty conscience or an unbelief in moral forces. A certain sort of
agitators expect and desire a violent struggle, because they see privilege
defiant and violence seems to them the shortest way to get at it; and on the
other hand, there are many in the enjoyment of privilege who feel in their

hearts that they deserve nothing better than to have it taken away from
them: but these are naïve views that ignore the solidity of the present order,
which ensures that any change must be gradual and make its way by reason.
Orderly struggle is the time-honored method of adjusting controversies
among a free people, and why should we assume that it will degenerate into
anarchy and violence at just this point? Will not feeling be rather better than
worse when a vague sense of injustice has had a chance to try itself out in a
definite and positive self-assertion?
It is to be remembered, moreover, that in a society where groups interlace
as much as they do with us a conflict of class interests is, in great degree,
not a conflict of persons but rather one of ideas in a common social medium
—since many persons belong to more than one class. Only under conditions
of caste would a class war of the sort predicted by some theorists be likely
to come to pass. I am not sure that it would be more fantastic to expect a
literal war between Democrats and Republicans than between the parties—
hardly less united by common social and economic interests—of Labor and
Capital.
It seems equally mistaken to say, on the one hand, that all class-
consciousness is bad, or, on the other, that we ought above all things to gird
ourselves for the class-struggle. The just view apparently is that we should
have in this matter, as elsewhere, difference on a basis of unity. Class
loyalty in the pursuit of right ends is good; but like all such sentiments it
should be subordinate to a broad justice and kindness. If there is no class-
consciousness men become isolated, degraded and ineffective; if there is
too much, or the wrong kind, the group becomes separate and forgets the
whole. Let there be “diversities of gifts but the same spirit.”
The present state of things as regards fellowship and coöperation in
special groups is, on the whole, one of deficiency rather than excess. The
confusion or “individualism” that we see in literature, art, religion and
industry means a want of the right kind of class unity and spirit. There is a
lack of mutual aid and support not only among hand-workers, where it is
much needed, but also among scholars, artists, professional men, writers
and men of affairs. The ordinary business or professional man hardly feels
himself a member of any brotherhood larger than the family; with his wife
and children about him he stands in the midst of a somewhat cold and
jostling world, keeping his feet as best he can and seeking a mechanical

security in bank-account and life insurance—being less fortunate in this
regard, perhaps, than the trades-unionist, who has been forced by necessity
to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellows and give and take sacrifice
for the common good. And much the same is true of scholars and artists:
they are likely not to draw close enough together to keep one another warm
and foster the class ideals which lead the individual on to a particular kind
of efficiency: there is a lack of those snug nests of special tradition and
association in which more settled civilizations are rich.
Organization, of certain kinds, is no doubt more extensive and elaborate
than ever before, and organization, it may be said, involves the
interdependence, the unity, of parts. But will this be a conscious and moral
unity? In a high kind of organization it will; but rapid growth may give us a
system that is mechanical rather than, in the higher sense, social. When
organization quickly extends there is a tendency to lower its type, as a
rubber band becomes thinner the more you stretch it; the relations grow less
human, and so may degrade instead of elevating the individual’s relation to
his whole. In a measure this has taken place in our life. The vast structure of
industry and commerce remains, for the most part, unhumanized, and
whether it proves a real good or not depends upon our success or failure in
making it vital, conscious, moral. There is union on a low plane and
isolation on a higher. The progress of communication has supplied the
mechanical basis for a spiritual organization far beyond anything in the
past; but this remains unachieved. On the whole, in the words of Miss Jane
Addams, with whom this is a cherished idea, “The situation demands the
consciousness of participation and well-being which comes to the
individual when he is able to see himself ‘in connection and coöperation
with the whole’; it needs the solace of collective art inherent in collective
labor.”[114]
It is indeed probable that the growth of class fellowship will help to
foster that spirit of art in work which we so notably lack, and the repose and
content which this brings. There is truth in the view that a confused and
standardless competition destroys art, which requires not only a group ideal
but a certain deliberation, a chance to brood over things and work
perfection into them. When the workman is more sure of his position, when
he feels his fellows at his shoulder and knows that the quality of his work
will be appreciated, he will have more courage and patience to be an artist.

We all draw our impulse toward perfection not from vulgar opinion or from
our pay, but from the approval of fellow craftsmen. The truth, little seen in
our day, is that all work should be done in the spirit of art, and that no
society is humanly organized in which this is not chiefly the case.
It is also true that closer fellowship—dominated by good ideals—should
bring the sympathetic and moral motives to diligence and efficiency into
more general action, and relegate the ‘work or starve’ motive more to the
background. Some of us love our work and are eager to do it well; others
have to be driven. Is this because the former are naturally a superior sort of
people, because the work itself is essentially more inviting, or because the
social conditions are such that sympathy and fellowship are more enlisted
with it? Allowing something for the first two, I suspect the third is the
principal reason. What work is there that would not be pleasant in moderate
quantities, in good fellowship, and in the feeling of service? No great
proportion, I imagine, of our task. Washing dishes is not thought desirable,
and yet men do it joyfully when they go camping together.
Class organization is not, as some people assert, necessarily hostile to
freedom. All organization is, properly, a means through which freedom is
sought. As conditions change, men are compelled to find new forms of
union through which to express themselves, and the rise of industrial
classes is of this nature.
In fact, the question of freedom, as applied to class conditions, has two
somewhat distinct aspects. These are:
1. Freedom to rise from one class into another, freedom of individual
opportunity, or carrière ouverte aux talents. This is chiefly for the man of
exceptional capacity and ambition. It is important, but not more so than the
other, namely:
2. Freedom of classes, or, what is the same thing, of those individuals
who have not the wish or power to depart from the sphere of life in which
circumstance has placed them. It means justice, opportunity, humane living,
for the less privileged groups as groups; not opportunity to get out of them
but to be something in them; a chance for the teamster to have comfort,
culture and good surroundings for himself and his family without ceasing to
be a teamster.

The first of these has been much better understood in America than the
second. That it is wrong to keep a man down who might rise is quite
familiar, but that those who cannot rise, or do not care to, have also just
claims is almost a novel idea, though they are evidently that majority for
whom our institutions are supposed to exist. Owing to a too exclusive
preoccupation with ideals of enterprise and ambition, a certain neglect, and
even reproach, have rested upon those who do quietly the plain work of life.
Ours, if you think of it, is rather too much success on the tontine plan,
where one puts all he has into a pool in the hope of being one of a few
survivors to get what the rest lose; it would be better to take to heart that
idea of Emerson’s that each may succeed in his own way, without putting
others down. It is a great thing that every American boy may aspire to be
president of the United States, or of the Standard Oil Company, but it is
equally important that he should have a chance for full and wholesome life
in the more probable condition of clerk or mill hand. While we must admire
the heroes of Samuel Smiles, we may remember that they do and should
constitute only a small minority of the human race.
And the main guaranty for freedom of this latter sort is some kind of
class organization which shall resist the encroachment and neglect of which
the weaker parties in society are in constant danger. Those who have
wealth, position, knowledge, leisure, may perhaps dispense with formal
organization (though in fact it is those who are strong already who most
readily extend their strength in this way), but the multitudes who have
nothing but their human nature to go upon must evidently stand together or
go to the wall.

FOOTNOTES:
[113] I make frequent use of this word to mean an activity which furthers
some general interest of the social group. It differs from “purpose” in not
necessarily implying intention.
[114] Democracy and Social Ethics, 219.

CHAPTER XXII
HOW FAR WEALTH IS THE BASIS OF OPEN CLASSES

Impersonal Character of Open Classes—Various Classifications—
Classes, as Commonly Understood, Based on Obvious Distinctions—
Wealth as Generalized Power—Economic Betterment as an Ideal of
the Ill-Paid Classes—Conclusion.

Where classes do not mean separate currents of thought, as in the case of
caste, but are merely differentiations in a common mental whole, there are
likely to be several kinds of classes overlapping one another, so that men
who fall in the same class from one point of view are separated in another.
The groups are like circles which, instead of standing apart, interlace with
one another so that several of them may pass through the same individual.
Classes become numerous and, so to speak, impersonal; that is, each one
absorbs only a part of the life of the individual and does not sufficiently
dominate him to mould him to a special type. This is one of the things that
distinguish our American order from that, say, of Germany, where caste is
still so dominant as to carry many other differences with it and create
unmistakable types of men. As a newspaper writer puts it, “The one thing
we may be sure of every day is that not a man whom we shall meet in it will
belong to his type. The purse-proud aristocrat turns out to be a humble-
minded young fellow anxiously envious of our knowledge of golf; the
comic actor in private life is dull and shy, and reddens to the tips of his ears
when he speaks; the murderer taken out of the dock in a quiet hob-and-nob
turns out to be a likable young chap who reminds you of your cousin Bob.”
And this independence of particular classes should give one the more
opportunity to achieve a truly personal individuality by combining a variety
of class affiliations, each one suited to a particular phase of his character.
It is, then, easy to see why different classifiers discover different class
divisions in our society, according to their points of view; namely, because
there are in fact an indefinite number of possible collocations. This would

not have been the case anywhere in the Middle Ages, nor is it nearly as
much the case in England at the present time as in the United States.
We might, to take three of the most conspicuous lines of division, classify
the people about us according to trade or profession, according to income,
and according to culture. The first gives us lawyers, grocers, plumbers,
bankers and the like, and also, more generally, the hand-laboring class,
skilled and unskilled, the mercantile class, the professional class and the
farming class. The division by income is, of course, related to this, though
by no means identical. We might reckon paupers, the poor, the comfortable,
the well-to-do and the rich. Culture and refinement have with us no very
close or essential connection with occupation or wealth, and a classification
based upon the former would show a very general rearrangement. There are
many scholars and philosophers among us who, like Thoreau, follow
humble trades and live upon the income of day labor.
And virtue, the most important distinction of all, is independent alike of
wealth, calling and culture. The real upper class, that which is doing the
most for the onward movement of human life, is not to be discerned by any
visible sign. The more inward or spiritual a trait is, the less it is dependent
upon what are ordinarily understood as class distinctions.
It is, however, upon the grosser and more obvious differences of wealth
and rank, and not upon intellectual or moral traits, that classes, in the
ordinary meaning of the word, are based. The reasons for this are, first, that
something obvious and unquestionable is requisite as a symbol and
unfailing mark of class, and, second, that the tangible distinctions alone are
usual matters of controversy. Culture and character have more intrinsic
importance, but are too uncertain to mark a class, and even if they were
stamped upon the forehead they are not matter to quarrel over like wealth or
titles; since those who have them not cannot hope to get them by depriving
those who have.
Income, for instance, classifies people through creating different
standards of living, those who fall into the same class in this respect being
likely to adopt about the same external mode of life. It usually decides
whether men live in one quarter of the city or another, what sort of houses
or apartments they inhabit, how they dress, whether the wife “does all her
own work” or employs household help (and, if the latter, how much and of

what sort), whether they keep a carriage, whether they go into the country
for the summer, whether they travel abroad, whether they send their sons to
college, and so on. And such likeness leads to likeness of ideas, especially
in that commonplace sort of people—the most numerous of course—who
have not sufficient definiteness or energy of character to associate on any
other basis. Note how difficult it is for two people, congenial in other
respects, to converse freely when one has an income of $5,000, the other of
$500. Few topics can be touched upon without accentuating the superficial
but troublesome discrepancy. Amusements, household and the like are
hardly possible; the weather may supply a remark or two, perhaps also
politics, though here the economic point of view is likely to appear.
Religion or philosophy, if the parties could soar so high, would be best of
all. Of course, serious discussion should be all the more practicable and
fruitful because of difference of viewpoint. What I mean, however, is light,
offhand, sociable talk that does not stir any depths. As between their wives
the situation would be harder still, and only an unusual tact and
magnanimity would make it tolerable.
The result is that we ordinarily find it most comfortable to associate on a
basis of income, combined with and modified by the influence of
occupation, culture and special tastes. And yet to do this is perhaps a
confession of failure, a confession that we do not know how to cast off the
adventitious and meet as men. The most superficial differences, being the
most apparent, impose themselves upon our commonly indolent and
sensuous states of mind.
In proportion to their energy men will always seek power. It is, perhaps,
the deepest of instincts, resting directly on the primary need for self-
expression. But the kind of power sought will take many forms.
Wealth stands, in modern society, for nearly all the grosser and more
tangible forms; for power over material goods, primarily, and secondarily
over the more purchasable kinds of human activity—hand labor,
professional services, newspaper commendation, political assiduity and so
on. The class that has it is, in all such matters, the strong class, and naturally
our coarser thought concludes that this is the kind of power most worth
consideration. In all the obvious details of life, in that seeking for petty
advantages and immunities in which most of our time is passed, at the store
or the railway station, we are measured by money and are apt to measure

others so. The ascendency of wealth is too natural to disappear. Children
prize possessions before they can talk, and readily learn that money is
possession generalized. Indeed, only the taste for finer possessions can or
should drive out that for lower.
And yet all clear minds, or rather all minds in their clearer moments, may
see that wealth is not the chief good that the commonplace and superficial
estimate makes it. It is simply a low form of power, important in measure to
the group and to the individual, but easily preoccupying the mind beyond its
just claim. If society gets material prosperity too fast, its spiritual life
suffers, as is somewhat the case in our day: and the individual is in peril of
moral isolation and decay as soon as he seeks to get richer than his fellows.
The finest and, in the long run, the most influential minds, have for the
most part not cared for riches, or not cared enough to go out of their way to
seek them, preferring to live on bare necessities if they must rather than
spend their lives in an uncongenial scramble. And the distinctively spiritual
leaders have always regarded them as inconsistent with their aims. “Provide
neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey,
neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves.” Not that Christianity is
opposed to industrial prosperity—the contrary is the case—but that
Christian leadership required the explicit renunciation of prosperity’s
besetting sin. In our day the life of Thoreau, among others, illustrates how a
man may have the finer products of wealth—the culture of all times—while
preferring to remain individually poor. He held that for an unmarried
student, wishing first of all to preserve the independence of his mind,
occasional day labor, which one can do and have done with, is the best way
of getting a living. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things
which he can afford to let alone.” “It makes but little difference whether
you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”[115] The thoroughgoing
way in which this doctrine is developed in his Walden and other books
makes them a vade mecum for the impecunious idealist.
Professor William James asserts that the prevalent fear of poverty among
the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which civilization
suffers, paralyzing their ideal force. “Think of the strength which personal
indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular
causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the
revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of

promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet,
while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our
example would help to set free our generation.”[116]
If these considerations do not keep us from greed, it is because most of us
have only flashes of the higher ambition. We may believe that we could
reconcile ourselves to poverty if we had to—even that it might be good for
us—but we do our best to avoid it.
For the ill-paid classes, certainly, the desire for money does not mean
“materialism” in any reproachful sense, but is chiefly the means by which
they hope to realize, first, health and decency, and then a better chance at
the higher life—books, leisure, education and refinement. They are
necessarily materialized in a certain sense by the fact that their most
strenuous thought must be fixed upon work and product in relation to
material needs. It is in those who are already well-to-do that the
preoccupation with money is most degrading—as not justified by primary
wants. “Meat is sweetest when it is nearest the bone,” and it is good to long
and strive for money when you have an urgent human need for it; but to do
this for accumulation, luxury, or a remote security is not wholesome. This
cold-blooded storing up in banks and tin boxes is perilous to the soul, often
becoming a kind of secret vice, a disease of narrow minds, feeble
imaginations and contracted living.[117]
In modern life, then, and in a country without formal privilege, the
question of classes is practically one of wealth, and of occupation
considered in relation to wealth; the reason being not that this distinction
really dominates life, but that it is the focus of the more definite and urgent
class controversies. Other aims are pursued in peace; wealth, because it is
material and appropriable, involves conflict. We may then accept the
economic standpoint for this purpose without at all agreeing with those who
regard it as more fundamental than others.[118]

FOOTNOTES:
[115] Walden, 89, 91.
[116] The Varieties of Religious Experience, 368.

[117] I will not here discuss the question just how far it serves a useful
purpose in the economic system.
[118] If the reader cares to know my opinion of that doctrine—sometimes
called the economic interpretation of history—which teaches that economic
conditions are in a peculiar sense the primary and determining factor in society,
he will find it in the following passages:
“The organic view of history [which I hold] denies that any factor or factors
are more ultimate than others. Indeed it denies that the so-called factors—such
as the mind, the various institutions, the physical environment and so on—have
any real existence apart from a total life in which all share in the same way that
the members of the body share in the life of the animal organism. It looks upon
mind and matter, soil, climate, flora, fauna, thought, language and institutions as
aspects of a single rounded whole, one total growth. We may concentrate
attention upon some one of these things, but this concentration should never go
so far as to overlook the subordination of each to the whole, or to conceive one
as precedent to others.”
“I cannot see that the getting of food, or whatever else the economic activities
may be defined to be, is any more the logical basis of existence than the ideal
activities. It is true that there could be no ideas and institutions without a food
supply; but no more could we get food if we did not have ideas and institutions.
All work together, and each of the principal functions is essential to every
other.”
“History is not like a tangled skein which you may straighten out by getting
hold of the right end and following it with sufficient persistence. It has no
straightness, no merely lineal continuity, in its nature. It is a living thing, to be
known by sharing its life, very much as you know a person. In the organic world
—that is to say in real life—each function is a centre from which causes radiate
and to which they converge; all is alike cause and effect; there is no logical
primacy, no independent variable, no place where the thread begins. As in the
fable of the belly and the members, each is dependent upon all the others. You
must see the whole or you do not truly see anything.” (Publications of the
American Economic Association, Third Series, vol. v, 426 ff.)

CHAPTER XXIII
ON THE ASCENDENCY OF A CAPITALIST CLASS

The Capitalist Class—Its Lack of Caste Sentiment—In What Sense “the
Fittest”—Moral Traits—How Far Based on Service—Autocratic
and Democratic Principles in the Control of Industry—Reasons for
Expecting an Increase of the Democratic Principle—Social Power in
General—Organizing Capacity—Nature and Sources of Capitalist
Power—Power Over the Press and Over Public Sentiment—Upper-
class Atmosphere.

Since in our age commerce and industry absorb most of the practical
energy of the people, the men that are foremost in these activities have a
certain ascendency, similar to that of warriors in a military age.
Although this sort of men is not sharply marked off, it is well enough
indicated by the term capitalist or capitalist-manager class; the large owner
of capital being usually more or less of a manager also, while the large
salaries and other gains of successful managers soon make them capitalists.
It is not quite accurate to speak of the group in question as the rich,
because, at a given time, a large part of its most vigorous membership is as
yet without wealth—though in a way to get it—and, on the other hand,
many of the actual possessors of wealth are personally idle or ineffective.
The essential thing is a social tendency or system of ideas generated in the
accumulation of wealth and having for its nucleus the more active and
successful leaders of commerce and industry.
That these are a very small class in proportion to their power is apparent,
but not, perhaps, in itself, so fatal a defect in the system that permits it as
many imagine. In so far as concentration of control means that wealth is in
the hands of those who understand how to use it for the common good, and
do in fact so use it, much may be said in its favor. We are all eager to entrust
our property to those who will make it profitable to us; and society, under
any system that could be devised, must probably do the same. But we may

well ask whether there is not some more adequate means than we now have
of getting this trust faithfully executed.
For better or for worse, concentration is probably inevitable in any
society that has a vast, mobile wealth subject to competition; and the actual
inequality is perhaps not much greater than that of political power, which is
supposed to be equally distributed by general suffrage. The truth is that
equality of power or influence, in any sphere of life, is inconsistent with the
free working of human forces, which is ever creating differences, some of
which are useful to society and some harmful. A true freedom, a reasonable
equality, aims to conserve the former and abolish or limit the latter.
The sentiment of the class is not aristocratic in the ordinary sense.
Although its members endeavor to secure their possessions to their children,
there is little of the spirit of hereditary caste, which, indeed, is uncongenial
to commerce. Freedom of opportunity is the ideal in this as in other parts of
American society, and educational or other opportunities designed to
maintain or increase it are sincerely approved and supported. There is, in
fact, an almost inevitable dualism which makes it natural that a man should
strive to aggrandize himself, his family and his class even though he truly
wishes for greater equality of privilege. He floats on two currents, and as a
man and a brother may be glad of restraints upon his own class which are in
the interest of justice.
The ideal of freedom prevalent in the managing class is, however,
somewhat narrow and hardly hospitable to the group self-assertion of the
less privileged classes. The labor movement has made its way by its energy
and reasonableness in the face of a rather general mistrust and opposition—
sometimes justified by its aberrations—on the part of the masters of
industry. Yet even in this regard, as it comes to be seen that organization is
an element of fair play, and as experience shows that union may become an
instrument of stability, a broader sentiment makes headway.
Like everything else that has power in human life, the money-strong
represent, in some sense, the survival of the fittest—not necessarily of the
best. That is, their success, certainly no guaranty of righteousness, does
prove a certain adaptation to conditions, those who get rich being in general
the ablest, for this purpose, of the many who devote their energies to it with
about the same opportunities. They are not necessarily the ablest in other

regards, since only certain kinds of ability count in making money; other
kinds, and those often the highest, such as devotion to intellectual or moral
ideals, being even a hindrance. Men of genius will seldom shine in this way,
because, as a rule, only a somewhat commonplace mind will give itself
whole-heartedly to the commercial ideal.
There is much likeness in the persons and methods by which, in all ages,
the cruder sort of power is acquired. When the military system is ascendent
over the industrial it is acquired in one way, when property is secure from
force in another, but this makes less difference than might be supposed. In
either case it is not mere personal prowess, with the sword or with the tool,
that gains large success, but power in organization. Aggressiveness, single-
minded devotion to the end and, above all, organizing faculty—these were
the methods of Clovis and Pepin and William of Normandy, as they are of
our rulers of finance. And now, as formerly, much of the power that is alive
in such men falls by inheritance into weaker hands.
As to righteousness, in the sense of good intention, they probably do not,
on the whole, differ much from the average. Some may be found of the
highest character, some of gross unscrupulousness. The majority are
doubtless without moral distinction and take the color of their associates.
The view sometimes set forth on behalf of men of wealth that riches go
with virtue, and the view, more popular among non-possessors, that it
comes by wickedness, are equally untrustworthy. The great mass of wealth
is accumulated by solid qualities—energy, tenacity, shrewdness and the like
—which may coexist with great moral refinement or with the opposite.
As a group, however, they are liable to moral deficiencies analogous to
those of the conquerors and organizers of states just referred to. There is,
especially, a certain moral irresponsibility which is natural to those who
have broken away from customary limitations and restraints and are
coursing almost at will over an unfenced territory. I mean that business
enterprise, like military enterprise, deals largely with relations as to which
there are no settled rules of morality, no constraining law or public opinion.
Such conditions breed in the ordinary actor a Macchiavellian opportunism.
Since it is hard to say what is just and honest in the vast and abstract
operations of finance, human nature is apt to cease looking for a standard
and to seize booty wherever and however it safely can. Hence the truly

piratical character of many of our great transactions. And in smaller matters
also, as in escaping taxation, it is often fatally easy for the rich to steal.
It must be allowed that such ascendency as the capitalist class has rests,
in part at least, upon service. That is to say, its members have had an
important function to perform, and in performing that function have found
themselves in a position to grasp wealth. The great work of the time has
been, or has seemed to be, the extension and reconstruction of industry. In
this work leadership and organization have been needed on a great scale,
and our captains of industry have nobly met this demand. That their
somewhat autocratic control of production was called for by the situation
seems to be shown by the rather general failure of coöperative enterprises
intended to dispense with it. Why is it that America abounds in opportunity,
and that every sort of industrial capacity is eagerly sought out and
rewarded? Of course natural advantages play a great part, but much must
also be ascribed to the energy and imaginative daring of our entrepreneurs,
many of whom have spent great faculty and tireless zeal upon business, in a
spirit of adventure and achievement rather than of gain. Where the general
is aggressive the soldier will be kept busy.
I have no sympathy with the general abuse of commercialism, but hold
with Montesquieu that “The spirit of commerce is naturally attended with
that of frugality, economy, moderation, labor, prudence, tranquillity, order
and rule. So long as this spirit subsists the riches it produces have no ill
effect. The mischief is when excessive wealth destroys the spirit of
commerce; then it is that the inconveniences of inequality begin to be
felt.”[119]
The conception of keen adaptation of means to ends, of exact social
workmanship, inculcated by “business” is of untold value to our civilization
and capable of very general application. It is a very proper demand that
government, education and philanthropy should, in this sense, be conducted
on business principles.
At the same time it is plain that a large part of the accumulation of wealth
—hard unfortunately to distinguish from other parts—is accomplished not
by social service but, as just intimated, by something akin to piracy. This is
not so much the peculiar wickedness of a predatory class as a tendency in
all of us to abuse power when not under definite legal or moral control. The

vast transactions associated with modern industry have come very little
under such control, and offer a field for freebooting such as the world has
never seen.
Nor need we affirm that even the gains of the great organizers are in the
highest sense right, only that they are natural and do not necessarily involve
conscious wrong-doing.
The question of the rather arbitrary control of industry by the capitalist-
manager, which now prevails, and of the possibility of this control being
diminished or modified in the future, calls for some analysis of underlying
forces. Evidently there is a conflict of principles here—the democratic or
popular and the autocratic. The latter, now ascendant, has the advantages of
concentration, secrecy and promptness—the same which give it superiority
in war. On the other hand, the democratic principle should have the same
merit in industry and commerce that it has in politics; namely that of
enlisting the pride and ambition of the individual and so getting him to put
himself into his work. Other things being equal, a free system is a more
vital and energetic organism than one in which the initiative and choice
come from a central authority.
And it is apparent that the working of the autocratic system in our
economic life shows just the strength and weakness that would naturally be
expected. The prompt undertaking and execution of vast schemes at a
favorable moment, and the equally prompt recession when conditions alter;
the investment of great resources in enterprises which yield no immediate
return; the decision and secrecy important in overcoming competitors; the
unhesitating sacrifice of workmen and their families when the market calls
for a shut-down of production—such traits as these are of the utmost
importance to commercial success, and belong to arbitrary control rather
than to anything of a more popular sort. On the other hand, it would be easy
to show at any length desired that such control is accompanied by a
widespread disaffection of spirit on the part of the working classes, which,
expressed in unwilling labor, strikes and agitation, is a commercial
disadvantage, and a social problem so urgent as to unsettle the whole
economic system.
The autocratic system has evidently a special advantage in a time of rapid
and confused development, when conditions are little understood or

regulated, and the state of things is one of somewhat blind and ruthless
warfare; but it is quite possible that as the new industries become
established and comparatively stable, there will be a commercial as well as
a social demand for a system that shall invite and utilize more of the good-
will and self-activity of the workman. “The system which comes nearest to
calling out all the self-interests and using all the faculties and sharing all the
benefits will outcompete any system that strikes a lower level of motive
faculty and profit.”[120] And the penetrating thinker who wrote this sentence
believed that the function of the autocratic “captain of industry” was
essentially that of an explorer and conqueror of new domains destined to
come later under the rule of a commonwealth. Indeed the rise, on purely
commercial grounds, of a more humane and individualizing tendency,
aiming in one way or another to propitiate the self-feeling of the workman
and get him to identify himself with his work, is well ascertained. Among
the familiar phases of this are the notable growth of coöperative production
and exchange in Belgium, Russia and other European countries, the
increasing respect for labor unions and the development by large concerns
of devices for insurance, for pensions, for profit-sharing and for the material
and social comfort of their employees. “As a better government has come
up from the people than came down from the kings, so a better industry
appears to be coming up from the people than came down from the
capitalists.”[121]
In some form or other the democratic principle is sure to make its way
into the economic system. Coöperation, labor unions, public regulation,
public ownership and the informal control of opinion will no doubt all have
a part; the general outcome being that the citizen becomes a more vital
agent in the life of the whole.
Before discussing further the power of the capitalist-manager class, we
ought to think out clearly just what we mean by social power, since
nowhere are we more likely to go astray than in vagueness regarding such
notions.
Evidently the essence of it is control over the human spirit, and the most
direct phases of power are immediately spiritual, such as one mind
exercises over another by virtue of what it is, without any means but the
ordinary symbols of communication. This is live, human power, and those
who have it in great degree are the prime movers of society, whether they

gain any more formal or conventional sort or not. Such, for instance, are the
poets, prophets, philosophers, inventors and men of science of all ages, the
great political, military and religious organizers, and even the real captains
of industry and commerce. All power involves in its origin mental or
spiritual force of some sort; and so far as it attaches to passive attributes,
like hereditary social position, offices, bank-accounts, and the like, it does
so through the aid of conventions and habits which regard these things as
repositories of spiritual force and allow them to exercise its function.
In its immediate spiritual phase power is at a maximum of vitality and a
minimum of establishment. Only a few can recognize it. Its possessors,
then, strive to establish and organize it, to give it social expression and
efficacy, to gain position, reputation or wealth. Since power is not apparent
to the common mind until it takes on these forms, they are, to superficial
observation and in all the conventional business of life, the only valid
evidence of it. And yet by the time these symbols appear, the spiritual basis
has often passed away. Primary power goes for the most part unseen, much
of it taking on no palpable form until late in life, much yielding only
posthumous reputation, and much, and that perhaps the finest sort, having
never any vulgar recognition whatever.
Regarding money-value we may say, in general, that it is one expression
of the conventional or institutional phase of society, and exhibits all that
mixture of grandeur and confusion with which nature usually presents
herself to our understanding. I mean that its appraisal of men and things is
partly expressive of great principles, and partly, so far as we can see, unjust,
trivial or accidental. Some gains are vital or organic, springing from the
very nature of life and justified as we come to understand that life; some are
fanciful, springing from the tastes or whims of the rich, like the value of
diamonds or first editions, and some parasitical, like those of the legally-
protected swindler. In general the values of the market are those of the
habitual world in all its grossness; spiritual values, except those that have
become conventional, being little felt in it. These appeal to the future. The
detailed working of market value has no ascertainable connection with
moral worth, and we must not expect it to have. If a man’s work is moral, in
the higher sense, it is in its nature an attack upon the habitual world which
the latter is more likely to resent than reward. One can only take up that
useful work that seems best suited to him, trying to be content if its value is

small, and, if large, to feel that the power over money it gives him is rightly
his only in so far as he uses it for the general good.
The more tangible kind of social power—so far as it is intrinsic to the
man and not adventitious like inherited wealth—depends chiefly upon
organizing capacity, which may be described as the ability to build and
operate human machinery. It has its roots in tact and skill in dealing with
men, in tenacity, and in a certain instinct for construction. One who
possesses it sees a new person as social material, and is likely to know what
can be made of him better than he knows himself.[122]
Of all kinds of leadership this has the readiest recognition and the highest
market value; and naturally so, since it is essential to every sort of
coöperative achievement. Its possessors understand the immediate control
of the world, which they will exercise no matter what the apparent forms of
organization may be. In all ages they have gained and held the grosser
forms of power, whenever these were at all open to competition. Thus,
during the early Middle Age, men of energy and management, more or less
favored by situation, built up for themselves local authority and estate, or
perhaps exploited the opportunities for still wider organization, like the
founders of Burgundy and Brittany and the early kings of France; very
much in the same manner as men of our own day build up commercial and
industrial systems and become senators and railway presidents.
Indeed, this type of ability was never in such demand as it now is, for the
conduct of the vast and diverse social structures rising about us—industrial
enterprises, political parties, labor unions, newspapers, universities and
philanthropies.
It has its high money value partly because of its rarity and partly because
there is a regular market for it; the need being so urgent and obvious as to
create a steady and intelligent demand. In this latter respect it contrasts with
services, like moral leadership, which people need but will seldom pay for.
A third reason is that its possessors are almost always clever enough to
know their own value and secure its recognition.
In discussing the power of the capitalist class there is no question of the
finer and higher forms of power. We shall rarely find among the rich any
pregnant spiritual leadership, theirs being a pedestrian kind of authority
which has a great deal to do with the every-day comfort of their

contemporaries but does not attempt to sway the profounder destinies of the
race. Nor does the world often accord them enduring fame: lacking spiritual
significance their names are writ in water. Even in industry the creative
thought, the inventions which are the germs of a new era, seldom come
from money-winners, since they require a different kind of insight.
The capitalist represents power over those social values that are tangible
and obvious enough to have a definite standing in the market. His money
and prestige will command food, houses, clothes, tools and all conventional
and standard sorts of personal service, from lawn-mowing to the
administration of a railroad, not genius or love or anything of that nature.
That wealth means social power of this coarser sort is apparent in a general
way, and yet merits a somewhat closer examination.
We have, first, its immediate power over goods and services: the master
of riches goes attended by an invisible army of potential servitors, ready to
do for him anything that the law allows, and often more. He is in this way,
as in so many others, the successor of the nobleman of mediæval and early
modern history, who went about with a band of visible retainers eager to
work his will upon all opposers. He is the ruler of a social system wherever
he may be.
The political power of wealth is due only in part to direct corruption, vast
as that is, but is even more an indirect and perfectly legal pressure in the
shape of inducements which its adroit use can always bring to bear—trade
to the business man, practice to the lawyer and employment to the hand-
worker: every one when he thinks of his income wishes to conciliate the
rich. Influence of this sort makes almost every rich man a political power,
even without his especially wishing to be. But when wealth is united to a
shrewd and unscrupulous political ambition, when it sets out to control
legislation or the administration of the laws, it becomes truly perilous. We
cannot fail to see that a large part of our high offices are held by men who
have no marked qualification but wealth, and would be insignificant
without it; also that our legislation—municipal, state and national—and
most of our administrative machinery, feel constantly the grasp of pecuniary
power. Probably it is not too much to say that except when public opinion is
unusually aroused wealth can generally have its way in our politics if it
makes an effort to do so.

As to the influence of the rich over the professional classes—lawyers,
doctors, clergymen, teachers, civil and mechanical engineers and the like—
we may say in general that it is potent but somewhat indirect, implying not
conscious subservience but a moral ascendency through habit and
suggestion. The abler men of this sort are generally educated and self-
respecting, have a good deal of professional spirit and are not wholly
dependent upon any one employer. At the same time, they get their living
largely through the rich, from whom the most lucrative employment comes,
and who have many indirect ways of making and marring careers. The
ablest men in the legal profession are in close relations with the rich and
commonly become capitalists themselves; physicians are more independent,
because their art is not directly concerned with property, yet look to wealthy
patients for their most profitable practice; clergymen are under pressure to
satisfy wealthy parishioners, and teachers must win the good will of the
opulent citizens who control educational boards.
Now there is nothing in social psychology surer than that if there is a
man by whose good will we desire to profit, we are likely to adapt our way
of thinking to his. Impelled to imagine frequently his state of mind, and to
desire that it should be favorable to our aims, we are unconsciously swayed
by his thought, the more so if he treats us with a courtesy which does not
alarm our self-respect. It is in this way that wealth imposes upon intellect.
Who can deny it?
Newspapers are generally owned by men of wealth, which has no doubt
an important influence upon the sentiments expressed in them; but a
weightier consideration is the fact that they depend for profit chiefly upon
advertisements, the most lucrative of which come from rich merchants who
naturally resent doctrines that threaten their interest. Of course the papers
must reach the people, in order to have a value for advertising or any other
purpose, and this requires adaptation to public opinion; but the public of
what are known as the better class of papers are chiefly the comparatively
well-to-do. And even that portion of the press which aims to please the
hand-working class is usually more willing to carry on a loud but vague
agitation, not intended to accomplish anything but increase circulation, than
to push real and definite reform.
All phases of opinion, including the most earnest and honest inquiry into
social questions, finds some voice in print, but—leaving aside times when

public opinion is greatly aroused—those phases that are backed by wealthy
interests have a great advantage in the urgency, persistence and cleverness
with which they are presented. At least, this has been the case in the past. It
is a general feeling of thoughtful men among the hand-working class that it
is hard to get a really fair statement of their view of industrial questions
from that portion of the newspaper and magazine press that is read by well-
to-do people. The reason seems to be mainly that the writers live
unconsciously in an atmosphere of upper-class ideas from which they do
not free themselves by thorough inquiry. Besides this, there is a sense of
what their readers expect, and also, perhaps, a vague feeling that the
sentiments of the hand-working class may threaten public order.
Since the public has supplanted the patron, a man of letters has least of
all to hope or fear from the rich—if he accepts the opinion of Mr. Howells
that the latter can do nothing toward making or marring a new book.
The power of wealth over public sentiment is exercised partly through
sway over the educated classes and the press, but also by the more direct
channel of prestige. Minds of no great insight, that is to say the majority,
mould their ideals from the spectacle of visible and tangible success. In a
commercial epoch this pertains to the rich; who consequently add to the
other sources of their influence power over the imagination. Millions accept
the money-making ideal who are unsuited to attain it, and run themselves
out of breath and courage in a race they should never have entered; it is as if
the thin-legged and flat-chested people of the land should seek glory in
foot-ball. The money-game is mere foolishness and mortification for most
of us, and there is a madness of the crowd in the way we enter into it. Even
those who most abuse the rich commonly show mental subservience in that
they assume that the rich have, in fact, gotten what is best worth having.
As hinted above, there is such a thing as an upper-class atmosphere, in
the sense of a state of mind regarding social questions, initiated by the more
successful money-winners and consciously or unconsciously imposed upon
business and professional people at large. Most of us exist in this
atmosphere and are so pervaded by it that it is not easy for us to understand
or fairly judge the sentiment of the hand-working classes. The spokesmen
of radical doctrines are, in this regard, doing good service to the public
mind by setting in motion counterbalancing, if not more trustworthy,
currents of opinion.

If any one of business or professional antecedents doubts that he breathes
a class atmosphere, let him live for a time at a social settlement in the
industrial part of one of our cities—not a real escape but as near it as most
of us have the resolution to achieve—reading working-class literature (he
will be surprised to find how well worth reading it is), talking with hand-
working people, attending meetings, and in general opening his mind as
wide as possible to the influences about him. He will presently become
aware of being in a new medium of thought and feeling; which may or may
not be congenial but cannot fail to be instructive.

FOOTNOTES:
[119] The Spirit of Laws, book v, chap. 6.
[120] Henry D. Lloyd, Man the Social Creator, 255.
[121] Idem, 246. Lloyd was rather a prophet than a man of science, but there
is a shrewd sense of fact back of his visions.
[122] Such a one

“Lässt jeden ganz das bleiben was er ist;
Er wacht nur drüber das er’s immer sei
Am rechten Ort; so weiss er aller Menschen
Vermögen zu dem seinigen zu machen.”

“He lets every one remain just what he is, but takes care that he shall always
be it in the right place: thus he knows how to make all men’s power his own.”
Schiller, Wallenstein’s Lager, I, 4.

CHAPTER XXIV
ON THE ASCENDENCY OF A CAPITALIST CLASS—Continued

The Influence of Ambitious Young Men—Security of the Dominant Class
in an Open System—Is there Danger of Anarchy and Spoliation?—
Whether the Sway of Riches is Greater now than Formerly—
Whether Greater in America than in England.
In any society where there is some freedom of opportunity ambitious
young men are an element of extreme importance. Their numbers are
formidable and their intelligence and aggressiveness much more so: in
short, they want an opening and are bound to get it.
As the members of this class are mainly impecunious, it might be
supposed that they would be a notable offset to the power of wealth; and in
a sense they are. It is their interest to keep open the opportunity to rise, and
they are accordingly inimical to caste and everything which tends toward it.
But it by no means follows that they are opposed to the ascendency of an
upper class based on wealth and position. This becomes evident when one
remembers that their aim is not to raise the lower class, but to get out of it.
The rising young man does not identify himself with the lowly stratum of
society in which he is born, but, dissatisfied with his antecedents, he strikes
out for wealth, power or fame. In doing so he fixes his eyes on those who
have these things, and from whose example he may learn how to gain them;
thus tending to accept the ideals and standards of the actual upper class. He
gives a great deal of attention to the points of view of A, a railroad
president, B, a senator, and even of C, head of a labor organization, but to a
mere farmer or laborer, whose hand is on no levers, he is indifferent.
The students of our universities are subject to a conflict between the
healthy idealism of youth, which prevails with the more generous, and the
influences just indicated, which become stronger as education draws closer
to practical affairs. On the whole, possessed of one great privilege and eager

to gain others, they are not so close in spirit to the unprivileged classes as
might be imagined.
Thus the force of ambitious youth goes largely to support the ascendency
of the money-getting class; directly, in that it accepts the ideals of this class
and looks forward to sharing its power; indirectly, in that it is withdrawn
from the resources of the humbler class. How long will the rising lawyer
retain his college enthusiasm for social reform if the powers that be
welcome him and pay him salaries?
We have then the fact, rather paradoxical at first sight, that the dominant
class in a competitive society, although unstable as to its individual
membership, may well be more secure as a whole than the corresponding
class under any other system—precisely because it continually draws into
itself most of the natural ability from the other classes. Throughout English
history, we are told, the salvation of the aristocracy has been its
comparative openness, the fact that ability could percolate into it, instead of
rising up behind it like water behind a dam, as was the case in pre-
revolutionary France. And the same principle is working even more
effectually in our own economic order. A great weakness of the trades-union
movement, as of all attempts at self-assertion on the part of the less
privileged classes, is that it is constantly losing able leaders. As soon as a
man shows that marked capacity which would fit him to do something for
his fellows, it is ten to one that he accepts a remunerative position, and so
passes into the upper class. It is increasingly the practice—perhaps in some
degree the deliberate policy—of organized wealth to win over in this way
the more promising leaders from the side of labor; and this is one respect in
which a greater class-consciousness and loyalty on the part of the latter
would add to its strength.
Thus it is possible to have freedom to rise and yet have at the same time a
miserable and perhaps degraded lower class—degraded because the social
system is administered with little regard to its just needs. This is more the
case with our own industrial system, and with modern society in general,
than our self-satisfaction commonly perceives. Our one-sided ideal of
freedom, excellent so far as it goes, has somewhat blinded us to the
encroachments of slavery on an unguarded flank. I mean such things as bad
housing, insecurity, excessive and deadening work, child labor and the lack

of any education suited to the industrial masses—the last likely to be
remedied now that it is seen to threaten industrial prosperity.
It is hard to say how much of the timidity noticeable in the discussion of
questions of this sort by the comfortable classes is due to a vague dread of
anarchy and spoliation by an organized and self-conscious lower class; but
probably a good deal. If power, under democracy, goes with numbers, and
the many are poor, it would seem at first glance that they would despoil the
few.
To conservative thinkers a hundred, or even fifty, years ago this seemed
almost an axiom, but a less superficial philosophy has combined with
experience to show that anarchy, in Mr. Bryce’s words, “is of all dangers or
bugbears the one which the modern world has least cause to fear.”[123]
The most apparent reason for this is the one already discussed, namely,
that power does not go with mere numbers, under a democracy more than
under any other form of government; a democratic aristocracy, that is, one
whose members maintain their position in an open struggle, being without
doubt the strongest that can exist. We shall never have a revolution until we
have caste; which, as I have tried to show, is but a remote possibility. And
as an ally of established power we have to reckon with the inertia of social
structure, something so massive and profound that the loudest agitation is
no more than a breeze ruffling the surface of deep waters. Dominated by the
habits which it has generated, we all of us, even the agitators, uphold the
existing order without knowing it. There may, of course, be sudden changes
due to the fall of what has long been rotten, but I see little cause to suppose
that the timbers of our system are in this condition: they are rough and
unlovely, but far from weak.
Another conservative condition is that economic solidarity which makes
the welfare of all classes hang together, so that any general disturbance
causes suffering to all, and more to the weak than to the strong. A sudden
change, however reasonable its direction, must in this way discredit its
authors and bring about reaction. The hand-working classes may get much
less of the economic product than they ought to; but they are not so badly
off that they cannot be worse, and, unless they lose their heads, will always
unite with other classes to preserve that state of order which is the guaranty
of what they have. Anarchy would benefit no one, unless criminals, and

anything resembling a general strike I take to be a childish expedient not
likely to be countenanced by the more sober and hard-headed leaders of the
labor movement. All solid betterment of the workers must be based on and
get its nourishment from the existing system of production, which must
only gradually be changed, however defective it may be. The success of
strikes, and of all similar tactics, depends, in the nature of things, on their
being partial, and drawing support from the undisturbed remainder of the
process. It is the same principle of mingling stability with improvement
which governs progress everywhere.
And, finally, effective organization on the part of the less privileged
classes goes along with intelligence, with training in orderly methods of
self-assertion, and with education in the necessity of patience and
compromise. The more real power they get, the more conservatively, as a
rule, they use it. Where free speech exists there will always be a noisy party
advocating precipitate change (and a timid party who are afraid of them),
but the more the people are trained in real democracy the less will be the
influence of this element.
Whatever divisions there may be in our society, it is quite enough an
organic whole to unite in casting out tendencies that are clearly anarchic.
And it is also evident that such tendencies are to be looked for at least as
much among the rich as among the poor. If we have at one extreme
anarchists who would like to despoil other people, we have, at the other,
monopolists and financiers who actually do so.
It is a common opinion that the sway of riches over the human mind is
greater in our time than previously, and greater in America than elsewhere.
How far is this really the case?
To understand this matter we must not forget that the ardor of the chase
—as in a fox hunt—may have little to do with the value of the quarry. The
former, certainly, was never so great in the pursuit of wealth as here and
now; chiefly because the commercial trend of the times, due to a variety of
causes, supplies unequalled opportunities and incitements to engage in the
money-game. In this, therefore, the competitive zeal of an energetic people
finds its main expression. But to say that wealth stands for more in the inner
thought of men, that to have or not to have it makes a greater intrinsic
difference, is another and a questionable proposition, which I am inclined to

think opposite to the truth. Such spiritual value as personal wealth has
comes from its power over the means of spiritual development. It is,
therefore, diminished by everything which tends to make those means
common property: and the new order has this tendency. When money was
the only way to education, to choice of occupation, to books, leisure and
variety of intercourse, it was essential to the intellectual life; there was no
belonging to the cultured class without it. But with free schools and
libraries, the diffusion of magazines and newspapers, cheap travel, less
stupefying labor and shorter hours, culture opportunity is more and more
extended, and the best goods of life are opened, if not to all, yet to an ever-
growing proportion. Men of the humblest occupations can and do become
gentlemen and scholars. Indeed, people are coming more and more to think
that exclusive advantages are uncongenial to real culture, since the deepest
insight into humanity can belong only to those who share and reflect upon
the common life.
The effect is that wealth is shorn of much of that prestige of knowledge,
breeding and opportunity which always meant more than its material power.
The intellectual and spiritual centre of gravity, like the political, sinks down
into the masses of the people. Though our rich are rich beyond the dreams
of avarice, they mean less to the inner life of the time, exercise less spiritual
authority, perhaps, than the corresponding class in any older society. They
are the objects of popular curiosity, resentment, admiration or envy, rather
than the moral deference given to a real aristocracy. They are not taken too
seriously. Indeed, there could be no better proof that the rich are no
overwhelming power with us than the amount of good-natured ridicule
expended upon them. Were they really a dominant order, the ridicule, if
ventured at all, would not be good-natured. Their ascendency is great when
compared with a theory of equality—and in this sense the remarks in the
last chapter should be understood—but small compared with that of the
ruling classes of the Old World.
Over a class of frenzied gold-seekers, rich or poor, chiefly in the towns,
the money-idea is no doubt ascendant; but if you approach the ordinary
farmer, mechanic or sober tradesman you are likely to find that he sets no
high rate on wealth beyond what is necessary for the frugal support of a
family, and that he neither admires nor envies the rich, but looks at the
millionaire and thinks: “After all, it isn’t life. What does he get out of it

more than the rest of us?” The typical American is an idealist, and the
people he looks up to are those who stand in some way for the ideal life—or
whom he supposes to do so—most commonly statesmen, but often writers,
scientists or teachers. Education and culture, as Mr. Bryce and others have
noticed, is cherished by plain people all over the land, often to a degree that
puts to shame its professed representatives.
We find, then, that agitators who strive to incite the people against the
rich encounter with disgust an idealism which refuses to believe that their
advantages are extravagantly great; and one of the main grievances of such
men is what they look upon as the folly or lack of spirit of the poor in this
regard.
Never before, probably, was there so large a class of people who, having
riches, feel that they are a doubtful blessing, especially in relation to the
nurture of children. Many a successful man is at his wits’ end to give his
children those advantages of enforced industry, frugality and self-control
which he himself enjoyed. One of the richest men of the day holds that
accumulations are generally bad for the children, as well as for society, and
favors almost unlimited graduated taxation of inheritances.[124] According
to the philosophy which he supports by practice as well as theory, the man
who finds himself rich is to live modestly and use his surplus as a trust fund
for the benefit of the public.
What would a man wish for his own son, if he could choose? First, no
doubt, some high and engrossing purpose, which should fill his life with the
sense of worthy striving and aspiration. After this he would wish for health,
friends, peace of mind, the enjoyment of books, a happy family life and
material comfort. But the last, beyond that degree which even unskilled
labor should bring, he would regard as of secondary importance. Not a
straitened house and table but a straitened soul is the real evil, and the two
are more separable now than formerly. The more a real democracy prevails,
the less is the spiritual ascendency of riches.
There is, for instance, no such settled and institutional deference to
wealth in the United States as there seems to be in England; the reason
being, in part, that where there are inherited classes there are also class
standards of living, costly in the upper class, to which those who would live
in good company are under pressure to conform. In England there is

actually a ruling order, however ill defined, which is generally looked up to
and membership in which is apparently the ambition of a large majority of
all aspiring men who do not belong to it by birth. Its habits and standards
are such that only the comparatively rich can be at home in it. There is
nothing corresponding to this with us. We have richer men and the pursuit
of riches is an even livelier game, but there is no such ascendency in
wealth, no such feeling that one must be rich to be respectable. With us, if
people have money they enjoy it; if not, they manage with what they have,
neither regarding themselves nor regarded by others as essentially inferior.
It is also a general feeling here that wealth should not be a controlling
factor in marriage, and it is not common for American parents to object
seriously to a proposed son-in-law (much less a daughter-in-law) on the
mere ground of lack of means, apart from his capacity to earn a living. The
matter-of-fact mercenariness in this regard which, as we are led to believe
by the novelists, prevails in the upper circles of England, is as yet somewhat
shocking to the American mind.
Hereditary titles, sometimes imagined to be a counterpoise to the
ascendency of wealth, are really, in our time at least, a support and sanction
to it, giving it an official standing and permanence it cannot have in
democracy. We understand that in England wealth—with tact, patience and
maybe political services—will procure a title, which, unlike anything one
can get for money in America, is indestructible by vice and folly, and can be
used over and over to buy wealth in marriage. “Nothing works better in
America than the promptness with which the degenerate scions of honored
parents drop out of sight.”[125] Rank is not an offset but a reward and bribe
to wealth; perhaps the only merit that can be claimed for it in this
connection being that the desire and deference for it imposes a certain
discipline on the arrogance of newly acquired riches.
The English idea that those in high offices should have a magnificent
style of living, “becoming to their station,” is also one that goes with caste
feeling. It makes it hardly decent for the poor to hold such offices, and is
almost absent here, where, if riches are important to political success, the
condition is one of which the people do not approve and would gladly
dispense with.

I doubt whether the whole conception which imputes merit to wealth and
seeks at least the appearance of the latter in modes of dress, attendance and
the like, is not stronger everywhere in Europe than in the United States.

FOOTNOTES:
[123] The American Commonwealth, Chapter 94.
[124] Andrew Carnegie.
[125] T. W. Higginson, Book and Heart, 145.

CHAPTER XXV
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ILL-PAID CLASSES

The Need of Class Organization—Uses and Dangers of Unions—
General Disposition of the Hand-Working Classes.
It is not the purpose of this book to add anything to the merely
controversial literature of the time; and in treating the present topic I intend
no more than to state a few simple and perhaps obvious principles designed
to connect it with our general line of thought.
It is quite apparent that an organized and intelligent class-consciousness
in the hand-working people is one of the primary needs of a democratic
society. In so far as this part of the people is lacking in a knowledge of its
situation and in the practice of orderly self-assertion, a real freedom will
also be lacking, and we shall have some kind of subjection in its place;
freedom being impossible without group organization. That industrial
classes exist—in the sense already explained[126]—cannot well be denied,
and existing they ought to be conscious and self-directing.
The most obvious need of class-consciousness is for self-assertion
against the pressure of other classes, and this is both most necessary and
most difficult with those who lack wealth and the command over organized
forces which it implies. In a free society, especially, the Lord helps those
who help themselves; and those who are weak in money must be strong in
union, and must also exert themselves to make good any deficiency in
leadership that comes from ability deserting to more favored classes.
That the dominant power of wealth has an oppressive action, for the most
part involuntary, upon the people below, will hardly be denied by any
competent student. The industrial progress of our time is accompanied by
sufferings that are involved with the progress. These sufferings—at least in
their more tangible forms—fall almost wholly upon the poorer classes,
while the richer get a larger share of the increased product which the
progress brings. By sufferings I mean not only the physical hardship and

liability to disease, early decay, and mutilation or death by accident, which
fall to the hand-worker; but also the debasement of children by premature
and stunting labor, the comparative lack of intellectual and social
opportunities, the ugly and discouraging surroundings, and the insecurity of
employment, to which he and his are subject. There is no purpose to inflict
these things; but they are inflicted, and the only remedy is a public
consciousness, especially in the classes who suffer from them, of their
causes and the means by which they can be done away with.
The principal expressions of class-consciousness in the hand-working
classes in our day are labor unions and that wider, vaguer, more
philosophical or religious movement, too various for definition, which is
known as socialism. Regarding the latter I will only say at present that it
includes much of what is most vital in the contemporary working of the
democratic spirit; the large problems with which its doctrines deal I prefer
to discuss in my own way.
Labor unions are a simpler matter. They have arisen out of the urgent
need of self-defence, not so much against deliberate aggression as against
brutal confusion and neglect. The industrial population has been tossed
about on the swirl of economic change like so much sawdust on a river,
sometimes prosperous, sometimes miserable, never secure, and living
largely under degrading, inhuman conditions. Against this state of things the
higher class of artisans—as measured by skill, wages and general
intelligence—have made a partly successful struggle through coöperation in
associations, which, however, include much less than half of those who
might be expected to take advantage of them.[127] That they are an effective
means of class self-assertion is evident from the antagonism they have
aroused.
Besides their primary function of group-bargaining, which has come to
be generally recognized as essential, unions are performing a variety of
services hardly less important to their members, and serviceable to society
at large. In the way of influencing legislation they have probably done more
than all other agencies together to combat child-labor, excessive hours, and
other inhuman and degrading kinds of work; also to provide for safeguards
against accident, for proper sanitation of factories, and the like. In this field
their work is as much defensive as aggressive, since employing interests, on

the other side, are constantly influencing legislation and administration to
their own advantage.
Their function as spheres of fellowship and self-development is equally
vital and less understood. To have a we-feeling, to live shoulder to shoulder
with one’s fellows, is the only human life; we all need it to keep us from
selfishness, sensuality and despair, and the hand-worker needs it even more
than the rest of us. Usually without pecuniary resource and insecure of his
job and his home, he is, in isolation, miserably weak and in a way to be
cowed and unmanned by misfortune or mere apprehension. Drifting about
in a confused society, unimportant, apparently, to the rest of the world, it is
no wonder if he feels

“I am no link of Thy great chain,”[128]

and loses faith in himself, in life and in God. The union makes him feel that
he is part of a whole, one of a fellowship, that there are those who will
stand by him in trouble, that he counts for something in the great life. He
gets from it that thrill of broader sentiment, the same in kind that men get in
fighting for their country; his self is enlarged and enriched and his
imagination fed with objects, comparatively, “immense and eternal.”
Moreover, the life of labor unions and other class associations, through
the training which it gives in democratic organization and discipline, is
perhaps the chief guaranty of the healthy political development of the hand-
working class—especially those imported from non-democratic
civilizations—and the surest barrier against recklessness and disorder. That
their members get this training will be evident to anyone who studies their
working, and it is not apparent that they would get it in any other way. Men
learn most in acting for purposes which they understand and are interested
in, and this is more certain to be the case with economic aims than with any
other.
Thus, if unions should never raise wages or shorten hours, they would yet
be invaluable to the manhood of their members. At worst, they ensure the
joy of an open fight and of companionship in defeat. Self-assertion through
voluntary organization is of the essence of democracy, and if any part of the
people proves incapable of it it is a bad sign for the country. On this ground

alone it would seem that patriots should desire to see organization of this
sort extend throughout the industrial population.
The danger of these associations is that which besets human nature
everywhere—the selfish use of power. It is feared with reason that if they
have too much their own way they will monopolize opportunity by
restricting apprenticeship and limiting the number of their members; that
they will seek their ends through intimidation and violence; that they will
be made the instruments of corrupt leaders. These and similar wrongs have
from time to time been brought home to them, and, unless their members
are superior to the common run of men, they are such as must be expected.
But it would be a mistake to regard these or any other kinds of injustice as a
part of the essential policy of unions. They are feeling their way in a human,
fallible manner, and their eventual policy will be determined by what, in the
way of class advancement, they find by experience to be practicable. In so
far as they attempt things that are unjust we may expect them, in the long
run, to fail, through the resistance of others and through the awakening of
their own consciences. It is the part of other people to check their excesses
and cherish their benefits.
In general no sort of persons mean better than hand-laboring men. They
are simple, honest people, as a rule, with that bent toward integrity which is
fostered by working in wood and iron and often lost in the subtleties of
business. Moreover, their experience is such as to develop a sense of the
brotherhood of man and a desire to realize it in institutions. Not having
enjoyed the artificial support of accumulated property, they have the more
reason to know the dependence of each on his fellows. Nor have they any
great hopes of personal aggrandizement to isolate them and pamper their
self-consciousness.
To these we may add that offences from this quarter are likely to be more
shocking and less dangerous than those of a more sophisticated sort of
people. Occasional outbreaks of violence alarm us and call for prompt
enforcement of law, but are not a serious menace to society, because general
sentiment and all established interests are against them; while the subtle,
respectable, systematic corruption by the rich and powerful threatens the
very being of democracy.

The most deplorable fact about labor unions is that they embrace so small
a proportion of those that need their benefits. How far into the shifting
masses of unskilled labor effective organization can extend only time will
show.

FOOTNOTES:
[126] See chapter 21.
[127] Professor John R. Commons (Publications of the American Sociological
Society, vol. ii, p. 141) estimates 2,000,000 members of unions out of 6,000,000
wage-earners “available for class conflict.”
[128] George Herbert.

CHAPTER XXVI
POVERTY

The Meaning of Poverty—Personal and General Causes—Poverty in a
Prosperous Society Due Chiefly to Maladjustment—Are the Poor
the “Unfit”?—Who is to Blame for Poverty?—Attitude of Society
Toward the Poor—Fundamental Remedies.
The most practical definition of poverty is that now widely adopted
which relates it to function, and calls those the poor whose income is not
sufficient to keep up their health and working efficiency. This may be vague
but is not too much so to be useful, and is capable of becoming quite
definite through exact inquiry. At least it indicates roughly a considerable
portion of the people who are poor in an obvious and momentous sense of
the word.
Being undernourished, the poor lack energy, physical, intellectual and
moral. Whatever the original cause of their poverty, they cannot, being
poor, work so hard, think so clearly, plan so hopefully, or resist temptation
with so much steadfastness as those who have the primary means of
keeping themselves in sound condition.
Moreover, the lack of adequate food, clothing and housing commonly
implies other lacks, among which are poor early training and education, the
absence of contact with elevating and inspiring personalities, a narrow
outlook upon the world, and, in short, a general lack of social opportunity.
The poor are not a class in the sense of having a distinct psychical
organization. Absorbed in a discouraging material struggle, or perhaps in
the sensuality and apathy to which a discouraging outlook is apt to lead,
they have no spirit or surplus energy adequate to effectual coöperative
endeavor on their own initiative, or even to grasping the benefits of existing
organization. As a rule they get far less from the law and its administration,
from the church, the schools, the public libraries and the like, than the
classes more capable of self-assertion, and this is particularly true in a

laissez-faire democracy, such as ours, which gives rights pretty much in
proportion to the vigor with which they are demanded. It is this lack of
common consciousness and purpose that explains the ease with which, in
all ages, the poor have been governed, not to say exploited, from above.
And if they are getting some consciousness and purpose at the present time,
it is largely for the very reason that they are less inveterately and hopelessly
poor now than in the past.
The familiar question whether poverty is due to personal or social causes
is in itself somewhat fallacious, as smacking of a philosophy that does not
see that the personal and social are inseparable. Everything in personality
has roots in social conditions, past or present. So personal poverty is part of
an organic whole, the effect in one way or another, by heredity or influence,
of the general life. The question has significance, however, when we
understand it as asking whether or not the cause is so fixed in personality
that it cannot be counteracted by social influences. We find that in a
community generally prosperous a part of the people—say ten per cent.—
are poor in the urgent sense indicated above. The practical question is, Are
these people poor from causes so established in their characters (however
originating) that the rest of the community can do nothing effectual for
them, or are they plastic to forces which might raise them to a normal
standard of living?
As to this—leaving out the various extreme opinions which attend all
such questions—there is a fair measure of agreement among competent
observers somewhat to the following effect: There is a considerable number
of individuals and families having intrinsic defects of character which must
always keep them poor so long as they are left in the ordinary degree of
self-dependence. The great majority of the poor, however, have no
ineradicable personal weakness but are capable of responding to influences
which might raise them to a normal standard of living. In other words, the
nine-tenths of the community which is not poor might conceivably bring
influences to bear which would—in a healthy manner and without
demoralizing alms-giving—remove all but a small part of the poverty of the
other tenth. It is only a question of putting into the matter sufficient
knowledge and good will. As to the view, still not uncommon, that the
laziness, shiftlessness and vice of the poor are the source of their
difficulties, it may be said that these traits, so far as they exist, are now

generally regarded by competent students as quite as much the effect as the
cause of poverty. If a man is undervitalized he will either appear lazy or will
exhaust himself in efforts which are beyond his strength—the latter being
common with those of a nervous temperament. Shiftlessness, also, is the
natural outcome of a confused and discouraging experience, especially if
added to poor nutrition. And as to drink and other sensual vices, it is well
understood that they are the logical resource of those whose life does not
meet the needs of human nature in the way of variety, pleasantness and
hope. There are other causes of vice besides poverty, as appears from its
prevalence among the unresourceful rich, but there can be no doubt that
good nurture, moderate work, wholesome amusement and a hopeful outlook
would do away with a great, probably the greater, part of it. There are, no
doubt, among the poor, as among the well-to-do, many cases of incurable
viciousness and incompetence, but it would be no less unjust and foolish to
assume that any individual is of this sort than to give up a scarlet fever
patient because some will die of that disease in spite of the best treatment.
I find that the ablest and most experienced workers have generally the
most confidence as to what may be done even with the apparently lazy,
shiftless or vicious by bringing fresh suggestions, encouragements and
opportunities to bear upon them. And it is only a small portion of the poor
that are even apparently lazy, shiftless or vicious; the majority comparing
not unfavorably with the well-to-do classes in these respects.
Leaving aside general conditions which may depress whole nations or
races, the main cause of poverty in a prosperous country like the United
States is without doubt some sort of maladjustment between the individual,
or the family or neighborhood group, and the wider community, by reason
of which potential capacity does not yield its proper fruit in efficiency and
comfort. This is evidently the case, for example, with the sort of poverty
most familiar in our American cities; that due to the transplanting of vast
numbers of Europeans to a society, not too good for them as we carelessly
assume, but out of connection with their habits and traditions. The Italians,
Slavs and Russian Jews who just now throng our cities are by no means
deficient, on the whole, either in intelligence, industry or thrift; and those
who know them best find them prolific in some qualities, such as artistic
sensibility of various kinds, in which America is otherwise rather deficient.

But the process of adaptation to our industrial conditions is trying and
leaves many in poverty and demoralization.
Among the native population also, poverty and the moral degradation
which is often found with it is due largely, perhaps chiefly, to various kinds
of maladjustment between the working classes and the industrial system—
to loss of employment from periodical depressions or from the introduction
of new methods, to the lack of provision for industrial education, to the
perils attending migration from country to city, and so on.
What shall we say of the doctrine very widely, though perhaps not very
clearly, held that the poor are the “unfit” in course of elimination, and are
suffering the painful but necessary consequences of an inferiority that
society must get rid of at any cost? A notion of this kind may be discovered
in the minds of many men of fair intelligence, and is due to remote, obscure
and for the most part mistaken impressions of the teaching of Malthus and
Darwin.
The unfit, in the sense of Darwin and of biology in general, are those
whose hereditary type is so unsuited to the conditions of life that it tends to
die out, or at least suffer relative diminution in numbers, under the action of
these conditions—as white families tend to die out in the tropics. In other
words, they have an inferiority due to heredity, and this inferiority is of such
a character that they do not leave as many children to continue their race as
do those of a superior or fitter type.
It is very questionable whether any great part of the poor answer the
description in either of these respects. As to the first, it is the prevailing
opinion with those most familiar with the matter that their inferiority,
except possibly where a distinct race is in question, as with the Negroes, is
due chiefly to deficient nurture, training and opportunity, and not to
heredity. This view is supported by the fact that under the conditions which
a country of opportunity, like the United States, affords, great masses of
people rise from poverty to comfort, and many of them to opulence,
showing that the stock was as capable as any. Something of this sort has
taken place with German and Irish immigrants, and is likely to take place
with Jews, Slavs and Italians.
As to elimination, it is well known that only poverty of the most extreme
and destructive kinds avails to restrict propagation, and that the moderately

poor have a higher rate of increase than the educated and well-to-do classes.
It is, in fact, far more the latter that are the “unfit” in a biological sense than
the former.
The truth is that poverty is unfitness, but in a social and not a biological
sense. That is to say, it means that feeding, housing, family life, education
and opportunity are below the standards that the social type calls for, and
that their existence endangers the latter in a manner analogous to that in
which the presence of inferior cattle in a herd endangers the biological type.
They threaten, and to a greater or less degree actually bring about, a general
degradation of the community, through ignorance, inefficiency, disease,
vice, bad government, class hatred (or, still worse, class servility and
arrogance) and so on.
But since the unfitness is social rather than biological, the method of
elimination must also be social, namely, the reform of housing and
neighborhood conditions, improvement of the schools, public teaching of
trades, abolition of child-labor and the humanizing of industry.
That there are strains of biological unfitness among the poor—hereditary
idiocy, or nervous instability tending toward vice and crime, for example—
is not to be denied, and certainly these should be eliminated, but poverty,
far from effecting elimination, is perhaps their main cause. This will, no
doubt, be duly considered by students of the new science of eugenics, for
which those of us who approach social problems from another point of view
may yet have the highest regard and expectation. Only a shallow sort of
mind will suppose there is any necessary conflict between biological and
psychological sociology.
As to the question, who is to blame for poverty, let us remember that the
whole question of praise or blame is one of point of view and expediency.
Blame the poor if it will do them any good, and sometimes, perhaps, it will,
but not so often probably as the well-to-do are apt to imagine. It used to be
thought that people must always be held responsible for their condition, and
that the main if not the only source of improvement was to prod their sense
of this responsibility; but more thoughtful observation shows that it is not
always a good thing to urge the will. “Worry,” says an experienced worker,
[129]
“is one of the direct and all-pervading causes of economic
dependence,” and he asserts that “Take no thought for the morrow” is often

the most practical advice. Many indications, among them the spread of
“mind-cure” doctrines and practices, point to a widely felt need to escape
from the waste and unrest of an over-stimulated sense of responsibility.
The main blame for poverty must rest upon the prosperous, because they
have, on the whole, far more power in the premises. However, poverty
being due chiefly to conditions of which society is only just beginning to
become conscious, we may say that in the past nobody has been to blame. It
is an unintended result of the economic struggle, and is “done with the
elbows rather than the fists.” But consciousness is arising, and with it
comes responsibility. We are becoming aware of what makes poverty and
how it can in great part be done away with, and if accomplishment does not
keep pace with knowledge we shall be to blame indeed.
All parts of society being interdependent, the evils of poverty are not
confined to one class, but spread throughout the whole; and the influence of
a low standard of living is felt in the corruption of politics, the prevalence
of vice and the inefficiency of labor. The cause of the poor is therefore the
cause of all, and from this point of view those of them who in spite of
weakness, discouragement and neglect keep up the fight for a decent life
and shun dependence and degradation, should be regarded as heroic
defenders of the general welfare, deserving praise as much as the soldier at
the front. If we do not so regard them, it is because of our lack of
intelligence and social consciousness.
In a truly organic society the struggles and suffering of a poor class
would arouse the same affectionate and helping solicitude as is felt when
one member of a family falls ill. In contrast to this, the indifference or
somewhat contemptuous pity usually felt toward poverty indicates a low
state of community sentiment, a deficient we-feeling. Respect and
appreciation would seem to be due to those who sustain the struggle
successfully, and sympathetic help to those who are broken down by it.
Especially brutal, stupid and inexpedient—when we think of it—is the old
way of lumping the poor with the degenerate as “the lower class,” and
either leaving them to bear their discredited existence as best they may, or
dealing out to them a contemptuous and unbrotherly alms. The confusion
with the degraded of those who are keeping up the social standard in the
face of exceptional difficulties is as mean and deadly a wrong as could well
be.

In so far as there is an effective, self-conscious Christian spirit in the
world, thought, feeling and effort must concentrate wherever there is
injustice or avoidable suffering. That this takes place so slowly and
imperfectly in the matter of poverty is largely owing to a lack of clear
perception of what ought to be done. I suppose there is no doubt that if
mere gifts could wipe out poverty it would be wiped out at once. But people
are now, for the most part, just sufficiently informed to see the futility of
ordinary alms, without being instructed in the possibilities of rational
philanthropy. Rational philanthropy is coming, however, along with an
excellent literature and a body of expert persons who unite humane
enthusiasm with a scientific spirit.[130]
The fundamental remedy for poverty is, of course, rational organization
having for its aim the control of those conditions, near and remote, which
lead people into it and prevent their getting out. The most radical measures
are those which are educational and protective in a very broad and
searching sense of the words—the humanization of the primary school
system, industrial education, facilities for play, physical training and
healthy amusement, good housing, the restriction by law of child labor and
of all vicious and unwholesome conditions, and, finally, the biological
precaution of stopping the propagation of really degenerate types of men.
If we can give the children of the poor the right start in life, they will
themselves, in most cases, develop the intelligence, initiative, self-control
and power of organization which will enable them to look out for their own
interests when they are mature. The more one thinks of these questions the
more he will feel that they can only be solved by helping the weaker classes
to a position where they can help themselves.

FOOTNOTES:
[129] An editorial writer in Charities and the Commons, presumably Professor
Devine, the author of Principles of Relief, and other works on rational charity.
[130] “Our children’s children may learn with amazement how we thought it a
natural social phenomenon that men should die in their prime, leaving wives and
children in terror of want; that accidents should make an army of maimed
dependents; that there should not be enough houses for workers; and that

epidemics should sweep away multitudes as autumn frost sweeps away summer
insects.” Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization, 197.

CHAPTER XXVII
HOSTILE FEELING BETWEEN CLASSES

Conditions Producing Class Animosity—The Spirit of Service Allays
Bitterness—Possible Decrease of the Prestige of Wealth—
Probability of a More Communal Spirit in the Use of Wealth—
Influence of Settled Rules for Social Opposition—Importance of
Face-to-Face Discussion.
Class animosity by no means increases in proportion to the separation of
classes. On the contrary, where there is a definite and recognized class
system which no one thinks of breaking down, a main cause of arrogance
and jealousy is absent. Every one takes his position for granted and is not
concerned to assert or improve it. In Spain, it is said, “you may give the
inch to any peasant; he is sure to be a gentleman, and he never thinks of
taking the ell.” So in an English tale, written about 1875, I find the
following: “The peasantry and little people in country places like to feel the
gentry far above them. They do not care to be caught up into the empyrean
of an equal humanity, but enjoy the poetry of their self-abasement in the
belief that their superiors are indeed their betters.” So at the South there was
a kind of fellowship between the races under slavery which present
conditions make more difficult. A settled inequality is the next best thing,
for intercourse, to equality.
But where the ideal of equality has entered, even slight differences may
be resented, and class feeling is most bitter, probably, where this ideal is
strong but has no regular and hopeful methods of asserting itself. In that
case aspiration turns sour and generates hateful passions. Caste countries
are safe from this by lacking the ideal of equality, democracies by partly
realizing it. But in Germany, for instance, where there is a fierce democratic
propaganda on the one hand, and a stone wall of military and aristocratic
institutions on the other, one may feel a class bitterness that we hardly know
in America. And in England also, at the present time, when classes are still
recognized but very ill-defined, there seems to be much of an uneasy

preoccupation about rank, and of the elbowing, snubbing and suspicion that
go with it. People appear to be more concerned with trying to get into a set
above them, or repressing others who are pushing up from below, than with
us. In America social position exists, but, having no such definite symbols
as in England, is for the most part too intangible to give rise to snobbery,
which is based on titles and other externalities which men may covet or
gloat over in a way hardly possible when the line is merely one of opinion,
congeniality and character.
The feeling between classes will not be very bitter so long as the ideal of
service is present in all and mutually recognized. And it is the tendency of
the democratic spirit—very imperfectly worked out as yet—to raise this
ideal above all others and make it a common standard of conduct. Thus
Montesquieu, describing an ideal democracy, says that ambition is limited
“to the sole desire, to the sole happiness, of doing greater services to our
country than the rest of our fellow citizens. They cannot all render her equal
services, but they all ought to serve her with equal alacrity.” He thinks also
that the love of frugality, by which he means compunction in material self-
indulgence, “limits the desire of having to the study of procuring necessities
to our family and superfluities to our country.”[131] If it were indeed so in
our own world, there would be no danger of a class conflict.
Possibly all states of opinion by which any service is despised are
survivals from a caste society, and reminiscent of the domination of one
order over another—just as slavery has left a feeling in the South that hand
labor is degrading. So soon as all kinds of workers share freely in the social
and political order, all work must be respected. The social prestige of
idleness, of “conspicuous leisure,” that still exists in the Old World, is
evidently a survival of this sort, and it can hardly happen in the democratic
future that “people will let their nails grow that all may see they do not
work.” “I do not call one greater and one smaller,” says Whitman, “that
which fills its period and place is equal to any.”[132] I think, however, that
there will always be especial esteem for some sorts of achievement, but the
grounds for this will, more and more, be distinction in the common service.
The excessive prestige of wealth, along with much of the ill feeling
which it involves, is also, in my opinion, rather a legacy from caste society
than a trait congenial to democracy. I have tried to show that the ascendency
of riches is really greater in the older and less democratic societies; and it

survives in democracy as much as it does partly because of the tradition that
associates wealth with an upper caste, and partly because other ideals are as
yet crude and unorganized. A real democracy of sentiment and action, a
renewed Christianity and a renewed art might make life beautiful and
hopeful for those who have little money without diminishing the
wholesome operation of the desire for gain. At present the common man is
impoverished not merely by an absolute want of money but by a current
way of thinking which makes pecuniary success the standard of merit, and
so makes him feel that failure to get money is failure of life. As we no
longer feel much admiration for mere physical prowess, apart from the use
that is made of it, so it seems natural that the same should come true of
mere pecuniary strength. The mind of a child, or of any naive person, bases
consideration chiefly on function, on what a man can do in the common
life, and it is in the line of democratic development that we should return
toward this simple and human view.
It is in accord with this movement that children of all classes are more
and more taught the use of tools, cooking and other primary arts of life.
This not only makes for economy and independence, but educates the
“instinct of workmanship,” leading us to feel an interest in all good work
and a respect for those who do it.
The main need of men is life, self-expression, not luxury, and if self-
expression can be made general material inequalities alone will excite but
little resentment.
As to the use of wealth we may expect a growing sense of social
responsibility, of which there are already cheerful indications. Since it is no
longer respectable to be idle, why may we not hope that it will presently
cease to be respectable to indulge one’s lower self in other ways—in
pecuniary greed, in luxurious eating, in display, rich clothes and other
costly and exclusive pleasures?
We must not, however, be so optimistic as to overlook the ease with
which narrow or selfish interests may form special groups of their own,
encouraging one another in greed or luxury to the neglect of the common
life. Such associations cannot altogether shut out general sentiment, but
they can and do so far deaden its influence that the more hardened or
frivolous are practically unconscious of it. While there are some cheerful

givers on a large scale among us, and many on a small one, I am not sure
that there was ever, on the whole, a commercial society that contributed a
smaller part of its gains to general causes. We have done much in this way;
but then we are enormously rich; and the most that has been done has been
by taxation, which falls most heavily upon small property-owners. The
more communal use of wealth is rather a matter of general probability, and
of faith in democratic sentiment, than of demonstrable fact.
Much might be said of the various ways in which more community
sentiment might be shown and class resentment alleviated. In the matter of
dress, for example; shall one express his community consciousness in it or
his class consciousness, assuming that each is natural and creditable? It
would seem that when he goes abroad among men the good democrat
should prefer to appear a plain citizen, with nothing about him to interrupt
intercourse with any class. And in fact, it is a wholesome feature of
American life, in notable contrast with, say, Germany, that high as well as
low are averse to wearing military or other distinctive costume in public—
except at times of festival or display, when class consciousness is in special
function. We feel that if a man wants to distinguish himself in general
intercourse he should do so in courtesy or wisdom, not in medals or clothes.
And why should not the same principle, of deference to the community in
non-essentials, apply to one’s house and to one’s way of living in general?
If he has anything worthy to express in these things, let him express it, but
not pride or luxury.
Let us not, however, formulize upon the question what one may rightly
spend money for, or imagine that formulism is practicable. The principle
that wealth is a trust held for the general good is not to be disputed; but
latitude must be left to individual conceptions of what the general good is.
These are matters not for formulas or sumptuary laws, but for conscience.
To set up any other standard would be to suppress individuality and do
more harm than good.
Some of us would be glad to see almost any amount of wealth spent upon
beautiful architecture, though we might prefer that the buildings be devoted
to some public use. Let us have beauty, even luxury, but let it be public and
communicable. It certainly seems at first sight that vast expenditure upon
private yachts, private cars, costly balls, display of jewelry, sumptuous

eating and the like, indicates a low state of culture; but perhaps this is a
mistake; no doubt there is some beneficence in these things not generally
understood.
We do not want uniformity in earning and spending, more than
elsewhere, only unity of spirit. Some writers praise the emulation that is
determined to have as fine things as others have, but while this has its uses
it is a social impulse of no high kind and keeps the mass of men feeling
poor and inferior. Our dignity and happiness would profit more if each of us
were to work out life in a way of his own without invidious comparisons.
We shall never be content except as we develop and enjoy our individuality
and are willing to forego what does not belong to it. I know that I was not
born to get or to use riches, but I am willing to believe that others are.
An essential condition of better feeling in the inevitable struggles of life
is that there should be just and accepted “rules of the game” to give moral
unity to the whole. Much must be suffered, but men will suffer without
bitterness if they believe that they do so under just and necessary principles.
A solid foundation has been laid for this, in free countries, by the
establishment of institutions under which all class conflicts are referred, in
the last resort, to human nature itself. Through free speech a general will
may be organized on any matter urgent enough to attract general attention,
and through democratic government this may be tested, recorded and
carried out. Thus is provided a tribunal free from class bias before which
controversies may be tried and settled in an orderly manner.
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance to social peace of this
recognition of the ultimate authority of public opinion, acting slowly but
surely through constitutional methods. It means a moral whole which
prescribes rules, directs sane agitation into healthy and moderate channels,
and takes away all rational ground for violence or revolution. If men, for
instance, believe that a particular kind of socialistic state is the cure for the
evils of society, let them speak, print and form their party. Perhaps they are
right; at least, they get much wholesome self-expression and a kind of
happiness out of their aspiration and labors. And if they are partly wrong,
yet they may both learn and impart much to the general advantage.
But we have made only a beginning in this. Our ethics is only a vague
outline, not a matured system, and in the details of social contact—as

between employer and workman, rich and poor, Negro and white, and so on
—there is such a lack of accepted standards that men have little to go by but
their crude impulses. All this must be worked out, in as much patience and
good will as possible, before we can expect to have peace.
Where there is no very radical conflict of essential principles, ill feeling
may commonly be alleviated by face-to-face discussion, since the more we
come to understand one another the more we get below superficial
unlikeness and find essential community. Between fairly reasonable and
honest men it is always wholesome to “have it out,” and many careful
studies of labor troubles agree regarding the large part played by
misunderstandings and suspicion that have no cause except lack of
opportunity for explanation. “The rioting would not have taken place,” says
a student of certain mining disorders, “had not the ignorance and suspicion
of the Hungarians been supplemented by the ignorance and suspicion of the
employers; and the perseverance of this mutual attitude may yet create
another riot.”[133] There is a strong temptation for those in authority,
especially if they are overworked, or conscious of being a little weak or
unready in conference, to fence themselves with formality and the type-
written letter. But a man of real fitness in any administrative capacity must
have stomach for open and face-to-face dealing with men.
And a democratic system sooner or later brings to pass face-to-face
discussion of all vital questions, because the people will be satisfied with no
other. An appearance of shirking it will arouse even more distrust and
hostility than the open avowal of selfish motives; and accordingly it is more
and more the practice of aggressive interests to seek to justify themselves
by at least the appearance of frank appeal to popular judgment.

FOOTNOTES:
[131] The Spirit of Laws, book v, chap. 3.
[132] Leaves of Grass, 71.
[133] Spahr, America’s Working People, 128.

PART V
INSTITUTIONS

CHAPTER XXVIII
INSTITUTIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL

The Nature of Institutions—Hereditary and Social Factors—The Child
and the World—Society and Personality—Personality versus the
Institution—The Institution as a Basis of Personality—The Moral
Aspect—Choice versus Mechanism—Personality the Life of
Institutions—Institutions Becoming Freer in Structure.
An institution is simply a definite and established phase of the public
mind, not different in its ultimate nature from public opinion, though often
seeming, on account of its permanence and the visible customs and symbols
in which it is clothed, to have a somewhat distinct and independent
existence. Thus the political state and the church, with their venerable
associations, their vast and ancient power, their literature, buildings and
offices, hardly appear even to a democratic people as the mere products of
human invention which, of course, they are.
The great institutions are the outcome of that organization which human
thought naturally takes on when it is directed for age after age upon a
particular subject, and so gradually crystallizes in definite forms—enduring
sentiments, beliefs, customs and symbols. And this is the case when there is
some deep and abiding interest to hold the attention of men. Language,
government, the church, laws and customs of property and of the family,
systems of industry and education, are institutions because they are the
working out of permanent needs of human nature.
These various institutions are not separable entities, but rather phases of a
common and at least partly homogeneous body of thought, just as are the
various tendencies and convictions of an individual: they are the
“apperceptive systems” or organized attitudes of the public mind, and it is
only by abstraction that we can regard them as things by themselves. We are
to remember that the social system is above all a whole, no matter how the
convenience of study may lead us to divide it.

In the individual the institution exists as a habit of mind and of action,
largely unconscious because largely common to all the group: it is only the
differential aspect of ourselves of which we are commonly aware. But it is
in men and nowhere else that the institution is to be found. The real
existence of the Constitution of the United States, for example, is in the
traditional ideas of the people and the activities of judges, legislators and
administrators; the written instrument being only a means of
communication, an Ark of the Covenant, ensuring the integrity of the
tradition.
The individual is always cause as well as effect of the institution: he
receives the impress of the state whose traditions have enveloped him from
childhood, but at the same time impresses his own character, formed by
other forces as well as this, upon the state, which thus in him and others like
him undergoes change.
If we think carefully about this matter, however, we shall see that there
are several somewhat different questions which might be included in a
study of the relation between the individual and institutions; and these we
ought to distinguish.
One of them is that of the babe to the world, or of the hereditary factor of
life, existing in us at birth, to the factor of communication and influence.
Another and quite different one is that of society and personality, or of
the relation between the mature individual and the whole of which he is a
member.
A third is the question—again a distinct one—of the relation, not
between the person and society at large, but between him and particular
institutions. This last is the one with which we are more properly
concerned, but it may not be amiss to offer some observations on the others.
The child at birth, when, we may suppose for convenience, society has
had no direct influence upon him, represents the race stock or hereditary
factor in life in antithesis to the factor of tradition, communication and
social organization. He also represents an undeveloped or merely biological
individuality in contrast to the developed social whole into which he comes.
We think of the social world as the mature, organized, institutional factor
in the problem; and yet we may well say that the child also embodies an

institution (using the word largely) and one more ancient and stable than
church or state, namely the biological type, little changed, probably, since
the dawn of history. It cannot be shown in any way that I know of that the
children born to-day of English or American parents—leaving aside any
question of race mixture—are greatly different in natural outfit from the
Saxon boys and girls, their ancestors, who played upon the banks of the
Elbe fifteen hundred years ago. The rooted instincts and temperament of
races appear to be very much what they were, and the changes of history—
the development of political institutions, the economic revolutions, the
settlement of new countries, the Reformation, the rise of science and the
like—are changes mainly in the social factor of life, which thus appears
comparatively a shifting thing.
In the development of the child, then, we have to do with the interaction
of two types, both of which are ancient and stable, though one more so than
the other. And the stir and generation of human life is precisely in the
mingling of these types and in the many variations of each one. The
hereditary outfit of a child consists of vague tendencies or aptitudes which
get definiteness and meaning only through the communicative influences
which enable them to develop. Thus babbling is instinctive, while speech
comes by this instinct being defined and instructed in society; curiosity
comes by nature, knowledge by life; fear, in a vague, instinctive form, is
supposed to be felt even by the fœtus, but the fears of later life are chiefly
social fears; there is an instinctive sensibility which develops into sympathy
and love; and so on.
Nothing is more futile than general discussions of the relative importance
of heredity and environment. It is much like the case of matter versus mind;
both are indispensable to every phase of life, and neither can exist apart
from the other: they are coördinate in importance and incommensurable in
nature. One might as well ask whether the soil or the seed predominates in
the formation of a tree, as whether nature does more for us than nurture.
The fact that most writers have a predilection for one of these factors at the
expense of the other (Mr. Galton and the biological school, for example,
seeing heredity everywhere, and not much else, while psychologists and
sociologists put the stress on influence) means only that some are trained to
attend to one class of facts and some to another. One may be more relevant

for a given practical purpose than the other, but to make a general
opposition is unintelligent.
To the eye of sentiment a new-born child offers a moving contrast to the
ancient and grimy world into which it so innocently enters; the one formed,
apparently, for all that is pure and good, “trailing clouds of glory” as some
think, from a more spiritual world than ours, pathetically unconscious of
anything but joy; the other gray and saturnine, sure to prove in many ways a
prison-house, perhaps a foul one.

“Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight.”[134]

No doubt, however, the pathos of this contrast arises in part from
somewhat fallacious preconceptions. The imagination idealizes the child,
reading its own visions into his innocence as it does into the innocence of
the sea and the mountains, and contrasting his future career not with what
he is, but with an ideal of what he might become. In truth the child already
feels, in his own way, the painful side of life; he has the seeds of darkness
in him as well as those of light, and cannot in strictness be said to be any
better than the world. The good of life transcends his imagination as much
as does the evil, and he could not become anything at all except in a social
world. The pity of the matter, which may well move every one who thinks
of it to work for better homes, schools and playgrounds, is simply that we
are about to make so poor a use of a plastic material, that he might be so
much better and happier if we would prepare a better place for him.
It is true, in a sense, as Bacon says, that youth has more of divinity, but
perhaps we might also say that it has more of deviltry; the younger life is,
the more unbound it is, not yet in harness, with more divine insight and
more reckless passion, and adolescence is the period of criminality as well
as of poetry.
There is a natural affinity between childhood and democracy; the latter
implying, indeed, that we are to become more as little children, more
simple, frank and human. And it is a very proper part of the democratic
movement that more and more prestige is attaching to childhood, that it is
more studied, cherished and respected. Probably nothing else gives such
cogency to the idea of reform as to think of what it means to children. We
wish to know that all the children of the land are happily unfolding their

minds and hearts at home, school and play; and that there is a gradual
induction into useful work, which also proceeds regularly and happily. This
calls for better homes and neighborhoods, and the overcoming of conditions
that degrade them; it implies better schools, the suppression of child-labor,
regular industrial education, wholesome and fairly paid work and
reasonable security of position. While the child is not exactly better than the
world, his possibilities make us feel that the world ought to be better for his
sake.
As fast as a child becomes a person, he also becomes a member of the
existing social order. This is simply a case of a whole and one of its
differentiated parts; having so often insisted that society and the individual
are aspects of the same thing, I need not enlarge upon it here. Even the
degenerate, so far as they have faculty enough to be human, live in the
social order and are as much one with it as the rest of mankind. We simply
cannot separate the individual from society at large; to get a contrast we
must pass on to consider him in relation to particular institutions, or to
institutions in general as distinguished from more plastic phases of life.
An institution is a mature, specialized and comparatively rigid part of the
social structure. It is made up of persons, but not of whole persons; each
one enters into it with a trained and specialized part of himself. Consider,
for instance, the legal part of a lawyer, the ecclesiastical part of a church
member or the business part of a merchant. In antithesis to the institution,
therefore, the person represents the wholeness and humanness of life; he is,
as Professor Alfred Lloyd says,[135] “a corrector of partiality, and a
translator and distributor of special development.” A man is no man at all if
he is merely a piece of an institution; he must stand also for human nature,
for the instinctive, the plastic and the ideal.
The saying that corporations have no soul expresses well enough this
defect of all definite social structures, which gives rise to an irrepressible
conflict between them and the freer and larger impulses of human nature.
Just in proportion as they achieve an effective special mechanism for a
narrow purpose, they lose humanness, breadth and adaptability. As we have
to be specially on our guard against commercial corporations, because of
their union of power and impersonality, so we should be against all
institutions.

The institution represents might, and also, perhaps, right, but right
organized, mature, perhaps gone to seed, never fresh and unrecognized.
New right, or moral progress, always begins in a revolt against institutions.
I have in mind a painting which may be said to set forth to the eye this
relation between the living soul and the institution. It represents St. James
before the Roman Emperor.[136] The former is poorly clad, beautiful, with
rapt, uplifted face; the latter majestic, dominant, assured, seated high on his
ivory chair and surrounded by soldiers.
Of course the institutional element is equally essential with the personal.
The mechanical working of tradition and convention pours into the mind
the tried wisdom of the race, a system of thought every part of which has
survived because it was, in some sense, the fittest, because it approved itself
to the human spirit. In this way the individual gets language, sentiments,
moral standards and all kinds of knowledge: gets them with an exertion of
the will trifling compared with what these things originally cost. They have
become a social atmosphere which pervades the mind mostly without its
active participation. Once the focus of attention and effort, they have now
receded into the dimness of the matter-of-course, leaving energy free for
new conquests. On this involuntary foundation we build, and it needs no
argument to show that we could accomplish nothing without it.
Thus all innovation is based on conformity, all heterodoxy on orthodoxy,
all individuality on solidarity. Without the orthodox tradition in biology, for
instance, under the guidance of which a store of ordered knowledge had
been collected, the heterodoxy of Darwin, based on a reinterpretation of this
knowledge, would have been impossible. And so in art, the institution
supplies a basis to the very individual who rebels against it. Mr. Brownell,
in his work on French Art, points out, in discussing the relation of Rodin the
innovating sculptor to the French Institute, that he owes his development
and the interest his non-conformity excites largely to “the very system that
has been powerful enough to popularize indefinitely the subject both of
subscription and revolt.”[137] In America it is not hostile criticism but no
criticism at all—sheer ignorance and indifference—that discourages the
artist and man of letters and makes it difficult to form a high ideal. Where
there is an organized tradition there may be intolerance but there will also
be intelligence.

Thus choice, which represents the relatively free action of human nature
in building up life, is like the coral insect, always working on a mountain
made up of the crystallized remains of dead predecessors.
It is a mistake to suppose that the person is, in general, better than the
institution. Morally, as in other respects, there are advantages on each side.
The person has love and aspiration and all sorts of warm, fresh, plastic
impulses, to which the institution is seldom hospitable, but the latter has a
sober and tried goodness of the ages, the deposit, little by little, of what has
been found practicable in the wayward and transient outreachings of human
idealism. The law, the state, the traditional code of right and wrong, these
are related to personality as a gray-haired father to a child. However world-
worn and hardened by conflict, they are yet strong and wise and kind, and
we do well in most matters to obey them.
A similar line of reasoning applies to the popular fallacy that a nation is
of necessity less moral in its dealings with other nations than an individual
with other individuals. International morality is on a low plane because it is
recent and undeveloped, not from any inevitable defect in its nature. It is
slow to grow, like anything else of an institutional character, but there is no
reason why it should not eventually express the utmost justice and
generosity of which we are capable. All depends upon the energy and
persistence with which people try to effectuate their ideals in this sphere.
The slowness of an institution is compensated by its capacity for age-long
cumulative growth, and in this way it may outstrip, even morally, the
ordinary achievement of individuals—as the Christian Church, for example,
stands for ideals beyond the attainment of most of its members. If we set
our hearts on having a righteous state we can have one more righteous than
any individual.
The treatment of Cuba by the United States and the suppression of the
slave-trade by the British are examples of nations acting upon generous
principles which we may reasonably expect to extend as time goes on. As
the need of international justice and peace becomes keenly felt, its growth
becomes as natural as the analogous process in an individual.
Whenever the question is raised between choice and mechanism,[138] the
advocates of the latter may justly claim that it saves energy, and may
demand whether, in a given case, the results of choice justify its cost.

Thus choice, working on a large scale, is competition, and the only
alternative is some mechanical principle, either the inherited status of
history or some new rule of stability to be worked out, perhaps, by
socialism. Yet the present competitive order is not unjustly censured as
wasteful, harassing, unjust and hostile to the artistic spirit. Choice is
working somewhat riotously, without an adequate basis of established
principles and standards, and so far as socialism is seeking these it is doing
well.
Carlyle and others have urged with much reason that the mediæval
workman, hemmed in as he was by mechanical and to us unreasonable
restrictions, was in some respects better off than his modern successor.
There was less freedom of opportunity, but also less strain, ugliness and
despair; and the standards of the day were perhaps better maintained than
ours are now.
We need a better discipline, a more adequate organization; the competent
student can hardly fail to see this; but these things do not exist ready-made,
and our present task seems to be to work them out, at the expense,
doubtless, of other objects toward which, in quieter times, choice might be
directed.
Thus it is from the interaction of personality and institutions that progress
comes. The person represents more directly that human nature which it is
the end of all institutions to serve, but the institution represents the net
result of a development far transcending any single personal consciousness.
The person will criticise, and be mostly in the wrong, but not altogether. He
will attack, and mostly fail, but from many attacks change will ensue.
It is also true that although institutions stand, in a general way, for the
more mechanical phase of life, they yet require, within themselves, an
element of personal freedom. Individuality, provided it be in harness, is the
life of institutions, all vigor and adaptability depending upon it.
An army is the type of a mechanical institution; and yet, even in an army,
individual choice, confined of course within special channels, is vital to the
machine. In the German army, according to a competent observer, there is a
systematic culture of self-reliance, a “development of the individual powers
by according liberty to the utmost extent possible with the maintenance of
the necessary system and discipline.” “To the commandant of the company

is left the entire responsibility for the instruction of his men, in what mode
and at what hour he may see fit,” and “a like freedom is accorded to every
officer charged with every branch whatsoever of instruction,” while “the
intelligence and self-reliance of the soldier is constantly appealed to.”[139]
In American armies the self-reliant spirit of the soldier and the common-
sense and adaptability developed by our rough-and-ready civilization have
always been of the utmost value. Nor are they unfavorable to discipline,
that “true discipline of the soldiers of freedom, a discipline which must
arise from individual conviction of duty and is very different from the
compulsory discipline of the soldier of despotism.”[140] Thus, in the battle
of Gettysburg, when Pickett’s charge broke the Federal line, and when for
the moment, owing to the death of many officers, the succession of
command was lost, it is said that the men without orders took up a position
which enabled them to crush the invading column.
As the general character of organization becomes freer and more human,
both the mechanical and the choosing elements of the institution rise to a
higher plane. The former ceases to be an arbitrary and intolerant law, upheld
by fear, by supernatural sanctions and the suppression of free speech; and
tends to become simply a settled habit of thought, settled not because
discussion is stifled but because it is superfluous, because the habit of
thought has so proved its fitness to existing conditions that there is no
prospect of shaking it.
Thus in a free modern state, the political system, fundamental property
rights and the like are settled, so far as they are settled, not because they are
sacred or authoritative, but because the public mind is convinced of their
soundness. Though we may not reason about them they are, so to speak,
potentially rational, inasmuch as they are believed to rest upon reason and
may at any time be tested by it.
The advantages and disadvantages of this sort of institutions are well
understood. They do not afford quite the sharp and definite discipline of a
more arbitrary system, but they are more flexible, more closely expressive
of the public mind, and so, if they can be made to work at all, more stable.
The free element in institutions also tends to become better informed,
better trained, better organized, more truly rational. We have so many
occasions to note this that it is unnecessary to dwell upon it here.