The true state must gather up every interest within itself. It must take

our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I have all these

different allegiances, I should indeed lead a divided and therefore

uninteresting life if I could not unify them, Life _would_ be “just one

damned thing after another.” The true state has my devotion because it

gathers up into itself the various sides of me, is the symbol of my

multiple self, is my multiple self brought to significance, to

self-realization. If you leave me with my plural selves, you leave me in

desolate places, my soul craving its meaning, its home. The home of my

soul is in the state.

But the true state does not “demand” my allegiance. It is the

spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our multiple

interests. And as it does not “demand” allegiance, so also it does not

“compete” with trade-unions etc., as the present state often does, for

my allegiance. We have been recently told that the tendency of the state

is to be intolerant of “any competing interest or faith or hope,” but if

it is, the cure is not to make it tolerant, but to make it recognize

that the very substance of its life is all these interests and faiths

and hopes. Every group which we join must increase our loyalty to the

state because the state must recognize fully every legitimate interest.

Our political machinery must not be such that I get what I need by

pitting the group which most clearly embodies my need against the state;

it must be such that my loyalty to my trade-union is truly part of my

loyalty to the state.

When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the state

conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I am a

trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union clash at the

time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of immediate action,

decide between these loyalties. But my duty to either group or state is

not thereby exhausted: I must, if my disapproval of war is to be neither

abandoned nor remain a mere particularist conviction, seek to change the

policy of my state in regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing

that there can be no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted

against the state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial

and political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can

become a constituent part of the interests of the state.

I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable of a

unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will claim, but

that is something very different from an “undivided” allegiance. It is,

to use James’ phrase again, a compounding of allegiances. “Multiple

allegiance” leaves us with the abnormal idea of competing groups.

“Supplementary allegiance” gives us too fragmentary an existence.

“Coöperative allegiance” comes nearer the truth. Can we not perhaps

imagine a coöperative or unified allegiance, all these various and

varying allegiances actually living in and through the other?

We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying

power: it is the state-principle when two or three are gathered

together, when any differences are harmonized. Our problem is how all

the separate community sense and community loyalty and community

responsibility can be gathered up into larger community sense and

loyalty and control.

One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the

unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static state.

We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to ourselves

to-day, but organized as a plastic state, those commands may change

to-morrow with our changing needs and changing ideals, and they will

change through _our_ initiative. The true state is neither an external

force nor an unchanging force. Rooted in our most intimate daily lives,

in those bonds which are at the same time the strongest and the most

pliant, the “absolutism” of the true state depends always upon _our_

activity. The objectors to the unified state seem to imply that it is

necessarily a ready-made state, with hard and fast articulations,

existing apart from us, imposing its commands upon us which we must

obey; but the truth is that the state must be in perfect flux and that

it is utterly dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we

actualize it, it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we

see it in a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an

arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification to

express its different stages of growth which each and all must be so

flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of continual

growth.

But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists does not I

believe take from them the right to leadership in political thought.

First, they prick the bubble of the present state’s right to supremacy.

They see that the state which has been slowly forming since the Middle

Ages with its pretences and unfulfilled claims has not won either our

regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we render this state

obedience? “[The state must] prove itself by what it achieves.” With the

latter we are all beginning to agree.

Genuine power, in the sense not of power actually possessed, but in the

sense of a properly evolved power, is, we have seen, an actual

psychological process. Invaluable, therefore, is the implicit warning of

the pluralists that to attain this power is an infinite task.

Sovereignty is always a-growing; our political forms must keep closely

in touch with the specific stage of that growth. In rendering the state

obedience, we assume that the state has genuine power (because the

consequences of an opposite assumption would be too disastrous) while we

are trying to approximate it. The great lesson of Mr. Laski’s book is in

its implication that we do not have a sovereign state until we make one.

Political theory will not _create_ sovereignty, acts of Parliament

cannot _confer_ sovereignty, only living the life will turn us, subjects

indeed at present, into kings of our own destiny.

Moreover, recently some of the pluralists are beginning to use the

phrase coöperative sovereignty[134] which seems happily to be taking

them away from their earlier “strung-along” sovereignty. If they press

along this path, we shall all be eager to follow.

Secondly, they recognize the value of the group and they see that the

variety of our group life to-day has a significance which must be

immediately reckoned with in political method. Moreover they repudiate

the idea that the groups are given authority by the state. An able

political writer recently said, “All other societies rest on the

authority given by the state. The state itself stands self-sufficient,

self-directing....” It is this school of thought which the pluralists

are combating and thereby rendering invaluable service to political

theory.

Third, and directly connected with the last point, they plead for a

revivification of local life. It is interesting to note that the

necessity of this is recognized both by those who think the state has

failed and by those who wish to increase the power of the state. To the

former, the group is to be the substitute for the repudiated state. As

for the latter, the Fabians have long felt that local units should be

vitalized and educated and interested, for they thought that socialism

would begin with the city and other local units. Neighborhood education

and neighborhood organization is then the pressing problem of 1918. All

those who are looking towards a real democracy, not the pretence of one

which we have now, feel that the most imminent of our needs is the

awakening and invigorating, the educating and organizing of the local

unit. All those who in the humblest way, in settlement or community

centre, are working for this, are working at the greatest political

problem of the twentieth century.

In the fourth place the pluralists see that the interest of the state is

not now always identical with the interests of its parts. It is to the

interest of England to win this war, they say, but England has yet to

prove that it is also for the interest of her working people.

In the fifth place, we may hail the group school as the beginning of the

disappearance of the crowd. Many people advocate vocational

representation because they see in it a method of getting away from our

present crowd rule, what they call numerical representation. They see

our present voters hypnotized by their leaders and manipulated by

“interests,” and propose the occupational group as a substitute for the

crowd. New political experiments must indeed be along this line. We must

guard only (1) that the “group” itself shall not be a crowd, (2) that

the union of groups shall not be a numerical union.

Finally, this new school contains the prophecy of the future because it

has with keenest insight seized upon the problem of identity, of

association, of federalism,[135] as the central problem of politics as

it is the central problem of life. The force of the pluralist school is

that it is not academic; it is considering a question which every

thoughtful person is asking himself. We are faced to-day with a variety

of group interests, with many objects demanding our enthusiasm and

devotion; our duty itself shines, not a single light showing a single

path, but shedding a larger radiance on a life which is most gloriously

not a path at all. Shall Boston or Washington hold me, my family, my

church, my union? With the complexity of interests increasing every day

on the outside, inside with the power of the soul to “belong” expanding

every day (the English and the French flags stir us hardly less than the

American now), with the psychologists talking of pluralism and the

political scientists of multiple sovereignty, with all this yet the soul

of man seeks unity in obedience to his essential nature. How is this to

be obtained? Social evolution is in the hands of those who can solve

this problem.

What is the law of politics that corresponds in importance to the law of

gravitation in the physical world? It is the law of interpenetration and

of multiples. I am the multiple man and the multiple man is the germ of

the unified state. If I live fully I become so enriched by the manifold

sides of life that I cannot be narrowed down to mere corporation or

church or trade-union or any other special group. The miracle of spirit

is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain

unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided. I am not a serial story to be read

only in the different instalments of my different groups. We do not give

a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to each

and the whole remains for every other relation. Life escapes its

classifications and this is what some of the writers on group

organization do not seem to understand. This secret of the spirit is the

power of the federal principle. True federation multiplies each

individual. We have thought that federal government consisted of

mechanical, artificial, external forms, but really it is the spirit

which liveth and giveth life.

Let the pluralists accept this principle and they will no longer tell us

that they are torn by a divided allegiance. Let them carry their

pragmatism a step further and they will see that it is only by actual

living that we can understand an undivided allegiance. James tells us

that “Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in

living its own undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and

creates.” This is the way we must understand an undivided allegiance. I

live forever the undivided life. As an individual I am the undivided

one, as the group-I, I am again the undivided one, as the state-I, I am

the undivided one—I am always and forever the undivided one, mounting

from height to height, always mounting, always the whole of me mounting.

-----

Footnote 133:

See p. 39, note.

Footnote 134:

Mr. Laski, I think.

Footnote 135:

It does not matter in the terms of which branch of study you express

it—philosophy, sociology, or political science—it is always the same

problem.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXXIII

INCREASING RECOGNITION OF THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP

--------------

FROM the confessedly embryonic stage of thinking in which the movement

for group organization still is, two principal questions have emerged:

(1) shall the groups form a pluralistic or a unifying state, (2) shall

the economic group be the sole basis of representation? The first

question I have tried to answer, the second offers greater difficulties

with our present amount of experience. Men often discuss the

occupational vs. the neighborhood group on the pivotal question—which of

these is nearest a man? Benoist’s plea for the occupational group was

that politics must represent _la vie_. But, agreed as to that, we still

question whether the occupational group is the most complete embodiment

of _la vie_.

It is not, however, necessary to balance the advantages of neighborhood

and occupational group, for I am not proposing that the neighborhood

group take the place of the occupational. We may perhaps come to wish

for an integration of neighborhood and industrial groups—and other

groups too as their importance and usefulness demand—as their

“objective” value appears. In our neighborhood group we shall find that

we can correct many partial points of view which we get from our more

specialized groups. A director of a corporation will be more valuable to

his state and even to his corporation if he is at the same time the

member of a neighborhood group. It may be that we shall work out some

machinery by which the neighborhood group can include the occupational

group. All our functions must be expressed, but somewhere must come that

coördination which will give them their real effectiveness. We are not

yet ready to say what the machinery will be, only to recognize some of

the principles which should guide us in constructing that machinery. The

power of an individual is his power to live a vital group life. The more

your society is diversified in group life, the higher the stage of

civilization. Perhaps the destiny of the neighborhood group is to

interpret and correlate, to give full significance and value to, all the

spontaneous association which our increasingly fuller and more varied

life is constantly creating. It may be that the neighborhood group is

not so much to _include_ the others as to make each see its relation

through every other to every other.[136] The possible solution,

mentioned above, of the two houses of our legislatures and parliaments

dividing neighborhood and occupational representation, seems a little

crude now to our further analysis unless some practical integration is

being worked out at the same time in the local unit. But all this must

be a matter of experiment and experience, of patient trial and

open-minded observation.[137]

The salient fact, however, is that neighborhood and occupational groups,

either independently or one through the other, must both find

representation in the state. But we must remember that it is industry

which must be included in the state, not labor, but labor and capital.

This war certainly shows us the importance of the great organizations of

industry. Let them be integrated openly with the state on the side of

their public service, rather than allow a back-stairs connection on the

side of their “interests.” And let them be integrated in such manner

that labor itself is at last included in our political organization.

This will not be easy; as a matter of fact we have no more difficult, as

we have no more important, problem before us than the relation within

the state of one powerful organized body to another and of these bodies

to the state. The average American is against the growth of corporate

bodies. But this prejudice must go: we need strong corporate bodies not

to compete with the state but to minister to the state. Individualism

and concentrated authority have been struggling for supremacy with us

since the beginning of our government. From the beginning of our

government we have been seeking the synthesis of the two. That synthesis

is to be found in the recognition of organized groups, but not, I

believe, by taking away power from the state and giving to the group.

Some of the pluralists, in their reaction to the present fear of

powerful groups, advocate that groups should be given more and more

power. I agree with them so far, but their implication is that we shall

thereby have shorn the Samson locks of the state. This I do not believe

we want to do.

Every one sees the necessity to-day of the increase of state control as

a war measure, but some tell us that we should guard against its dangers

by giving to certain organizations within the state enough power to

“balance” the state. I insist that balance can never be the aim of sound

political method. We must first change our conception of the

state—substitute the Service State for the Sovereign State—then methods

must be devised within which such new conception can operate. We should,

indeed, give more and more power to the groups, or rather, because we

can never “give” power, we should recognize all the power which springs

up spontaneously within the state, and seek merely those methods by

which that self-generating power shall tend immediately to become part

of the strength of the state.

How absurd our logic has been. We knew that it took strong men to make a

strong state; we did not realize that those groups which represent the

whole industry and business of the country need not be rivals of the

state, but must be made to contribute to the state, must be the means by

which the state becomes great and powerful at the same time that it uses

that power for the well-being and growth of all. Our timidity has been

but the reflection of our ignorance. A larger understanding is what we

need to-day. There is no need to condemn the state, as do the

pluralists; there is no need to condemn our great corporate bodies, as

do their opponents. But full of distrust we shall surely be, on one side

or the other, until we come truly to understand a state and to create a

state which ministers continuously to its parts, while its parts from

hour to hour serve only the enhancement of its life, and through it, the

enhancement of the life of its humblest member.

The tendency to which we have long been subject, to do away with

everything which stood between man and the state, must go, but that does

not mean that we must fly to the other extreme and do away with either

the individual or the state. One of the chief weaknesses of political

pluralism is that it has so many of the earmarks of a reaction—the truth

is that we have groups _and_ man _and_ the state, all to deal with.

Neighborhood groups, economic groups, unifying groups, these have been

my themes, and yet the point which I wish to emphasize is not the kind

of group, but that the group whatever its nature shall be a genuine

group, that we can have no genuine state at all which does not rest on

genuine groups. Few trade-unionists in demanding that their organization

shall be the basis of the new state examine that organization to see

what right it has to make this demand. Most trade-unionists are

satisfied in their own organizations with a centralized government or an

outworn representative system. Labor can never have its full share in

the control of industry until it has learnt the secrets of the group

process. Collective bargaining must first be the result of a genuine

collective will before it can successfully pass on to directorate

representation, to complete joint control.[138]

It is significant that the guild socialists, in considering how

acrimonious disputes between guilds are to be avoided, say that “the

labor and brains of each Guild naturally [will evolve] a hierarchy to

which large issues of industrial policy might with confidence be

referred,” and “at the back of this hierarchy and finally dominating it,

is the Guild democracy....” But then guild socialism is to have no

different psychological basis from our present system. This is exactly

what we rely on now so patiently, so unsuccessfully—the lead of the few,

the following of the crowd, with the fiction that, as our government is

based on numbers, the crowd can always have what it wants; therefore, at

any moment what we have is what we have chosen—Tammany rule for

instance. We need a new method: the group process must be applied to

industrial groups as well as to neighborhood groups, to business groups,

to professional societies—to every form of human association. If the

labor question is to be solved by a system of economic control based on

economic representation instead of upon vital modes of association,

“industrial democracy” will fail exactly as so-called political

democracy has failed.

Perhaps this warning is particularly necessary at the present moment

because “group” control of industry seems imminent. Through the pressure

of the war guild socialism has made practical as well as theoretical

headway in England. There are two movements going on side by side, both

due it is true to the emergency of war, but neither of which will be

wholly lost when the war is over; it is the opinion of many, on the

contrary, that these movements are destined to shape a new state for

England. First, the government has assumed a certain amount of control

over munition plants, railroads, mines, breweries, flour mills and

factories of various kinds, and it has undertaken the regulation of

wages and prices, control of markets and food consumption, taxation of

profits etc.[139]

Secondly, at the same time that the state is assuming a larger control

of industry, it is inviting the workmen themselves to take part in the

control of industry. “The Whitley Report, adopted by the Reconstruction

Committee of the Cabinet, proposes not only a Joint Standing Industrial

Council for each great national industry, for the regular consideration

of matters affecting the progress and well-being of the trade, but

District Councils and Works Committees within each business upon which

capital and labor shall be equally represented.” These bodies will take

up “questions of standard wages, hours, overtime, apprenticeship, shop

discipline, ... technical training, industrial research and invention,

the adoption of improved machinery and processes, and all those matters

which are included under ‘scientific management.’”[140]

This is a step which goes far beyond arbitration and conciliation

boards. It gives to labor a positive share in the control of industry.

“Although it is not at present proposed to give any legal recognition to

this new machinery of economic government or any legal enforcement of

its decision, ... it may reasonably be expected that [these national

industrial councils] will soon become the effective legislature of the

industry.”

Most noteworthy is the general acceptance of this plan. “All classes

appear to be willing and even anxious to apply the principle of

representative self-government not only to the conduct of the great

trades but to their constituent businesses.” Undoubtedly the English

laborer has an increasing fear of bureaucracy and this is turning him

from state socialism: his practical experience during the war of

“tyrannical” bureaucracy in the government controlled industries has

lost state socialism many supporters.

The establishment of the Standing Industrial Councils is a step towards

guild socialism although (1) the determination of lines of production,

the buying and selling processes, questions of finance, everything in

fact outside shop-management, is at present left to the employers, and

(2) the capitalist is left in possession of his capital. But this

movement taken together with the one mentioned above, that is, the trend

towards state-ownership or joint ownership or partial control, has large

significance: the state to own the means of production, the producers to

control the conditions of production, seems like the next step in

industrial development, in government form,—the fact that these two go

together, that government form is to follow industrial development,

gives us large hope for the future.

The British Labor Party in 1917 formulated a careful plan for

reorganization with a declared object of common ownership of means of

production and “a steadily increasing participation of the organized

workers in the management.”[141] This wording is significant.

In America also the pressure of war has led to the recognition of labor

in the control of industry. Adjustment boards containing labor

representatives have been required of almost all private employers

signing contracts with the War and Navy Departments.[142] The policy of

the administration is to recognize collective bargaining. And the

President’s Mediation Commission, which imposed collective agreements on

the copper industry of Arizona, stated in its official report, “The

leaders of industry must ... [enable] labor to take its place as a

coöperator in the industrial enterprise.” Moreover, the workman is

gaining recognition not only in the management of the industry in which

he is engaged, but also at Washington. On most of the important

government boards which deal with matters affecting labor, labor is

represented. The work of the War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies

Board mark our advance in the treatment of labor questions.

The “National Party,” inaugurated in Chicago in October, 1917, composed

largely of socialists, had for one plank in its platform, “The chief

industries should be controlled by administrative boards upon which the

workers, the managers and the government should all be represented.”

Thus the old state socialism is passing.

In France long before the war we see the beginnings of syndicalism in

the steps taken to give to the actual teaching force of universities a

share in the administration of the department of education. In 1896–1897

university councils were established, composed of deans and two

delegates elected by each university faculty. While these councils are

under ministerial control, this is hailed as the beginning of

functionarist decentralization in France. In 1910 was organized the

representation of all the personnel of the service of post, telephone

and telegraph in regional and central councils of discipline, and also

advisory representation to the heads of the service.

The best part of syndicalism is its recognition that every department of

our life must be controlled by those who know most about that

department, by those who have most to do with that department. Teachers

should share both in the legislation and the administration affecting

education. Factory laws should not be made by a Parliament in which

factory managers and employees are not, or are only partially,

represented.

One movement toward syndicalism we see everywhere: the forming of

professional groups—commercial, literary, scientific, artistic—is as

marked as the forming of industrial groups. Any analysis of society

to-day must study its groupings faithfully. We are told too that in

France these professional groups are beginning to have political power,

as was seen in several large towns in the municipal elections before the

war. Similar instances are not wanting in England and America.

In Germany there are three strong “interest” organizations which have a

large influence on politics: the “Landlords’ League” which represents

the conservatives, the “Social Democrats” who represent labor, and the

“Hanseatic League for Manufactures, Trade and Industry” founded in 1909

with the express object of bringing forward its members as candidates

for the Reichstag and Landtags.[143]

We have an interesting instance in the United States of political

organization on occupational lines from which we may learn much—I refer

to the Nonpartisan league of North Dakota composed of farmers which,

inaugurated in 1915, in 1916–7 carried the state elections of North

Dakota, electing a farmer-governor, and putting their candidates in

three of the supreme court judgeships, and gaining 105 out of the 138

seats in the state legislature. The first object of the league was the

redress of economic injustice suffered by the farmer. They saw that this

must be done through concerted control of the political machinery. Of

the legislation they wished, they secured: (1) a new office of State

Inspector of Grains, Weights and Measures, (2) partial exemption of farm

improvements from taxation, (3) a new coöperative corporation law, and

(4) a law to prevent railroads from discriminating, in supplying

freight-cars, against elevators owned by farmers’ coöperative societies.

In 1917 a Farmers’ Nonpartisan League of the state of New York was

organized. In September, 1917, the North Dakota League became the

“National Nonpartisan League,” the organization spreading to several of

the neighboring states: Minnesota, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, etc. At

the North Dakota state primaries held in the summer of 1918, nearly all

the League’s candidates were nominated, thus insuring the continuance of

its control of the state government.

In Denmark we are told the battle rages between the agrarian party and

the labor party. More and more the struggle in Parliamentary countries

is becoming a struggle between interests rather than between parties

based on abstract principles. This must be fully taken into account in

the new state.

The hoped-for relation of industry to the state might be summed up thus:

we want a state which shall include industry without on the one hand

abdicating to industry, or on the other controlling industry

bureaucratically. The present plans for guild socialism or syndicate

control, while they point to a possible future development, and while

they may be a step on the way, as a scheme of political organization

have many weak points. Such experiments as the Industrial Councils of

England are interesting, but until further technique is worked out we

shall find that individual selfishness merely gives way to group

selfishness. From such experiments we shall learn much, but the new ship

of state cannot ride on such turbulent waters.

The part labor will take in the new state depends now largely upon labor

itself. Labor must see that it cannot reiterate its old cries, that it

need no longer demand “rights.” It is a question of a new conception of

the state and labor seeing its place within it. For a new state is

coming—we cannot be blind to the signs on every side, we cannot be deaf

to the voices within. Labor needs leaders to-day who are alive not to

the needs of labor, but to the needs of the whole state: then it will be

seen as a corollary how labor fits in, what the state needs from labor,

what labor needs from the state, what part labor is to have _in_ the

state.

-----

Footnote 136:

See pp. 199–201.

Footnote 137:

Some writers talk of trade representation vs. party organization as if

in the trade group you are rid of party. Have they studied the

politics of trade unionism? In neither the trade group nor the

neighborhood group do you automatically get rid of the party spirit.

That will be a slow growth indeed.

Footnote 138:

Yet perhaps the trade-union has been one of the truest groups, one of

the most effective teachers of genuine group lessons which we have yet

seen. Increased wages, improved conditions, are always for the group.

The trade-unionist feels group-wants; he seeks to satisfy these

through group action. Moreover the terms of a collective bargain

cannot be enforced without a certain amount of group solidarity. In

strikes workmen often sacrifice their own interests for what will

benefit the union: the individual—I may prefer his present wages to

the privations of a strike; the group-I wants to raise the wages of

the whole union.

Footnote 139:

I have not in this brief statement distinguished between government

“ownership,” “control,” “regulation,” etc. See “War-Time Control of

Industry” by Howard L. Gray.

Footnote 140:

“Representative Government in British Industry” by J. A. Hobson, in

_New Republic_, September 1, 1917.

Footnote 141:

See p. 120.

Footnote 142:

Following the precedent of England which provided, under the Munitions

of War act and other legislation, machinery (joint boards representing

employers and employed) for the prevention and adjustment of labor

disputes.

Footnote 143:

Christensen, “Politics and Crowd Morality,” p. 238.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART IV

THE DUAL ASPECT OF THE GROUP:

A UNION OF INDIVIDUALS, AN INDIVIDUAL IN A LARGER UNION

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXXIV

THE MORAL STATE AND CREATIVE CITIZENSHIP

--------------

WE see now that the state as the appearance of the federal principle

must be more than a coördinating agency. It must appear as the great

moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering. What is morality?

The fulfilment of relation by man to man, since it is impossible to

conceive an isolated man: the father and mother appear in our mind and

with the three the whole infinite series. The state is the ordering of

this infinite series into their right relations that the greatest

possible welfare of the total may be worked out. This ordering of

relations is morality in its essence and completeness. The state must

gather up into itself all the moral power of its day, and more than

this, as our relations are widening constantly it must be the explorer

which discovers the kind of ordering, the kind of grouping, which best

expresses its intent.

But “things are rotten in Denmark.” The world is at present a moral

bankrupt, for nations are immoral and men worship their nations. We have

for centuries been thinking out the morals of individuals. The morality

of the state must now have equal consideration. We spring to that duty

to-day. We have the ten commandments for the individual; we want the ten

commandments for the state.

How is the state to gain moral and spiritual authority?

Only through its citizens in their growing understanding of the widening

promise of relation. The neighborhood group feeds the imagination

because we have daily to consider the wants of all in order to make a

synthesis of those wants; we have to recognize the rights of others and

adapt ourselves to them. Men must recognize and unify difference and

then the moral law appears in all its majesty in concrete form. This is

the universal striving. This is the trend of all nature—the harmonious

unifying of all. The call of the moral law is constantly to recognize

this. Our neighborhood group gives us preëminently the opportunity for

moral training, the associated groups continue it, the goal, the

infinite goal, the emergence of the all-inclusive state which is the

visible appearance of the total relativity of man in all right

connections and articulations.

The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual activity of

its citizens. There is no state except through me. James’ deep-seated

antagonism to the idealists is because of their assertion that the

absolute is, always has been and always will be. The contribution of

pragmatism is that we must work out the absolute. You are drugging

yourselves, cries James, the absolute is real as far as you make it

real, as far as you bring forth in tangible, concrete form all its

potentialities. In the same way we have no state until we make one. This

is the teaching of the new psychology. We have not to “postulate” all

sorts of things as the philosophers do (“organic actuality of the moral

order” etc.), we have to _live_ it; if we can make a moral whole then we

shall know whether or not there is one. We cannot become the state

imaginatively, but only actually through our group relations. Stamped

with the image of All-State-potentiality we must be forever making the

state. We are pragmatists in politics as the new school of philosophy is

in religion: just as they say that we are one with God not by prayer and

communion alone, but by doing the God-deed every moment, so we are one

with the state by actualizing the latent state at every instant of our

lives. As God appears only through us, so is the state made visible

through the political man. We must gird up our loins, we must light our

lamp and set forth, we must _do_ it.

The federal state can be the moral state only through its being built

anew from hour to hour by the activity of all its members. We have had

within our memory three ideas of the individual’s relation to society:

the individual as deserving “rights” _from_ society, next with a duty

_to_ society, and now the idea of the individual as an activity _of_

society. Our relation to society is so close that there is no room for

either rights or duties. This means a new ethics and a new politics.

Citizenship is not a right nor a privilege nor a duty, but an activity

to be exercised every moment of the time. Democracy does not exist

unless each man is doing his part fully every minute, unless every one

is taking his share in building the state-to-be. This is the trumpet

call to men to-day. A creative citizenship must be made the force of

American political life, a trained, responsible citizenship always in

control creating always its own life. In most of the writing on American

politics we find the demand for a “creative statesmanship” as the most

pressing need of America to-day. It is indeed true that with so much

crystallized conservatism and chaotic radicalism we need leadership and

a constructive leadership, but the doctrine of true democracy is that

every man is and must be a creative citizen.

We are now awaking to this need. In the past the American conception of

government has been a machine-made not a man-made thing. We have wanted

a perfect machine which could be set going like an international

exhibition by pressing the button, but who is going to press the button?

We have talked about the public without thinking that we were the

public, of public opinion as something quite distinct from any opinion

of our own. It is partly because men have not wanted the trouble of

governing themselves that they have put all their faith in “good”

officials and “good” charters. “I hate this school, I wish it would burn

up,” wrote a boy home, “there’s too much old self-government about it,

you can’t have any fun.” Many of us have not wanted that kind of

government.

The idea of the state as a collection of units has fatally misled us in

regard to our duty as citizens. A man often thinks of his share in the

collective responsibility for Boston as a 1/500,000 part of the whole

responsibility. This is too small a part to interest him, and therefore

he often disregards such an infinitesimal duty altogether. Of course we

tell him about little drops of water, little grains of sand etc., but

hitherto such eloquence has produced little effect. This is because it

is untrue. We must somehow make it clear that the part of every man in a

great city is not analogous to the grain of sand in the desert, it is

not a 1/500,000 part of the whole duty. It is a part so bound up with

every other part that no fraction of a whole can represent it. It is

like the key of a piano, the value of which is not in its being 1/56 of

all the notes, but in its infinite relations to all the other notes. If

that note is lacking every other note loses its value.

Another twist in our ideas which has tended to reduce our sense of

personal responsibility has been that we have often thought of democracy

as a happy method by which all our particular limitations are lost sight

of in the general strength. Matthew Arnold said, “Democracy is a force

in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness

of each man taken by himself.” But there is no mysterious value in

people conceived of all together. A lot of ignorant or a lot of bad

people do not acquire wisdom and virtue the moment we conceive them

collectively. There is no alchemy by which the poornesses and weaknesses

of the individual get transmuted in the group; there is no trick by

which we can lose them in the whole. The truth is that all that the

individual has or is enhances society, all that the individual lacks,

detracts from society. The state will become a splendid thing when each

one of us becomes a splendid individual. Democracy does not mean being

lost in the mass, it means the contribution of every power I possess to

social uses. The individual is not lost in the whole, he makes the

whole.

A striking exception to the attitude of the average American in the

matter of his personal responsibility was Mr. John Jay Chapman’s visit

to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, to do penance for “that blot on American

history”—the burning a negro to death in the public square of

Coatesville—because he felt that “it was not the wickedness of

Coatesville but the wickedness of all America.”

But there are signs to-day of a new spirit among us. We have begun to be

restless under our present political forms: we are demanding that the

machine give way to the man, we want a world of men governed by the will

of men. What signs have we that we are now ready for a creative

citizenship?

Every one is claiming to-day a share in the larger life of society. Each

of us wants to pour forth in community use the life that we feel welling

up within us. Citizens’ associations, civic clubs and forums are

springing up every day in every part of the country. Men are seeking

through direct government a closer share in law-making. The woman

suffrage movement, the labor movement, are parts of this vital and

irresistible current. They have not come from surface springs, their

sources are deep in the life forces of our age. There is a more

fundamental cause of our present unrest than the superficial ones given

for the woman movement, or the selfish ones given for our labor

troubles: it is not the “demand for justice” from women nor the

“economic greed” of labor, but the desire for one’s place, for each to

give his share, for each to control his own life—this is the underlying

thought which is so profoundly moving both men and women to-day.

But a greater awakening has come since April, 1917. It has taken the

ploughshare of fire to reveal our true selves: this war is running the

furrows deep in the hearts of men and turning up desires of which they

were unconscious themselves in their days of ease. Men are flocking to

Washington at the sacrifice of business and personal interests willing

to pour out their all for the great stake of democracy; the moment came

when the possession of self-government was imperilled and all leapt

forward ready to lay down their lives to preserve it. This war has

revealed the deeper self with its deeper wishes to every man and he sees

that he prizes beyond life the power to govern himself. Now is the

moment to use all this rush of patriotism and devotion and love of

liberty and willingness to serve, and not let it sink back again into

its hidden and subterranean depths. Let us develop the kind of

institutions which will call forth and utilize these powers and energies

for peace as for war, for the works of peace are glorious if men can but

see the goal. Let us make a fitting abiding place for men’s innate

grandeur. Let us build high the walls of democracy and enlarge its

courts for our daily dwelling.

Then must men understand that in peace as in war ours is to be a life of

endeavor, of work, of conscious effort towards conscious ends. The

ordinary man is not to do his work and then play a little in order to

refresh himself, with the understanding that the world of industry and

the government of his country are to be run by experts. They are to be

run by him and he is to prepare himself to tackle his job. The

leisure-time problem is not how the workman can have more time for play,

it is how he can have more time for association, to take his share in

the integrated thought and will and responsibility which is to make the

new world. The “good citizen” is not he who obeys the laws, but he who

has an active sense of being an integral part of the state. This is the

essence and the basis of effective good citizenship. We are not part of

a nation because we are living within its boundaries, because we feel in

sympathy with it and have accepted its ideas, because we have become

naturalized. We are part of a nation only in so far as we are helping to

make that nation.

For this we must provide methods by which every man is enabled to take

his part. We are no longer to put business and political affairs in the

hands of one set of men and then appoint another set as watch-dogs over

them, with the people at best a sort of chorus in the background, at the

worst practically non-existent. But we are so to democratize our

industrial and our political methods that all will have a share in

policy and in responsibility. Exhortation to good citizenship is

useless. We get good citizenship by creating those forms within which

good citizenship can operate, by making it possible to acquire the habit

of good citizenship by the practice of good citizenship.

The neighborhood group gives the best opportunity for the training and

for the practice of citizenship. The leader of a neighborhood group

should be able to help every one discover his greatest ability, he

should see the stimulus to apply, the path of approach, that the

constituents of his neighborhood should not merely serve, but should

serve in exactly that way which will best fit themselves into the

community’s needs. The system of war registration where men and women

record what they are best able to do, might, through the medium of the

neighborhood group, be applied to the whole country. The chief object of

neighborhood organization is not to right wrongs, as is often supposed,

but to found more firmly and build more widely the right.

Moreover, neighborhood organization gives us a definite objective for

individual responsibility. We cannot understand our duty or perform our

duty unless it is a duty to _something_. It is because of the erroneous

notion that the individual is related to “society” rather than to a

group or groups that we can trace much of our lack of responsibility. A

man trusts vaguely that he is doing his duty to “society,” but such

vagueness gets him nowhere. There is no “society,” and therefore he

often does no duty. But let him once understand that his duty is to his

group—to his neighborhood group, to his industrial group—and he will

begin to see his duty as a specific, concrete thing taking definite

shape for him.

But my gospel is not for a moment of citizenship as a mere duty. We must

bring to politics passion and joy. It is not through the cramping and

stultification of desire that life is nobly lived, it is through seeing

life in its fulness. We want to use the whole of man. You cannot put

some of his energies on one side and some on the other and say some are

good and some bad—all are good and should be put to good use. Men follow

their passions and should do so, but they must purify their passions,

educate them, discipline and direct them. We turn our impulses to wrong

uses, but our impulses are not wrong. The forces of life should be used,

not stifled. It is not corruption, dishonesty, we have to fight; it is

ignorance, lack of insight, desires not transmuted. We want a state

which will transmute the instincts of men into the energies of the

nation. You cannot dam the stream entirely, you can only see that it

flows so as to irrigate and fructify. It all comes down to our fear of

men. If we could believe in men, if we could see that circle which

unites human passion and divine achievement as a halo round the head of

each human being, then social and political reorganization would no

longer be a hope but a fact. The old individualism feared men; the

corner-stone of the new individualism is faith in men. We need a

constructive faith and a robust faith, faith in men, in this world, in

this day, in the Here and the Now.

From the belief of savages in the spirits who ruled their fate to the

“power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness,” through the weak

man’s reliance on luck and the strong man’s reliance on his isolated

individuality, we have had innumerable forms of the misunderstanding of

responsibility. But all this is now changing. The distinguishing mark of

our age is that we are coming to a keen sense of personal

responsibility, that we are taking upon ourselves the blame for all our

evils, the charge for all our progress. We are beginning to realize that

the redemptive power is within the social bond, that we have creative

evolution only through individual responsibility.

The old ways of thinking are breaking up. The New Life is before us. Are

we ready? Are we making ourselves ready? A new man is needed for the New

Life—a man who understands self-discipline, who understands training,

who is willing to purge himself of his particularist desires, who is

conscious of relations as the stuff of his existence.

To sum up this chapter: the moral state is the task of man. This must be

achieved through the creative power of man as brought into visibility

and actuality through his group life. The great cosmic force in the womb

of humanity is latent in the group as its creative energy; that it may

appear the individual must do his duty every moment. We do not get the

whole power of the group unless every individual is given full value, is

giving full value. It is the creative spontaneity of each which makes

life march on irresistibly to the purposes of the whole. Our social and

political organization must be such that this group life is possible. We

hear much of “the wasted forces of our nation.” The neighborhood

organization movement is a movement to use some of the wasted forces of

this nation—it is the biggest movement yet conceived for conservation.

Have we more “value” in forests and water-power in America than in human

beings? The new generation cries, “No, this release of the spiritual

energy of human beings is to be the salvation of the nation, for the

life of all these human beings is the nation.” The success of democracy

depends (1) upon the degree of responsibility it is possible to arouse

in every man and woman, (2) on the opportunity they are given to

exercise that responsibility. The new democracy depends upon you and me.

It depends upon you and me because there is no one else in the world but

you and me. If I pledge myself to the new democracy and you pledge

yourself to the new democracy, a new motor force will be born in the

world.

We need to-day new principles. We can reform and reform but all this is

on the surface. What we have got to do is to change some of the

fundamental ideas of our American life. This is not being disloyal to

our past, it is exactly the opposite. Let us be loyal to our inheritance

and tradition, but let us understand what that inheritance and tradition

truly is. It is not _our_ tradition to stick to an outworn past, a

conventional ideal, a rigid religion. We are children of men who have

not been afraid of new continents or new ideas. In our blood is the

impulse to leap to the highest we can see, as the wills of our fathers

fixed themselves on the convictions of their hearts. To spring forward

and then to follow the path steadfastly is forever the duty of

Americans. We must _live_ democracy.

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XXXV

THE WORLD STATE

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WE have seen the true state emerging through the working of the

federal principle, dual in its nature: (1) created by the law of

interpenetration, the unifying of difference, and (2) representing the

multiple man in his essential nature. Through the further working of

this principle the world-state appears.

The lesson of the group is imperative for our international relations.

No “alliances,” no balance of power, no agreements, no Hague tribunals

will now satisfy us; we know that it is only by creating a genuine

community of nations that we can have stability and growth—world peace,

world progress. What are the contributions of group psychology to the

League of Nations?

There is no way out of the hell of our present European situation until

we find a method of compounding difference. Superficial moralists try to

get us to like some other nationality by emphasizing all the things we

have in common, but war can never cease until we see the value of

differences, that they are to be maintained not blotted out. The

white-man’s burden is not to make others like himself. As we see the

value of the individual, of every individual, so we must see the value

of each nation, that all are needed. The pacifists have wanted us to

tolerate our enemies and the more extreme ones to turn the other cheek

when smitten. But tolerance is intolerable. And we cannot dwell among

enemies. The ideal of this planet inhabited by Christian enemies all

turning the cheek does not seem to me a happy one. We must indeed, as

the extreme militarists tell us, “wipe out” our enemies, but we do not

wipe out our enemies by crushing them. The old-fashioned hero went out

to conquer his enemy; the modern hero goes out to disarm his enemy

through creating a mutual understanding.

The failure of international society in the past is a fact fraught with

deep significance: the differences between nations are not to be

overcome by one class of people in a country uniting with the same class

in another country. The upper classes of Petrograd, Berlin, Paris and

London have very much the same manners and habits. This has not brought

peace. Artists the world over have a common language. Workingmen have

tried to break down international barriers by assuming that their

interests were so identical that they could unite across these barriers.

But this has failed to bring peace as the other _rapprochements_ have

failed. Why? Because they are all on the wrong track. International

peace is never coming by an increase of similarities (this is the

old-fashioned crowd-philosophy); international peace is coming by the

frankest and fullest kind of recognition of our differences.

Internationalism and cosmopolitanism must not be confused. The aim of

cosmopolitanism is for all to be alike; the aim of internationalism is a

rich content of widely varying characteristic and experience.

If it were true that we ought to increase the likenesses between

nations, then it would be legitimate for each nation to try to impose

its ideals upon others. In that case England would try to spread her

particular brand of civilization, and Germany hers, for if some one kind

of civilization has to prevail, each will want it to be his own. There

is not room on this planet for a lot of similar nations, but only for a

lot of different nations. A group of nations must create a group culture

which shall be broader than the culture of one nation alone. There must

be a world-ideal, a whole-civilization, in which the ideals and the

civilization of every nation can find a place. The ideal of one nation

is not antagonistic to the ideal of another, nor do these ideals exist

in a row side by side, but these different kinds of civilization are

bound up in one another. I am told that this is mysticism. It is the

most practical idea I have found in the world.

It is said that a mighty struggle is before us by-and-by when East meets

West, and in that shock will be decided which of these civilizations

shall rule the world—that this is to be the great world-decision. No,

the great world-decision is that each nation needs equally every other,

therefore each will not only protect, but foster and increase the other

that thereby it may increase its own stature.

Perhaps one of the most useful lessons to be learned from the group

process is a new definition of patriotism. Patriotism must not be

herd-instinct. Patriotism must be the individual’s rational,

self-conscious building of his country every moment. Loyalty means

always to create your group, not to wave a flag over it.[144] We need a

patriotism which is not “following the lead” but involved in a process

in which all take part. In the place of sentimental patriotism we want a

common purpose, a purpose evolved by the common life, to be used for the

common life. Some of our biologists mislead us when they talk of the

homogeneity of the herd as the aim of nations. The nation may be a herd

at present. What we have to do is to make it a true group.

Internationalism must be based upon group units, not upon herd or crowd

units, that is, upon people united not by herd instinct but by group

conviction. If a nation is a crowd, patriotism is mere hypnotism; if a

nation is a true federal state built up of interlocking and ascending

groups, then patriotism is self-evolved. When you are building up an

association or a nation you have to preach loyalty; later it is part of

the very substance which has been built.

Then genuine loyalty, a self-evolved loyalty, will always lead the way

to higher units. Nationalism looks out as well as in. It means, in

addition to its other meanings, every nation being responsible to a

larger whole. It is this new definition of patriotism which America is

now learning. It is this new patriotism which must be taught our

children, which we must repeat to one another on our special patriotic

day, July 4th, and on every occasion when we meet. This new patriotism

looks in, it looks out: we have to learn that we are not wholly

patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we

are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take

her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations. Nationalism is

not my nation for itself or my nation against others or my nation

dominating others, but simply my nation taking its part as “an equal

among equals.”

Shall this hideous war go on simply because people will not understand

nationalism? Nationalism and internationalism are not opposed. We do not

lop off just enough patriotism to our country to make enough for a

world-state: he who is capable of the greatest loyalty to his own

country is most ready for a wider loyalty. There is possible no

world-citizenship the ranks of which are to be filled by those who do

not care very much for their own country. We have passed through a

period when patriotism among cultivated people seemed often to be at a

discount—the ideal was to be “citizens of the world.” But we see now

that we can never be “citizens of the world” until we learn how to be

citizens of America or England or France. Internationalism is not going

to swallow up nationalism. Internationalism will accentuate, give point,

significance, meaning, value, reality, to nationalism.

Whether we can have a lasting peace or not depends upon whether we have

advanced far enough to be capable of loyalty to a higher unit, not as a

substitute for our old patriotism to our country, but in addition to it.

Peace will come by the group consciousness rising from the national to

the international unit. This cannot be done through the imagination

alone but needs actual experiments in world union, or rather experiments

first in the union of two or more nations. Men go round lecturing to

kind-hearted audiences and say, “Can you not be loyal to something

bigger than a nation?” And the kind-hearted audiences reply, “Certainly,

we will now, at your very interesting suggestion, be loyal to a league

of nations.” But this is only a wish on their part, its realization can

never come by _wishing_ but only by _willing_, and willing is a process,

you have to put yourself in a certain place from which to will. We must,

in other words, try experiments with a league of nations, and out of the

actual life of that league will come loyalty to it. We are not ready for

the life of the larger group because some teacher of ethics has taught

us “to respect other men’s loyalties.” We are ready for it when our

experience has incorporated into every tissue of our thought-life the

knowledge that we need other men’s loyalties. Loyalty, therefore, is not

the chickens running back to the coop, also it is not a sentiment which

we decide arbitrarily to adopt, it is the outcome of a process, the

process of belonging.

Of course there must be some motive for the larger union: we shall

probably first get nations into an international league through their

economic interests; then when we have a genuine union the sense of

belonging begins. When men have felt the need of larger units than

nations and have formed “alliances,” they have not felt that they

belonged to these alliances. The sense of belonging ended at the British

Empire or the German Empire. But the reason Germany became one empire

and Italy one nation was because an economic union brought it home to

the people daily that they were Italians, not Venetians, Germans, not

Bavarians. We must feel the international bond exactly as we feel the

national bond. Some one in speaking of the difficulties of

internationalism has said, “It is easier to make sacrifices for those

whom you know well, your own countrymen, than for strangers.” But

internationalism has not come when we decide that we are willing to make

sacrifices for strangers. This fallacy has been the stumbling block of

some of the pacifists. To make sacrifices for “strangers” will never

succeed. We make sacrifices for our own nation because of group feeling.

We shall make sacrifices for a league of nations when we get the same

feeling of a bond.

We may, perhaps, look forward to Europe going through something of the

same process which we have gone through in the United States. The

colonies joined in a federal government. The union was something

entirely apart from themselves. The men of Massachusetts were first and

last men of Massachusetts. We belonged for good reasons to a larger

unit, but it was only very slowly that we gained any actual feeling of

belonging to the United States, of loving it because we were a

constituent part of it, because we were helping to make it, not just as

an external authority to which we had promised loyalty. The American

colonies did not undertake to look pleasant and be kind to one another,

they went to work and learned how to live together. And state jealousy

has been diminished every year, not by any one preaching to us, but by

the process of living together. This is what may happen in a league of

nations.

The great lesson of the group process, in which all others are involved,

is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer possible. There

is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism the moment we can

invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we see now that a nation

cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of

its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world

affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation—that is the

old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some

larger whole. Nations have fought for national rights. These are as

obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. What raises this

war to a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are

not fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the

contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America’s

taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that national

particularism was in 1917 dead.

And as we are no longer to talk of the “rights” of nations, so no longer

must “independent” nations be the basis of union. In our present

international law a sovereign nation is one that is independent of other

nations—surely a complete legal fiction. And when stress is laid on

independence in external relations as the nature of sovereignty, it is

but a step to the German idea that independence of others can develop

into authority over others. This tendency is avoided when we think of

sovereignty: (1) as _looking in_, as authority over its own members, as

the independence which is the result of the complete interdependence of

those members; and when we at the same time (2) think of this

independence as _looking out_ to other independences to form through a

larger interdependence the larger sovereignty of a larger whole.

Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the

keynote of the relations of individuals within a nation. As no man can

be entirely free except through his perfected relation to his group, so

no nation can be truly independent until a genuine union has brought

about interdependence. As we no longer think that every individual has a

final purpose of his own independent of any community, so we no longer

think that each nation has a “destiny” independent of the “destiny” of

other nations.

The error of our old political philosophy was that the state always

looks in: it has obligations to its members, it has none to other

states; it merely enters into agreements with them for mutual benefit

thereby obtained. International law of the future must be based not on

nations as “sovereigns” dealing with one another, but on nations as

members of a society dealing with one another. The difference in these

conceptions is enormous. We are told that cessions of sovereignty must

be the basis of an international government. We cannot have a lasting

international union until we entirely reform such notions of

sovereignty: that the power of the larger unit is produced mechanically

by taking away bits of power from all the separate units. Sovereignty is

got by giving to every unit its fullest value and thereby giving birth

to a new power—the power of a larger whole. We must give up “sovereign”

nations in the old sense, but with our present definition of sovereignty

we may keep all the real sovereignty we have and then unite to evolve

together a larger sovereignty.

This idea must be carefully worked out: we can take each so-called

“sovereign power” which we are thinking of “delegating” to a League of

Nations and we can see that that delegating does not make us individual

nations less “sovereign” and less “free” but more so—it is the Great

Paradox of our time. The object of every proper “cession” of sovereignty

is to make us freer than ever before. Is it to be “sovereign” and “free”

for nations suspiciously and fearfully to keep sleepless watch on one

another while they build ship for ship, plane for plane? Have England

and Germany been proudly conscious of their “freedom” when thinking of

Central Africa? When the individual nations give up their separate

sovereignty—as regards their armaments, as regards the control of the

regions which possess the raw materials, as regards the great waterways

of the world, as regards, in fact, all which affects their joint

lives—the falling chains of a real slavery will reverberate through the

world. For unrelated sovereignty, with world conditions as they are

to-day, is slavery.

The idea of “sovereign” nations must go as completely as is disappearing

the idea of sovereign individuals. The isolation of sovereign nations is

so utterly complete that they cannot really (and I mean this literally)

even see each other. The International League is the one solution for

the relation of nations. Whenever we say we can have a “moral”

international law on any other basis, we write ourselves down pure

sentimentalists.

There are many corollaries to this project. We do not need, for

instance, a more vigorous protection of neutrals, but the abolition of

neutrals. The invasion of the rights of neutrals in this war by both

sides shows that we can no longer have neutrals in our scheme of union;

all must come within the bond.

Further, diplomatic relations will be entirely changed. “Honor among

thieves” means loyalty to your group: while to lie or to try to get the

better of your own particular group is an unpardonable offence, you may

deceive an outsider. We see now the psychological reason for this.

Diplomatic lying will not go until diplomatists instead of treating with

one another as members of alien groups consider themselves all as

members of one larger group—the League of Nations.

Moreover, one nation cannot injure another merely; the injury will be

against the community, and the community of nations will look upon it as

such. Under our present international system the attack of one nation on

another is the same as the attack of one outlaw on another. But under a

civilized international system, the attack of one individual on another

is an attack on society and the whole society must punish it. The

punishment, however, will not consist in keeping the offender out of the

alliance. If the Allies win, Germany should not be punished by keeping

her out of a European league; she must be shown how to take her place

within it. And it must be remembered that we do not join a league of

nations solely to work out our relations to one another, but to learn to

work for the larger whole, for international values. Until this lesson

is learned no league of nations can be successful.

Finally, the League of Nations is against the theory of the balance of

power, but this has been already considered in the chapter on The

Federal State.

To sum up all these particularist fallacies: live and let live can never

be our international motto. _Laissez-faire_ fails as ignominiously in

international relations as within a single nation. Our new motto must

be, Live in such manner that the fulness of life may come to all. This

is “the ledge and the leap” for twentieth-century thought.

Organized coöperation is in the future to be the basis of international

relations. We are international in our interests. We do not want an

American education, an English education, a French education.

“Movements” seek always an international society. We have international

finance. Our standards of living are becoming internationalized.

Socially, economically, in the world of thought, national barriers are

being broken down. It is only in politics that we are national. This

must soon change: with all these _rapprochements_ we cannot be told much

longer of fundamental differences between us which can be settled only

by murdering each other.

People thought that Italy could not be united, that the duchies of

Germany would never join. Cavour and Bismark had indeed no easy part.

But if one hundred millions of people in Central Europe can be made to

see the evils of separation, cannot others? With our greater facilities

of communication, with our increased commercial intercourse and our

increased realization of the interdependence of nations (a manufacturing

nation cannot get along without the food-producing nations, etc.), this

ought not now to be impossible. Or has the single state exhausted our

political ability? Are we willing to acknowledge this? We have had very

little idea yet of a community of nations. The great fault of Germany is

not that she overestimates her own power of achievement, which is indeed

marvellous, but that she has never yet had any conception of a community

of nations. Let her apply all her own theory of the subordination of the

individual to the whole to the subordination of Germany to an allied

Europe, and she would be a most valuable member of a European league.

The group process thus shows us that a genuine community of nations

means the correlation of interests, the development of an international

ethics, the creation of an international will, the self-evolving of a

higher loyalty, and above all and including all, the full responsibility

of every nation for the welfare of every other.

With such an aim before us courts of arbitration seem a sorry makeshift.

We are told that as individuals no longer fight duels but take their

disputes into the courts, so nations must now arbitrate, that is, take

their dispute to some court. But what has really ousted duels has not

been the courts but a different conception of the relation between men;

so what will do away with war will not be courts of arbitration, but a

different conception of the relations between nations. We need machinery

not merely for settling disputes but for preventing disputes from

arising; not merely for interpreting past relations, but for giving

expression to new relations; not merely to administer international law,

but to make international law—not a Hague court but an international

legislature.

A community of nations needs a constitution, not treaties. Treaties are

of the same nature as contract. Just as in internal law contract is

giving way to the truer theory of community, so the same change must

take place in international law. It is true that the first step must be

more progressive treaties before we can hope for a closer union, but let

us keep clearly before us the goal in order that in making these

treaties they shall be such that they will open the way in time to a

real federation, to an international law based not on “sovereign”

nations.

We have already seen that it is the _creation_ of a collective will

which we need most in our social and political life, not the enforcing

of it; it is the same with a league of nations—we must create an

international will. We want neither concession nor compromise. And a

vague “brotherhood” is certainly not enough. As we have seen the group

as the workshop for the making of the collective will, so we see that we

cannot have an international will without creating a community of

nations. Group psychology will revolutionize international law. The

group gets its authority through the power it has _in itself_ of

integrating ideas and interests. No so-called collective will which is

not a genuine collective will, that is, which is not evolved by this

process, will have real authority; therefore no stable international

relations are possible except those founded on the creation of an actual

community of nations.

What interests us most in all the war literature is any proposed

_method_ of union. The importance of an international league as a peace

plan is that you can never aim directly at peace, peace is what you get

through other things. Much of the peace propaganda urges us to choose

peace rather than war. But the decision between “war” or “peace” never

lies within our power. These are mere words to gather up in convenient

form of expression an enormous amount that is underneath. All sorts of

interests compete, all sorts of ideas compete or join: if they can join,

we have peace; if they must compete, we have war. But war or peace is

merely an outcome of the process; peace or war has come, by other

decisions, long before the question of peace or war ever arises.

All our hope therefore of future international relations lies, not in

the ethical exhortations of the pacifists, nor in plans for an economic

war, but in the recognition of the possibility of a community of

nations.

In making a plea for some experiment in international coöperation, I

remember, with humiliation, that we have fought because it is the easy

way. Fighting solves no problems. The problems which brought on this war

will all be there to be settled when the war ends. But we have war as

the line of least resistance. We have war when the mind gives up its job

of agreeing as too difficult.[145] It is often stated that conflict is a

necessity of the human soul, and that if conflict should ever disappear

from among us, individuals would deteriorate and society collapse. But

the effort of agreeing is so much more strenuous than the comparatively

easy stunt of fighting that we can harden our spiritual muscles much

more effectively on the former than the latter. Suppose I disagree with

you in a discussion and we make no effort to join our ideas, but “fight

it out.” I hammer away with my idea, I try to find all the weakest parts

of yours, I refuse to see anything good in what you think. That is not

nearly so difficult as trying to recognize all the possible subtle

interweavings of thought, how one part of your thought, or even one

aspect of one part, may unite with one part or one aspect of one part of

mine etc. Likewise with coöperation and competition in business:

coöperation is going to prove so much more difficult than competition

that there is not the slightest danger of any one getting soft under it.

The choice of war or peace is not the choice between effort and

stagnation. We have thought of peace as the lambs lying down together

after browsing on the consciousness of their happy agreements. We have

thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have

thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The

opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of

rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. I knew a

young business man who went to the Spanish war who said when he came

back that it had been as good as going to a sanitarium; he had simply

obeyed commands and had not made a decision or thought a thought since

he left home. From war to peace is not from the strenuous to the easy

existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to

the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life.

If, however, peace means for you simply the abstinence from bloodshed,

if it means instead of the fight of the battlefield, the fight of

employer and employed, the fight of different interests in the

legislature, the fight of competing business firms, that is a different

matter. But if you are going to try to _solve_ the problems of capital

and labor, of competing business interests, of differing nations, it is

a tougher job than standing up on the battlefield.

We are told that when the North Sea fishermen found that they were

bringing flabby codfish home to market, they devised the scheme of

introducing one catfish into every large tank of codfish. The consequent

struggle hardened the flesh of the fish and they came firm to market.

The conclusion usually drawn from all such stories is that men need

fighting to keep them in moral condition. But what I maintain is that if

we want to train our moral muscles we are devising a much harder job for

them if we try to agree with our catfish than to fight him.

Civilization calls upon us to “Agree with thine adversary.” It means a

supreme effort on our part, and the future of the world depends upon

whether we can make this effort, whether we are equal to the cry of

civilization to the individual man, to the individual nation. It is a

supreme effort because it is not, as sometimes thought, a matter of

feeling. To feel kindly, to desire peace—no, we must summon every force

of our natures, trained minds and disciplined characters, to find the

_methods_ of agreement. We may be angry and fight, we may feel kindly

and want peace—it is all about the same. The world will be regenerated

by the people who rise above both these passive ways and heroically

seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which

people _can_ agree.

What has this young twentieth century gone out to fight? Autocracy? The

doctrine of the right of might? Yes, and wherever found, in Germany or

among ourselves. And wherever found these rest on the consciousness of

separateness. It is the conviction of separateness which has to be

conquered before civilization can proceed. Community must be the

foundation stone of the New State.

* * * * *

The history of modern times from the point of view of political science

is the history of the growth of democracy; from the point of view of

social psychology it is the history of the growth of the social

consciousness. These two are one. But the mere consciousness of the

social bond is not enough. Frenssen said of Jörn Uhl, “He became

conscious of his soul, but it was empty and he had now to furnish it.”

We have become conscious of a social soul, we have now to give it

content. It is a long way from the maxim, “Religion is an affair between

man and his Maker,” to the cry of Mazzini, “Italy is itself a religion,”

but we surely to-day have come to see in the social bond and the

Creative Will, a compelling power, a depth and force, as great as that

of any religion we have ever known. We are ready for a new revelation of

God. It is not coming through any single man, but through the men and

men who are banding together with one purpose, in one consecrated

service, for a great fulfilment. Many of us have felt bewildered in a

confused and chaotic world. We need to focus both our aspirations and

our energy; we need to make these effective and at the same time to

multiply them by their continuous use. This book is a plea for the more

abundant life: for the fulness of life and the growing life. It is a

plea against everything static, against the idea that there need be any

passive material within the social bond. It is a plea for a splendid

progress dependent upon every splendid one of us. We need a new faith in

humanity, not a sentimental faith or a theological tenet or a

philosophical conception, but an active faith in that creative power of

men which shall shape government and industry, which shall give form

equally to our daily life with our neighbor and to a world league.

-----

Footnote 144:

See pp. 58–59.

Footnote 145:

It has usually been supposed that wars have been the all-important

element in consolidating nations; I do not want to disregard this

element, I want only to warn against its over emphasis. Moreover, the

way in which wars have had a real and permanent influence in the

consolidation of nations is by the pressure which they have exerted

upon them in showing them that efficiency is obtained by the closest

coöperation and coördination of all our activities, by a high degree

of internal organization.

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APPENDIX

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APPENDIX

THE TRAINING FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY

--------------

THE training for the new democracy must be from the cradle—through

nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our

life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or

current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired only

through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to

grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day

school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised

recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life.

When we change our ideas of the relation of the individual to society,

our whole system of education changes. What we want to teach is

interdependence, that efficiency waits on discipline, that discipline is

obedience to the whole of which I am a part. Discipline has been a word

long connected with school life—when we know how to teach _social_

discipline, then we shall know how to “teach school.”

The object of education is to fit children into the life of the

community.[146] Every coöperative method conceivable, therefore, must be

used in our schools for this end. It is at school that children should

begin to learn group initiative, group responsibility—in other words

social functioning. The group process must be learnt by practice. We

should therefore teach subjects which require a working together, we

should have group recitations, group investigations, and a gradual plan

of self-government. Every child must be shown his place in the life that

builds and his relation to all others who are building. All the little

daily and hourly experiences of his interrelations must be constantly

interpreted to him. Individual competition must, of course, disappear.

All must see that the test of success is ability to work with others,

not to surpass others.

Group work is, indeed, being introduced into our more progressive

schools. Manual training, especially when the object made is large

enough to require the work of two or more, cooking classes, school

papers, printing classes etc., give opportunity for organization into

groups with the essential advantage of the group: coördinated effort.

Moreover, we should have, and are beginning to have, group recitations.

A recitation should not be to test the pupil but to create something.

Every pupil should be made to feel that his point of view is slightly

different from any one’s else, and that, therefore, he has something to

contribute. He is not to “recite” something which the teacher knows

already; he is to contribute not only to the ideas of his fellow-pupils

but also to those of his teacher. And this is not impossible even for

the youngest. Once when I was in Paris I made the acquaintance of little

Michael, a charming English boy of five, who upon being taken to the

Louvre by his mother and asked what he thought of the Mona Lisa,

replied, with a most pathetic expression, “I don’t think she looks as if

she liked little boys.” That was certainly a contribution to Mona Lisa

criticism.

But after the child has been taught in his group recitation to

contribute his own point of view, he must immediately be shown that he

cannot over-insist upon it; he must be taught that it is only a part of

the truth, that he should be eager for all the other points of view,

that all together they can find a point of view which no one could work

out alone. In other words we can teach collective thinking through group

recitations.

A group recitation may give each pupil the feeling that a whole is being

created: (1) by different points of view being brought out and

discussed, and (2) by every one contributing something different: one

will do some extra reading, one will bring clippings from newspapers and

periodicals, one will take his camera to the Art Museum and take

pictures of the casts. Thus we get life, and the lesson of life, into

that hour. Thus may we learn the obligation and the joy of “belonging,”

not only when our school goes to play some other school, but in every

recitation hour of the day. The old idea was that no one should help

another in a recitation; the new idea is that every one is to help every

one else. The kind of competition you have in a group recitation is

whether you have added as much as any one else. You now feel responsible

not only for your contribution but that the recitation as a whole should

be a worthy thing. Such an aim will overcome much of the present

class-room indifference.

Many more of the regular school activities could be arranged on a group

basis than is now thought possible—investigation for instance. This is a

big word, but the youngest children sent out to the woods in spring are

being taught “original research.”

Again, every good teacher teaches her pupils to “assemble” his different

thoughts, shows them that a single thought is not useful, but only as it

is connected with others. The modern teacher is like the modern curator

who thinks the group significance of a particular classification more

important than the significance of each isolated piece. The modern

teacher does not wish his pupils’ minds to be like an old-fashioned

museum—a hodge-podge of isolated facts—but a useful workshop.

Again, to learn genuine discussion should be considered an essential

part of our education. Every child must be trained to meet the clash of

difference—difference of opinion, difference of interest—which life

brings. In some universities professors are putting aside one hour a

week for a discussion hour. This should be done in all colleges and

schools, and then it should be seen to that it is genuine discussion

that takes place in that hour.

Moreover, in many schools supervised playground and gymnasium activities

are being established, athletic clubs encouraged, choruses and dramatic

leagues developed, not only because of their value from the health or

art point of view, but because they teach the social lesson.

The question of self-government in the schools is too complicated a

subject and has met with too many difficulties, notwithstanding its

brilliant successes, to take up here, but undoubtedly some amount of

self-control can be given to certain groups, and in the upper grades to

whole schools, and when this can be done no training for democracy is

equal to the practice of democracy.

The aim is to create such a mental atmosphere for children that it is

natural for them to wish to take their part, to make them understand

that citizenship is not obeying the laws nor voting, nor even being

President,[147] but that all the visions of their highest moments, all

the aspirations of their spiritual nature can be satisfied through their

common life, that only thus do we get “practical politics.”

In our industrial schools it is obviously easier to carry further the

teaching of coördinated effort than in the regular day schools.

Our evening schools must adopt the methods of the more progressive day

schools, and must, as they are doing in many cases, add to the usual

activities of evening schools.

The most conscious and deliberate preparation for citizenship is given

by the “School Centres” now being established all over the United

States. The School Centre movement is a movement to mould the future, to

direct evolution instead of trusting to evolution. The subject of this

book has been the necessity for community organization, but the ability

to meet this necessity implies that we know how to do that most

difficult thing in the world—work with other people: that we are ready

to sacrifice individual interests to the general good, that we have a

fully developed sense of responsibility, that we are trained in

initiative and action. But this is not true. If the School Centres are

to fill an important place in neighborhood life, they must not only give

an opportunity for the development of neighborhood consciousness and

neighborhood organization, but they must train up young people to be

ready for neighborhood organization. We who believe in the School Centre

as one of the most effective means we have for reconstructing city life

believe that the School Centre can furnish this training. We hear

everywhere of the corruption of American municipal politics, but why

should the next generation do any better than the present unless we are

training our young men and women to a proper understanding of the

meaning of good citizenship and the sense of their own responsibility?

The need of democracy to-day is a trained citizenship. We must

deliberately train for citizenship as for music, art or trade. The

School Centres are, in fact, both the prophecy of the new democracy and

a method of its fulfilment. They provide an opportunity for its

expression, and at the same time give to men and women the opportunity

for the training needed to bring it to its highest expression.

The training in the School Centres consists of: group-activities,

various forms of civic clubs and classes, and practice in

self-government.

First, we have in the Centres those activities which require working

together, such as dramatic and choral clubs, orchestras and bands, civic

and debating clubs, folk-dancing and team-games. We want choral unions

and orchestras, to be sure, because they will enrich the community life

at the same time that they emphasize the neighborhood bond, we want

civic and debating clubs because we all need enlightenment on the

subjects taken up in these clubs, but the primary reason for choosing

such activities is that they are group activities where each learns to

identify himself with a social whole. This is the first lesson for all

practical life. Take two young men in business. One says of his firm,

“_They_ are doing so and so”: his attitude is that the business is a

complete whole, without him, to which he may indeed be ministering in

some degree. Another young man who has been a few weeks with an

old-established firm says “_We_ have done so and so for years,” “_Our_

policy is so and so.” You perhaps smile but you know that he possesses

one of the chief requirements for rising.

In our group the centre of consciousness is transferred from our private

to our associate life. Thus through our group activities does

neighborhood life become a preparation for neighborhood life; thus does

it prepare us for the pouring out of strength and strain and effort in

the common cause.

Then the consciousness of the solidarity of the group leads directly to

a sense of responsibility, responsibility in a group and for a group.

Sooner or later every one in a democracy must ask himself, what am I

worth to society? Our effort in the Centres is to help the birth of that

moment. This is the social lesson: for people to understand that their

every act, their work, their home-life, the kind of recreation they

demand, the kind of newspapers they read, the bearing of their children,

the bringing up of their children—that all these so-called private acts

create the city in which they live. It is not just when we vote, or meet

together in political groups, or when we take part in some charitable or

philanthropic or social scheme, that we are performing our duty to

society. Every single act of our life should be looked at as a social

act.

Moreover, we learn responsibility for our group as well as to our group.

We used to think, “I must do right no matter what anyone else does.” Now

we know how little that exhausts our duty; we must feel an equally keen

responsibility for our whole group.

These then are the lessons which we hope group activities will

teach—solidarity, responsibility and initiative,—how to take one’s place

worthily in a self-directed, self-governing community.

In the first year of one of our Boston Centres, the people of a certain

nationality asked if they might meet regularly at the Centre. At their

first meeting, however, they broke up without accomplishing anything,

without even deciding to meet again, simply because those present had

never learned how to do things with other people. Each man seemed a

little island by himself. They explained to me the fact that they made

no plans for further meeting by saying that they found they did not know

parliamentary law, and some of them must learn parliamentary law before

they could organize. I did not feel, however, that that was the real

reason. I was sure it was because they had never been accustomed to do

things in groups—they had probably never belonged to a basket-ball team

or a dramatic club—and we have to learn the trick of association as we

have to learn anything else.

But the Centres prepare for citizenship not only by group activities but

also by direct civic teaching. This takes the form not only of lectures,

classes in citizenship, but also of societies like the “junior city

councils” or the “legislatures” where municipal and state questions are

discussed, and young men’s and young women’s civic clubs. And it must be

remembered that the chief value of these clubs is not the information

acquired, not even the interest aroused, but the lesson learned of

genuine discussion with all the advantages therefrom.[148]

But I have written as if it were our young people who were to be

educated by the group activities of the Centres, as if the young people

were to have the training for democracy and the older people the

exercise of democracy. Nothing could be further from my thoughts. The

training for democracy can never cease while we exercise democracy. We

older ones need it exactly as much as the younger ones. That education

is a continuous process is a truism. It does not end with graduation

day; it does not end when “life” begins. Life and education must never

be separated. We must have more life in our universities, more education

in our life. Chesterton says of H. G. Wells, “One can lie awake nights

and hear him grow.” That it might be said of all of us! We need

education all the time and we all need education. The “ignorant vote”

does not (or should not) mean the vote of the ignorant, we get an

ignorant vote very often from educated people; an ignorant vote means

ignorance of some particular subject.

A successful business man said to me the other day, “I graduated from

college with honors, but all I learned there has done me little good

directly. What I got out of college was an attitude towards life: that

life was a matter of constantly learning, that my education had begun

and was going on as long as I lived.” Then he went on to say, “This is

the attitude I want somehow to get into my factory. Boys and girls come

to me with the idea, ‘School is over, learning is behind me, now work

begins.’ This is all wrong. I am now planning a school in connection

with my factory, not primarily on account of what they will learn in the

school, but in order to make them see that their life of steady learning

is just beginning and that their whole career depends on their getting

this attitude.” Now this is what we want the Centres to do for people:

to help them acquire the attitude of learning, to make them see that

education is for life, that it is as valuable for adults as for young

people.

We have many forms of adult education: extension courses, continuation

and night schools, correspondence schools, courses in settlements, Young

Men’s Christian Associations etc. And yet all these take a very small

per cent of our adult population. Where are people to get this necessary

education? Our present form of industry does not give enough. Tending a

machine all day is not conducive to thought;[149] a man thus employed

gets to rely entirely on his foreman. The man who lets his foreman do

his thinking for him all day tends to need a political boss at night. We

must somehow counteract the paralyzing effect of the methods of modern

industry. In the School Centre we have an opportunity for adult

education in the only forms in which many people, tired out with the

day’s work, can take it: discussion, recreation, group activities and

self-governing clubs. The enormous value of that rapidly spreading

movement, the forum movement, and its connection with the School

Centres, there is space here only to mention.

Many people, however, even if not the majority, are eager and hungry for

what one man spoke to me of as “real education.” University extension

work is spreading rapidly and in many cases adapting itself marvellously

to local needs; a much closer connection could be made between the

opportunities of the university and the training of the citizen for his

proposed increased activity in the state by having university extension

work a recognized part of the School Centre, so that every one, the

farmer or the humblest workman, might know that even although he cannot

give all his time to college life, he may have the advantage of its

training. In the School Centre should be opportunity for the study of

social and economic conditions, the work of constitutional conventions,

the European situation and our relation to it, the South American

situation and our relation to it, etc. etc.

Moreover, we must remember when we say we all need more education, that

even if we could be “entirely” educated, so to speak, at any one minute,

the next minute life would have set new lessons for us. The world is

learning all the time about health, food values, care of children etc.

All that science discovers must be spread. Adult education means largely

the assimilation of new ideas; from this point of view no one can deny

its necessity.

I have said that the Centres prepare for citizenship through group

activities, through civic clubs and classes and through actual practice

in self-government. The Centres may be a real training in

self-government, a real opportunity for the development of those

qualities upon which genuine self-direction depends, by every club or

group being self-governed, and the whole Centre self-directed and

self-controlled by means of delegates elected from each club meeting

regularly in a Central Council. If we want a nation which shall be

really self-governed not just nominally self-governed, we must train up

our young people in the ways of self-direction.

Moreover, the development of responsibility and self-direction will be

the most effective means of raising standards. We are hearing a great

deal just now of regulated recreation, regulated dance halls etc. We

must give regulation a secondary place. There is something better than

this which ought to be the aim of all recreation leaders, that is, to

educate our young people to want higher standards by interpreting their

own experience to them and by getting them to think in terms of cause

and effect. You can force a moral code on people from above yet this

will change them very little, but by a system of self-governing clubs

with leaders who know how to lead, we can make real progress in

educating people to higher standards. This is true of athletic games as

well as of dances. We find, indeed, that it is true of all parts of our

Centre work. Through the stormy paths of club election of officers, I

have seen leaders often guide their young men to an understanding of

honest politics. It is usually easier, it is true, to do _for_ people,

it is easier to “regulate” their lives, but it is not the way to bring

the results we wish. We need education, not regulation.

Self-government in the Centres then means not only the election of

officers and the making of a constitution, but a real management of club

and Centre affairs, the opportunity to take initiative, to make choices

and decisions, to take responsibility. The test of our success in the

Centres will always be how far we are developing the self-shaping

instinct. But we must remember that we have not given self-government by

allowing the members of a club to record their votes. Many people think

a neighborhood association or club is self-governing if a question is

put to them and every one votes upon it. But if a club is to be really

self-governed it must first learn collective thinking. This is not a

process which can be hurried, it will take time and that time must not

be grudged. Collective thinking must be reverenced as an act of

creation. The time spent in evolving the group spirit is time spent in

creating the dynamic force of our civilization.

Moreover each Centre should be begun, directed and supported (as far as

possible) by the adult people of a community acting together for that

end. A Centre should not be an undertaking begun by the School Committee

and run by the School Committee, but each Centre should be organized by

local initiative, to serve local needs, through methods chosen by the

people of a district to suit that particular district. The ideal School

Centre is a Community Centre. A group of citizens asks for the use of a

schoolhouse after school hours, with heat, light, janitor, and a

director to make the necessary connection between the local undertaking

and the city department. Then that group of citizens is responsible for

the Centre: for things worth while being done in the schoolhouse, and

for the support of the activities undertaken. By the time such a School

Centre is organized by such an association of citizens, neighbors will

have become acquainted with one another in a more vital way than before,

and they will have begun to learn how to think and to act together as a

neighborhood unit.

We are coming to a more general realization of this. In the municipal

buildings in the parks of Chicago, the people are not given free

lectures, free moving pictures, free music, free dances etc.; they are

invited to develop their own activities. To the Recreation Centres of

New York, operated by the Board of Education, are being added the

Community Centres controlled by local boards of neighbors. In Boston we

have under the School Committee a department of “The Extended Use of

School Buildings,” and the aim is to get the people of each district to

plan, carry out and supervise what civic, educational and recreational

activities they wish in the schoolhouses.

A Chicago minister said the other day that the south side of Chicago was

the only part of the city where interest in civic problems and community

welfare could be aroused, and this he said was because of the South

Park’s work in field houses, clubrooms and gymnasiums for the last ten

or twelve years.

When the chairman of the Agricultural Council of Defense of Virginia

asked a citizen of a certain county what he thought the prospects were

of being able to rouse the people in his county in regard to an

increased food production, the prompt reply was, “On the north side of

the county we shall have no trouble because we have several Community

Leagues there, but on the south side it will be a hard job.”

The School or Community Centre is the real continuation school of

America, the true university of true democracy.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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Footnote 146:

The western states feel that they are training members of society and

not individuals and that is why it seems proper to them to take public

money to found state universities.

Footnote 147:

A little girl I know said, “Mother, if women get the vote, shall I

_have_ to be President?”

Footnote 148:

See pp. 208–212.

Footnote 149:

Also men have less opportunity for discussion at work than formerly.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Hyphenation has not been regularized, and remains as printed.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the

public domain.

Archaic and non-standard spelling has been retained. Instances of what

seem to be obvious printer’s errors have been corrected. Changes made

are listed below:

Pg. 20: Corrected typo: ‘Social Psycology’ to ‘Psychology’

Pg. 34: Changed comma for period at end of sentence: ‘a collective

will,’ to ‘will.’

Pg. 43: Corrected typo: ‘rather perhaps indentified’ to ‘identified’

Pg. 98: Added umlaut for consistency: ‘compatible with cooperation’ to

‘coöperation’

Pg. 123: Added accent as in other instances: ‘L’Etat, Le Droit

Objectif’ to ‘L’État’

Pg. 205: Corrected typo: ‘these inner forces most’ to ‘must’

Pg. 234: Added missing punctuation after abbreviation: ‘education,

sanitation etc,’ to ‘etc.,’

Pg. 255: Corrected typo: ‘only shall we undersand’ to ‘understand’

Pg. 273: Corrected typo: ‘either law or a rigat’ to ‘right’

Pg. 274: Added missing accent: ‘métaphysique ou religieux’ to ‘oú’

Pg. 278: Corrected typo: ‘through the varous’ to ‘various’

Pg. 311: Corrected typo: ‘we are to be constitutent’ to ‘constituent’

Pg. 334: Added umlaut for consistency: ‘pre-eminently the opportunity’

to ‘preëminently’

Pg. 336: Corrected typo: ‘city is not analagous’ to ‘analogous’

Pg. 347: Corrected typo: ‘a nation is a crowd, partiotism’ to

‘patriotism’

Pg. 353: Corrected typo: ‘consider themeslves’ to ‘themselves’