THE PROVISION FOR THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN.
I.
Man has a body and a spirit. By the one, he is individual; by the other,
he is social. As individual, he needs bread; as social, he needs power.
As body, he is born from the loins; as spirit, he is born from the social
organism. In the process of finding food, clothing, shelter, to meet the
needs of himself as individual, he discovers that illimitable social
side of himself the material necessities of life do not supply. Here he
finds power, a more subtle and universal element, ready to serve his
higher need. This is the provision for the social side of man’s nature;
for, as individual, he does not need it, and could not appropriate and
use it if he did. As an individual, he can only avail himself of the use
of power, through the attempt of the social whole of which he forms a
member. In the primitive, unrelated, unorganized state, man is satisfied
if he can secure food to satisfy his hunger, and a cave to shelter him
from the storm. He does not even utilize the winds to draw his boat,
until, through interdependence and mutual relations, he has reached a
high degree of social life. The servants of man, on his individual side,
are the foods of the field, the waters of the spring, the woods of the
forest, the fruits of the orchard, and the wool on the sheep’s back.
The servants of man, on his social side, are the driving power of the
winds, the transporting power of heat, and the thought-defying power of
the lightning. As individual, he is a citizen of the community where he
first sees the light. As social, he is a citizen of the world. Through
his body, he is naturally related to his ancestors; through his spirit,
he is related to the human race. The rude elements of food, clothing,
and shelter, he might secure as individual; but power, which waits to
serve his higher, nobler nature, he can only secure through society. As
individual, he is narrow, meager, local. As social, he is broad, rich,
universal. On his individual side, he is centripetal; on his social side,
centrifugal. Self-centered, self-contained, and self-included, on the
one side; while, upon the other, he is possessed of the conviction that
private right must be subordinated to public good. Tethered to the earth
on the one side, linked with the immensities on the other. On the one
side, his outlook is hard and literal and low; on the other, he seeks,
through intellect, to transcend the infinite in time and space and truth.
On the side of himself, as individual, he knows no right or wrong. On
the side of himself, as social, he recognizes the infinite in duty, and
seeks harmony through the infinite in love.
II.
Yet this limited and unlimited self; transitory, perishable, and finite
on the one side; everlasting, imperishable, and infinite on the other,
are bound together in the same person. The fall of the one is accompanied
by the descent of the other, and the rise of the one is accompanied by
the ascent of the other. Their union involves perpetual conflict, and
there waits on the turn of the battle, the depression of remorse, or the
exultation of triumph.
On the individual side of himself, man would take up with the present,
the immediate, with that which allures the sense, and, with unholy
incense, regales the imagination. On the social side of himself, he
would despise the immediate, and give the casting vote in favor of the
unbiased, immeasurable good. In such a being as man, conflict were
inevitable. With a horizon measured by the edge of the plain where he
stands on the one side, and a horizon melting into the infinite star
depths on the other, it were but to be expected that a contest would
arise between the larger and the lesser outlook. On the one side, he
would possess the field, concentrate his attention upon its grasses and
its fruits, and lose himself in its products. On the other, he would go
forth to see where the stars are, to consider the sources of their light,
and to travel with them along their silent paths. With a view measured by
the hour that shuts him round on the one side, and with a view measured
by the organic pulsations of the world on the other; the question would
be, whether to give himself to the immediate pleasures of the hour; or to
elongate the pendulum of his timepiece till it should embrace the ages,
and regulate his life by an eternal measure. With appetites on one side,
clamoring for the things in sight, and with conscience on the other,
calling for harmony with things high and remote; the question would be,
whether to give the consent of the will to the demand of the appetites,
or to the appeal of the conscience.
III.
Knowing the side of himself of which a man takes counsel—the individual,
or the social—you are prepared to fix his grade in the scale of being.
The difference between Benedict Arnold and George Washington was just
this: in the case of the one the individual side was dominant; in the
case of the other the social side held sway. This is the difference
between the miser, despised of all, and the philanthropist, honored of
all. This is the difference between the debauche and the saint, between
the man who lives for his God and his race, and the man who pours himself
out on his lust and his passion. If the promptings of the individual
side of man’s nature are to be distrusted and watched, while liberal and
unstinted recognition is to be given to the social side, it is well to
inquire into the meaning and office of this larger fact of his life.
Let it be granted that on the individual side of himself man has no
kingdom of his own, no department of his own, no privileged class of
his own, and no titled order of his own. Let this side of him be left
to the naturalist, to be classed with the vertebrates, the mammals, or
the primates. But what conclusion are we to reach concerning the social
side of himself, that has found embodiment in that vast and complicated
movement we call civilization? Through this age-long historic process
man has been seeking to realize the capacities of his larger nature. Like
a magnificent temple, civilization has been rising through the centuries.
Its walls have silently come up from the earth, like Solomon’s Temple,
without clink of trowel or sound of hammer. It is built of granite, cut
from the Gethsemanes of history. Leonidas and his brave three hundred at
the pass of Thermopylæ carved some of the blocks of this great edifice,
into whose walls men have gone down as the living stones. The brave
Britons, at the waters of Solway, lifted to place some of the richly
foliaged pillars that stand upon its floors. William the Silent, while
organizing the forces and achieving the victories of the Netherlands,
was at the same time turning some of its arches and resting in place
some of its architraves. The Martyrs, who went to undying fame and
honor through fires of Smithfield, furnish themes for the music which
resounds through its corridors. It is the triumph of the social nature
of man, and stands upon the soil which has been made by the crumbling
dust of all generations of brave men. Its pinnacles and towers pierce
the skies, and declare to the immeasurable heights, the force, the
faith, the sentiment, and the love of man. It defies the elements of
disintegration and change, and around the tops of its lofty pillars there
cluster the buds of eternal spring. The gigantic trunks, whose arched
branches support the roof of this great structure, express themselves in
never withering flowers, and, where the boughs interlace at the summit of
the arches, there comes the light of heaven to color and illumine. Yet
within its doors we are in no forest of stone, where thoughts of men have
been chiseled into semblance with the trees. Its foundations are built
of convictions, its pillars of hope, its vaulting of lofty purpose,
and its windows of faith. Its cement is the blood of suffering, and its
decoration the loves of heroes. It is the edifice man has built in which
to house the social side of his nature. It contains and will conserve all
contributions ever made to human weal.
In walking the streets of Rome, one has a strange and melancholy sense
of the traditions and memories which cluster about every ruin and every
spot. But around the myriad facts and forces of civilization there hang
associations more pathetic still. Here we walk, not amid the ruins of
the past, but amid the achievements, the victories, and the glories
of the past. Achievements, victories, and glories not associated with
broken columns, defaced monuments and moldering ruins, but with the laws
and institutions of living men. We have here, in ten thousand embodied
forms, the travails of the souls of our fathers. Their spirits live in
the words we use, their consciences bind in the laws we observe, their
visions bless in the pictures we see, and their devotion sanctifies in
the religion we love. All the blood ever shed in sacrifice, all the
eloquence that ever thrilled senates and peoples in defense of the right,
all the protests ever in silence felt or in public uttered against the
wrong, are here held in everlasting form.
Are we to regard civilization, the manifold and complicated sum in
which man’s social nature has expressed itself, as nothing more than
a natural product? Are we to account for this by the same physical
principles in accordance with which the bee builds his cell, the monkey
hangs his bridge, and the beaver erects his dam? Does this stately
projection of man’s social nature mean no more than some lofty Alpine
Matterhorn, pushed into the heavens by the unconscious fires in the
earth’s bosom? Is this only like some mighty Giants’ Causeway, lifted up
by the same physical forces and by the same natural processes? If this
is so, why is it that when we turn away from civilization as a whole,
to view it in some of its national forms, we see the spiritual ups and
downs of history in such striking contrast with the uniform face which
nature wears? If the radiant civilization of Greece, that filled the
earth with the eloquence of thought and the melody of song, with the
Republic of Plato and the Ethics of Aristotle, that clothed itself in
the Parthenon of Phidias and the Iliad of Homer, was as natural among
the nations as the uprising of Gibraltar among the mountains, why is it
that Gibraltar still stands as the solemn sentinel of the Ocean and the
Sea, while the civilization of Greece is but a memory of the past? The
same sky and earth, and Mar’s Hill are there. Around her classic coast
there still murmurs the same heaving sea. But while ships may still
sail to Gibraltar, never more can they draw up to the Piræus of worthy
representatives of Plato and Aristotle. Not again do men, with noble
brows, deep eyes, and never dying thought, look into the Ægean from that
memorable meeting place of the world’s ships.
If the history of Israel, from the time of Abraham to the coming of John
the Baptist, was but a natural product, as easy to be accounted for as
the mountains round about Jerusalem; why is it that the mountains still
encompass the holy city; while we find no more men like Moses, David, and
Isaiah to lead, to rule, and to prophesy? There are the same Judean hills
and valleys. There rapidly flows the same historic Jordan. There grow the
same grapes, the figs, and olives. There are the same holy mountains.
There are the same dangerous rocks in the sea at Joppa. The physical
conditions that made the corn and the honey and the cattle are there; and
there still are found the corn, the honey, and the cattle. But no massive
man like Moses ever more climbs Sinai to get law on tables of stone, or
Pisgah, to see the promised land and die. No man after God’s own heart,
like David, any more minds sheep, watches the stars, and writes poetry
there. Never more do we find there a man like Isaiah, struggling on his
knees in prayer that he may rise up to give his people the oracles of
God. A shallow, degenerate and fickle people dwell amid the groves and
the vines where once lived the great race which gave to men their ethics
and the outlines of true religion.
If the civilization of Rome, that reached such volume and force as to
make her the mistress of the world, was as natural as the rising and
falling of the tides, why is it that Rome is in ruins, while the tides
continue to rise and fall? With no other aid than such as is afforded
by natural law and physical force, we cannot solve this problem. Where
monkeys grew once, monkeys grow to-day; where lions roamed once, lions
roam to-day; where figs grew once, figs grow to-day. The same physical
conditions, the same configuration of soil, the same degree of climate,
produce uniform natural results from age to age. These may be counted
on with the certainty of a coming eclipse, conditioned on varying
conjunctions of the heavenly bodies. But we must pass from the level and
range of soil, sky, climate, and physical conditions, to account for the
fact that a country in one period of its history produces a Pericles,
and, in another, a muddy-headed numskull; in one age an aristocracy of
poets, artists, statesmen, philosophers, and orators; and in another, a
listless swarm of stupid and secular cumberers of the ground.
IV.
The explanation of this question is to be found in the fact that man has
a dual nature, a body and a spirit, by virtue of which he is individual
and social. When the center of gravity is on the social side of human
nature, the fortunes of man go up; when the center of gravity is on the
individual side, the fortunes of man go down. On the individual side, he
is the subject of physical law. On the social side, of moral law.
That man was intended to express the force of his life through the social
side of himself and in accordance with moral law, instead of through the
individual side of himself and in accordance with physical law, is plain,
from the fact that it is only when he gives social expression to his
life that he reaches any degree of commanding and permanent influence.
The unrivaled place which the Greece of Pericles holds in history is due
to the fact that he lived at a time when the emphasis was altogether
on the social side of her people. The individual side was completely
subordinated to the life of the whole. It is doubtless true that she
pressed a right to rule too far, and stressed the citizen too much, and
considered the claims of the individual too little. A proper balance is
to be preserved between the individual and the social man. But it is true
that in merging the life of the individual into that of the state, Greece
did prepare a soil compact and rich enough to grow the most ample harvest
of literature, art, poetry, philosophy, and men, the world ever saw. As
soon as the emphasis passed over from the social to the individual side,
the process of pulverization began, and the continuities of thought
and aspiration were broken up. National unity was dissolved, and the
conditions of great men and great results were no longer present.
The difference between the Greece of 300 B. C. and the Greece of to-day,
is the difference between giving the national life a social and an
individual expression. The Greece of 300 B. C. was a compact whole, made
so by each man putting in his individual life as a contribution to the
life of the state. The Greece of to-day is an aggregate of self-centered
units, held together like so many potatoes in a basket, by outward force
and barriers, rather than by loyalty, patriotism, fidelity, and the
cling of man to man. In the Greece of 300 B. C. each man, while giving
his individual life to his fellows, gathered into his own being all
the life they had to give. Hence in Socrates we had a reproduction of
all Greece. In Homer, all her poetic passion, and expression. In the
orations of Demosthenes, all the aspirations of her heart and all her
love of liberty. In the Greece of to-day, we have not the same intimacy
of companionship, or the same network of relationships. Each man,
thinking more of himself as individual than of himself as social, finds
it no longer possible to make levies on the lives of his fellows, to
think his thought, conceive his temple, deliver his oration, or write his
poem. So it follows, they no longer think great thoughts, conceive great
temples, deliver great orations, or write great poems. Each man, in the
high sense, being a separate sand, they have a social soil as barren as a
desert.
Rome won her victories, wrote her laws, and laid the foundations of her
world-wide empire, when her people gave social rather than individual
expression to the force of their lives. A typical illustration we
have of this in the fidelity of Regulus. A prisoner at Carthage, he is
permitted to go to Rome to induce his countrymen to make peace with the
Carthaginians. He pledged his word to return if he failed. On reaching
Rome, however, instead of seeking to persuade his people to make peace,
he appealed to them to continue the war. The social side of himself
belonged to Rome; speaking through that, he called upon her to prosecute
the war. The individual side of himself was personal; acting through
that, he went back to Carthage in honor of his pledge, to be cruelly put
to death by his captors. This single incident is sufficient to help us
understand why, from her seven hills, Rome conquered and for a long time
ruled the world. The individual was sunk in the _Roman_. Not, as in the
case of Greece, that his personal identity might be swallowed up in the
mass, but that he might find a personal identity as great as the empire,
of whose social life he was the embodiment. Regulus was an epitome of
Rome. In him was all her indomitable will, her moral sturdiness, her iron
probity. In him she had a son, in the depth of whose spirit all the glory
she had won in war, and all the control she had found in sacrifice, was
safe. Regulus had the advantage of the Carthaginians, in that the larger,
nobler side of himself was safe from their hate. The Roman, the social
Regulus, was as eternal as the majesty, and fame, and mystery of the
Roman empire.
The doom of Rome, as a nation, was never sealed till the stress was
removed from the social to the individual side of her people. She might
have lived on among the nations, as fixed as her own eternal hills,
if the temptations to self-indulgence and self-gratification had been
resisted. Her downfall was not due to physical causes, but to her sins.
Observance of the moral laws, which made her great, would have kept her
great. When she threw her larger, social self into the fires of her
individual lust and passion, she burned the foundations of her dominion,
and a mighty wreck of shapeless ruins was all that was left of the once
proud mistress of the world.
V.
What is the correlate to the social side of man’s nature? Where is the
domain that matches it? Where is the vast realm, large enough to furnish
sufficient scope for all the possibilities which seem to lie folded
within it? A study of the eye reveals the fact that the light of the
sun is necessary to furnish an element wide and ethereal enough for the
exercise of its functions. By a study of the ear, we learn that it is
related to sound with all its possibilities of harmony. The fin of the
fish is related to the waters of the sea. The bird’s wing is a prophecy
of the sky. The migrating instinct of the wild goose is related to the
South, with its soft skies and balmy air.
In the calculations of Adams, in England, and of Leverrier, in France,
the perturbations of the planet Uranus were in correspondence with the
planet Neptune.
On the side of himself as individual, as we have seen, man is related to
the earth with all it contains to satisfy the needs of the body. We wish
also to determine the nature and dimensions of the sphere to which he is
related as social.
We have seen that, even within national boundaries, human life comes to
be fertile in great men, great deeds, and great art, when the expression
of it is social, rather than individual. With such disposition of her
national life force, Greece reached an unparalleled height of grandeur
and influence. But all outside of Greece were esteemed as barbarians. The
barbarian hordes around her state were like so many walls, which kept
the waves of national life from passing out into any world-wide sea.
The limits were soon reached, then the waves receded, to be thrown back
again in quick succession against the encompassing walls. Was this not in
violation of the law and nature of the expression which the social side
of man, by its very structure, is inclined to give of itself? Is it not,
by its nature, disposed to pass out in accordance with moral laws, which
have no boundaries and limits? And were not the walls they permitted
their hate to build of the barbarians on the outside to arrest the
outward flow of their national life, the evidence of a tacit treaty with
their selfishness? Did these not, after all, bear witness to a hampered
and halted surrender to the nobler side of their nature? Did they not
show that the Greeks were only willing to give social expression to their
national life, as far as the boundary lines of Achai? Too noble to permit
the emphasis to rest on the individual side of her people, as separate
members of the state, she lifted narrowness and selfishness into greater
place by giving them national form.
Too great of breadth to be individually selfish, she was not great
enough to be nationally unselfish. The individual sides of themselves
her people sacrificed on the altars of the state to her national unity,
she transmuted into contempt and hatred of other nations. Selfishness
only passed from the individual to the state. Retained by the state, it
worked itself back into the individuals again, when the unity of the
state was disintegrated. Do we not have in the limitations which Greece
attempted to put on the expression which the social nature of man would
give of itself, the real secret of their downfall? If, while giving
even limited social expression to her national life, Greece developed a
civilization so rich, how much greater might have been her contribution
to human progress had not the seeds of disintegration been sown among her
people through national enmity and hate. In the two hundred years which
embraced the most fertile portion of her history she laid the foundation
of thought. But it was only through thought that she sought to solve the
problems of life and destiny.
The social life of the Jews found only limited expression for itself.
It was worked out into religious lines that were unlimited and all
embracing, but this was in spite of their prejudices.
Their compact social life, the vast depth and vigor of their social
vitality, the tenacity with which they clung together, made it possible
for them to lay the foundation of a religion and an ethics larger than
they dreamed. Their scriptures, their prophets, and their saints were not
possible in a soil less socially rich.
Their devotion, their loyalty, their voluntary subordination of private
to public interests, their religious fidelity fitted them to become the
children of God. The summit of civilization they reached enabled them
to see and to transcribe the outlines of the kingdom of heaven. They
ascended high enough the mount of being to recognize the laws necessary
to regulate human conduct. But they permitted their narrowness and
prejudice to build of the Gentiles about them, walls to limit the outflow
of their national life. Hate for the unfortunate people without, could
not be without its influence on the lives of those within.
The selfishness which, as a nation, they cherished toward other people,
reproduced itself at length in their own lives. From the children of God
they descended until they became the children of the devil. The visions
of their nobler men were discounted and despised. The selfishness that
put them against the Gentiles, finally put them against one another; and
while they kept together in a certain sense, in spite of the upper and
nether mill stones of history, it was rather in memory of what they had
been, than of what they were.
In the civilization of Rome, again, limitations were put on the
expression of the social side of man’s nature. Within the precincts of
Rome, under her eagles and within her roads, there was a sinking of the
individual and an expression of the social side, that has been rarely
equaled in history. It was this merging of the individual units into the
social whole of Rome, that made it possible for her to formulate the
legal measures and provisions which continue to protect human life and
property. But sacrifice, companionship, social cohesion on the inside,
could not, for many centuries, be accompanied with fierce opposition
and cruel hate for others on the outside. It was inevitable that sooner
or later the disposition on the outside would get distributed among the
individuals on the inside.
VI.
The realm, then, to which man on the social side of himself is related,
is larger than that encompassed by any national boundaries. The Greek,
on the social side of himself, was larger than Achai, the Jew than
Palestine, and the Roman than the Empire. The Greek developed thought,
the Jew produced religion, and the Roman formulated law. But the larger
side of man’s nature is not met by thought simply, or by religion simply,
or by law simply, but by the combination of these in right proportions.
Man, on the social side of himself, is correlated through reciprocal
relations to the human race. To limit the social expression of man’s life
is to contract its nature, and to violate the moral laws in accordance
with which it must act. The understanding cannot rest in unrelated
phenomena. Through science it reduces the forces of nature to one force,
its energies to one energy, and its matter to its constituent elements.
So the social nature must find harmony in the union and cohesion of
scattered, separated human beings. It must have companionship, such as
the relations of all men help to make. It must have a range as wide
as the world. Because of the continuities of life and thought secured
through universal social cohesion, it must be able to pass and repass
through the length and breadth of human life. If man’s social nature is
to find its correlate, the race must be so completely one, so compact
and contiguous in the spirit of fraternity and good will, as to make it
possible for each man to share in the work, thought, and virtue of all
men. Individuals must be gathered into the network of social relations,
so that, instead of separate and isolated units, they shall be known
as farmers, merchants, blacksmiths, mechanics, shoemakers, lawyers,
doctors, editors, and ministers. The calling of each must relate to the
well-being of all. Every man must make for others and receive in return
for the supply of his own wants something of all the others make. Into
the multiplex flow of exchanges the shoemaker may put in simply one pair
of shoes per day, as his personal contribution. To that extent he must
be able to make levies on the contributions of all the rest. No one will
be independent in an unrelated sense. All will be dependent, and each
independent, through dependence on the rest. The race, as civil society,
will be at work under all climes, and on all soils, producing the
infinite variety of goods for the world’s market. By the specialization
and division of labor, we will have great increase of skill and the
multiplication of all products. People will be at work raising coffee
and drugs in Brazil, tea in China, creating a myriad of manufactures
in England, France, and Germany, growing fruits on the Mediterranean
Islands; these then will be gathered by various means of transportation
and loaded on ships and cars, to be carried to every place on earth; that
everyone may have the whole earth to serve him, while on his part he
renders service to all.
VII.
The universal organization of the human race into one social whole has
been the grand, far-off event, toward which the whole creation and the
whole process of history has moved. Toward this the race has been moving
through all the fierce antagonisms and bloody wars of the past.
Pestilences, which have decimated the ranks of men, and earthquakes,
which have swallowed up great cities, have contributed toward this
consummation.
The genius of men like Alexander the Great has been used to break up the
narrow and provincial groupings into which men had settled, that a way
might be opened for the distribution of products and the circulation of
ideas.
In the early history of the race, the process of organization began.
Every great man and every great movement helped toward its enlargement.
Abraham, getting up from Ur of the Chaldees, and moving with his family
and his herds across the plains of Syria, to plant a government in
Palestine, widened its sphere. Phœnicia, the strongest maritime power of
ancient times, while she had no motive but gain for crowding every port
with her ships, and for turning the world into an exchange, did augment
the knowledge of men and increase the relations of men. The Jews, by
their compact, social organization, lifted their national life into a
great civilization. This civilization they sought to make provincial;
they sought to fence themselves off, with all they had accumulated of
devotion and law and literature, from the rest of mankind. But their
social pulverization, due to their sins, helped forward universal
companionship. They moved out into other parts of the world. They
settled along the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. They went into Asia
Minor and back into Syria. They took up their abode in Alexandria and
along the Mediterranean coast. Wherever they went, they carried their
civilization; their synagogue, in which to teach their knowledge of the
one God; their Moses, to guide by his law their conduct; and their David,
to soothe, with his songs, their sorrow.
The marvelous productions of Grecian thought and skill were kept, for
a time, from the barbarians. They attempted a monopoly of beauty. But
the breaking up of their Commonwealth hastened the coming of universal
fraternity. They planted their civilization in Asia Minor. They went over
to Syria, down to Alexandria, and around the Mediterranean Sea. Wherever
they went they carried their language and their philosophy. The Romans
broke down the walls between different tribes, and brought them under one
law. They built roads into all parts of the civilized world, and thus
prepared the first great highways of travel.
Looking from this distance, back upon the movements of these great
peoples, it seems as if they might have been, on set purpose, devising
schemes and laying plans for bringing the world of mankind together.
It really looks as if all peoples above the grade of the savage had
been unconsciously and in spite of themselves working for the unity of
the race. The very walls that have been raised to keep men apart have
been battered down and used to make roads to bring them together. The
mountains, that served as barriers to separate them, have been tunneled
to unite them. The oceans, that seemed absolutely to insure isolation,
are now the favorite means of communication. All inventions and
discoveries have helped to the practical oneness of the race.
The mariner’s compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the steam engine,
the electric telegraph, the sewing machine, the spectroscope, the
electric light, the telephone, with the phonograph and microphone, have
wrought for this end. The discovery of the sun’s place in the heavens,
and of the shape and movements of the earth; the discovery of America
and of the law of gravitation; the discovery of the circulation of the
blood and of the wonderful remedies in nature which relieve the ills of
the body, have all reduced differences and augmented unity. Theologies,
which have divided men into religious partisans, fomenting strife,
and producing wars; which have separated men into parties bitter and
revengeful; have grown kinder and humaner as the years have passed, and
tend now to unite men, rather than to divide them. Philosophies, which
kept men apart under the heads of nominalist and realist, sensationalist
and idealist, are now deduced from a broader survey of the facts, and
tend to harmony rather than conflict.
From the beginning nature and human effort have wrought together for
universal good will and social organization. Lapses have been frequent
and the net gain of fraternity small, but from age to age, without
cessation and without intermission, in volume and sweep, it has been
increasing.
VIII.
Because of the limited knowledge men had of the uses of power in the
past, the growth of universal social organization has been slow. Methods
of intercommunication between nations wide apart were meager, hence the
people in one division of the globe could know but little of the people
who lived in another. Any part of the earth not understood was counted
as desert, and any people not known were considered barbarian. But with
the new uses and applications of power, all this is changed. The world
now lies open to all. The antipodes are neighbors. By hitching the
sun’s heat to the flying train, and the canvas to the favoring winds,
and the lightning to human thought, all races on the globe stand face to
face. The world is being encompassed, and no natural obstacles are now
permitted to stand in the way of railway lines, or of submarine cables.
All mountain chains are being tunneled, all chasms spanned, all oceans
traversed, and all straits bridged. The continents of the earth are now
connected by 125,000 miles of submarine electric cable, and countries
are crossed by thousands of miles of railroad lines. With an abiding and
irrepressible, even if unconscious sense, that on the social side of
himself he is related to the whole human race, man has well-nigh subdued
the earth, and removed the obstacles that opposed the realization of his
larger nature. Already great enterprises are being contemplated, which
look to the speedy removal of whatever remaining obstacles there are to
world-wide companionship among men. Some of the great enterprises already
projected which are to help toward universal brotherhood, have been noted
by Mr. Charles Hallock. A railway is to be built from Joppa to Jerusalem
in Palestine, and a bridge across the Straits of Dover near Folkestone.
The Mombasa and Nyanza Railway in Africa is to connect the Nile with
the interior lakes and with the coast. A railway is to be constructed
across Siberia, from St. Petersburg to Behring Strait. Upon this side a
railway is to be built across Alaska to Behring Strait, while Behring
Strait is to be bridged or ferried. A canal is to be cut across the
Isthmus of Corinth in Greece, to connect the Ægean Sea with the Gulf of
Corinth. There is to be a ship canal around Niagara Falls, and a railroad
from Quebec to Belle Isle in Labrador, with connecting ocean steamship
lines to Medford in Wales. There is to be an ocean cable from Clew Bay,
Ireland, to Greeny Island, Strait of Belle Isle, 1900 miles long. And
a railroad from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Hudson Bay, and steamship line
thence to Liverpool.
A railway is contemplated from Winnipeg to the Saskatchewan River, across
the Northwest Territory. A tunnel is to be cut under the Hudson River
at New York, and a tunnel under the St. Clair River, between Sarnia
and Port Huron, Mich. That the Panama and Nicaragua canals have been
projected and partially completed is known the world over. A tunnel is
to be made through the Atlas Mountains in Russia, and the great Northern
Railroad Company is to make one through the Rocky Mountains in Montana,
and another is to be cut through the Sierras from Truckee River, Nevada,
into California. There is to be a canal from Knoxville, Tenn., through
Alabama to the Gulf of Mexico, and one from Chicago to the Mississippi
River, which is to cost $25,000,000. A ship railway 60 miles long is
to be completed from Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario, connecting the
Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, costing $12,000,000. A canal
is contemplated from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico, and also a ship
railway around the Dalles of the Columbia River. There is to be a ship
canal across New Jersey to the Atlantic Ocean, 60 miles long, and a ship
railway to connect the Gulf of St Lawrence with the Bay of Fundy, 12
miles long, to cost $12,000,000. There are to be steam lines from Tampa,
Fla., to all parts of the West Indies, a longitudinal railway through the
axis of North and South America, from Chicago to the Argentine Republic;
steam lines from Vancouver in British Columbia, to Japan and Australia,
and steam lines from New York to the Carribbees and the Windward Islands.
There are to be steam lines from Scotland to the North Cape and the
Antarctic Ocean; stated voyages between Sitka, Alaska, and Point Barrow
in the Arctic Ocean, and steamboat navigation of all the great lakes and
rivers of Siberia, British America, and Central Africa. Ports of entry
are to be established in all countries to furnish terminal facilities for
these far reaching lines of transportation.
We are to have federation among the nations, as we now have it among the
States of the American Union. The social cohesion, once national, is to
be international. All are to think for each, and each is to think for
all. All are to work for each, and each is to work for all. All are to
plan for the good of each, and each is to plan for the good of all. Thus
the inequalities of life are to be reduced, and the littleness of life
is to be redressed.
As all the power in the vine and its branches to make grapes is expended
in the rounding and sweetening of each grape, so all the power in the
social whole to make men will be reproduced in each man. All the justice
in the race will regulate each man’s will, all the thought in the race
will replenish each man’s mind, and all the love in the race will feed
each man’s heart. Nothing less than this social whole, in which are
bound together in one organic body the lives, the welfare, and the hopes
of all, is the correlate of the social nature of man. Toward such a
world-wide organism, each living in the whole and the whole living in
each, his social nature reaches out and is never at home until it is
found. Such universal brotherhood would be impossible without power in
all its manifold forms. This serves the social body as bread serves the
individual body. Power, as the servant of the social body, waits on each
man through his relations with the social whole. A city builds gas works
and finds it possible to let down the price in proportion to the number
of those who use it. A railroad company can lower the rate on passengers
and freight in proportion to the number of men who travel and the volume
of freight transported. The price of a newspaper goes up or down as the
number of subscribers increases or diminishes. Mr. Edison expects to get
electricity from the disturbed conditions of the air, without the use of
fuel. This will make the conditions of life easier by one-half; and then,
as the number of people increases who avail themselves of the uses of
power, the conditions of living will still be easier. Not only will the
unity which comes through social organization lower the rate of insurance
and the price of the necessities of life, but this increased force of
the social whole will tend to the moral health of the people in the same
degree. Health in one part of the body will be brought to bear to correct
disease in another part. The conscience of the whole will be turned into
the degraded sections of our great cities, and the sympathy and love of
all will be called out to reclaim them. Starvation in one part of the
globe will be met by the over-supply of bread in another. Oppression
and tyranny in one nation will be opposed by the sense of fairness and
overcome by the love of freedom in all the rest. As climatic conditions
are made friendly to life by the circulation of oceanic and atmospheric
currents, so moral health will be preserved by the circulation of the
currents of conscience and justice.
IX.
The emphasis is to be kept on the social rather than the individual side
of human nature; not that personality may be lost, but that it may be
gained.
The social mass that constricts and squeezes the single life until the
virility of self-assertion and the right of private initiative are
destroyed, is no improvement on Bedouin isolation. The latter brutalizes
life, while the former eviscerates it. The eye does not lose its capacity
for sight, and its place of peculiar responsibility by being brought
into reciprocal relations along with other organs in the same body. It
would have no meaning and no power of vision apart from relations with
other organs. The ear is not discounted, nor are its wonderful functions
belittled amid the manifold members which work together in the same human
frame. Its position of honor is secured to it by the organic relations
it sustains to the other members. The foot, the hand, and the tongue find
themselves and their uses as they unite together in one living whole. The
lone Bedouin, with no laws and no relations, seems to have all liberty,
but in reality he has none. He is as completely without meaning as
would be the finger separated from the hand. The man of whom nature is
a prophecy is not the being in the woods whose home is a cave and whose
food is wild meat; but it is the man in society, whose home all woods
and metals and stones have helped to build, and whose food all soils and
skies and seas have helped to produce.
The emphasis is to be kept on the social side of human nature, because it
is through that side of himself that man is to pass into the world-wide
work and the glorious destiny for which he is fitted. Through that side
of himself he moves out into order, and strength, and freedom. All men
whose names are cherished in history, passed into place, influence, and
honor through the social side of human nature.
In passing through the social side of himself, the life man finds is a
million times larger and richer than the life he loses. That men might
find the life that belonged to them, the only life worth living, the
tendency from the first has been toward the solidarity of the race. The
relations growing out of such solidarity are constitutive of the being of
each man. The important properties of an acid cannot be known, when it is
considered out of relation with an alkali. What a thing is for another,
that it is in itself. So what a man is through relations with others,
that he is in himself. But what he is in himself cannot be known until he
comes into relations with others.
Solidarity is not to swamp single lives, but single lives are to come
to all that is peculiar and high in themselves through solidarity. The
universe is to preserve relations with each private spirit. By the
organization of men into one social whole, provision is made for each
man to participate in the life of humanity. It is intended that all the
oceans of life shall reach, through their waves, the shores of each man’s
being, and leave deposits of all their wealth in each man’s spirit. When
we speak of the horse, the eagle, the whale, it is understood that we are
using generic terms, and are intended to refer to no particular horse or
eagle or whale. Yet in each horse the species is reproduced, and in each
eagle the species is epitomized, and in each whale the whole whale type
is summarized. This is done in the case of the lower animals, without
their thought or volition. No universal relations are necessary among
whales, for each whale to have within itself all the peculiarities and
furnishments possessed by all whales. The species are to be realized in
each man, too; but this is to be accomplished through social relations
among all men. All the men in the world must touch each man, to call
forth the capacities which lie folded within his life. Humanity, as
parcelled out in nations, generations, epochs, must lift itself into the
being of each man; as the ocean, parcelled out in Atlantics, Pacifics,
Indians, Arctics, Antarctics, lifts itself into each wave.
Power, parcelled out in gravitation, heat, and electricity surrounding
the globe; advertised in every apple’s fall, declared in every flash from
the clouds, and present in every sunbeam; stands ready to make universal
brotherhood, not simply an ideal, running through the dreams of poets and
prophets, but an actual fact. The recognition of power, as the provision
made for the social nature of man, is enabling us to realize the dreams
of prophets and poets.
_TRUTH._
“A century is a formula; an epoch is an expressed thought.
One such thought-expressed civilization passes to another.
The centuries are the phrases of civilization; what she says
here she does not repeat there. But these mysterious phrases
are linked together: logic—the logos—is within them, and their
series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase expressions
of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly
deciphering the word _fraternity_.
“All light is at some point condensed into a flame; likewise
every epoch is condensed in a man. The man dead, the epoch is
concluded: God turns over the leaf. Dante dead, a period is
placed at the end of the thirteenth century: John Huss may
come. Shakspere dead, a period is placed at the end of the
sixteenth century. After this part, who contains and epitomizes
all philosophy, may come the philosophers—Pascal, Descartes,
Molière, Le Sage, Montesquieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais.”