personal interest, this giving of one's abilities and one's time, _in
addition to one's means_, is the beginning of the fulfilment of what I
have long thought: namely, the great gain that will accrue to numberless
communities and to the nation, when men of great means, men of great
business and executive ability, give of their time and their abilities
for the accomplishment of those things for the public welfare that
otherwise would remain undone, or that would remain unduly delayed. What
a gain will result also to those who so do in the joy and satisfaction
resulting from this higher type of accomplishment hallowed by the
undying element of human service!
You keep silent too much. "Have great leaders, and the rest will
follow," said Whitman. The gift of your abilities while you live would
be of priceless worth for the establishing and the maintenance of a
fairer, a healthier, and a sweeter life in your community, your city,
your country. It were better to do this and to be contented with a
smaller accumulation than to have it so large or even so excessive, and
when the summons comes to leave it to two or three or to half a dozen
who cannot possibly have good use for it all, and some of whom perchance
would be far better off without it, or without so much. By so doing you
would be leaving something still greater to them as well as to hundreds
or thousands of others.
Significant in this connection are these words by a man of wealth and of
great public service:[D]
"On the whole, the individualistic age has not been a success, either
for the individual, or the community in which he has lived, or the
nation. We are, beyond question, entering on a period where the welfare
of the community takes precedence over the interests of the individual
and where the liberty of the individual will be more and more
circumscribed for the benefit of the community as a whole. Man's
activities will hereafter be required to be not only for himself but for
his fellow-men. To my mind there is nothing in the signs of the times so
certain as this.
"The man of exceptional ability, of more than ordinary talent, will
hereafter look for his rewards, for his honours, not in one direction
but in two--first, and foremost, in some public work accomplished, and,
secondarily, in wealth acquired. In place of having it said of him at
his death that he left so many hundred thousand dollars it will be said
that he rendered a certain amount of public service, and, incidentally,
left a certain amount of money. Such a goal will prove a far greater
satisfaction to him, he will live a more rational, worthwhile life, and
he will be doing his share to provide a better country in which to live.
We face new conditions, and in order to survive and succeed we shall
require a different spirit of public service."
I am well aware of the fact that the mere accumulation of wealth is not,
except in very rare cases, the controlling motive in the lives of our
wealthy men of affairs. It is rather the joy and the satisfaction of
achievement. But nevertheless it is possible, as has so often proved, to
get so much into a habit and thereby into a rut, that one becomes a
victim of habit; and the life with all its superb possibilities of human
service, and therefore of true greatness, becomes side-tracked and
abortive.
There are so many different lines of activity for human betterment for
children, for men and women, that those of great executive and financial
ability have wonderful opportunities. Greatness comes always through
human service. As there is no such thing as finding happiness by
searching for it directly, so there is no such thing as achieving
greatness by seeking it directly. It comes not primarily through
brilliant intellect, great talents, but primarily through the heart. It
is determined by the way that brilliant intellect, great talents are
used. It is accorded not to those who seek it directly. By an indirect
law it is accorded to those who, forgetting self, give and thereby lose
their lives in human service.
Both poet and prophet is Edwin Markham when he says:
We men of earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise--we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The stairs into the Unfulfilled--
No other ivory for the doors--
No other marble for the floors--
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of man's immortal dream.
Here on the paths of every day--
Here on the common human way,
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To build a Heaven; to mould and make
New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime
To build Eternity in time!
This putting of divinity into life and raising thereby an otherwise
sordid life up to higher levels and thereby to greater enjoyments, is
the power that is possessed equally by those of station and means, and
by those in the more humble or even more lowly walks of life.
When your life is thus touched by the spirit of God, when it is ruled by
this inner Kingdom, when your constant prayer, as the prayer of every
truly religious man or woman will be--Lord, what wilt Thou have me to
do? My one desire is that Thy will be my will, and therefore that Thy
will be done in me and through me--then you are living the Divine life;
you are a coworker with God. And whether your life according to accepted
standards be noted or humble it makes no difference--you are fulfilling
your Divine mission. You should be, you cannot help being fearless and
happy. You are a part of the great creative force in the world.
You are doing a man's or a woman's work in the world, and in so doing
you are not unimportant; you are essential. The joy of true
accomplishment is yours. You can look forward always with sublime
courage and expectancy. The life of the most humble can thus become an
exalted life. Mother, watching over, cleaning, feeding, training, and
educating your brood; seamstress, working, with a touch of the Divine
in all you do--it must be done by some one--allow it to be done by none
better than by you. Farmer, tilling your soil, gathering your crops,
caring for your herds; you are helping feed the world. There is nothing
more important.
"Who digs a well, or plants a seed,
A sacred pact he keeps with sun and sod;
With these he helps refresh and feed
The world, and enters partnership with God."
If you do not allow yourself to become a slave to your work, and if you
cooperate within the house and the home so that your wife and your
daughters do not become slaves or near-slaves, what an opportunity is
yours of high thinking and noble living! The more intelligent you
become, the better read, the greater the interest you take in community
and public affairs, the more effectively you become what in reality and
jointly you are--the backbone of this and of every nation. Teacher,
poet, dramatist, carpenter, ironworker, clerk, college head, Mayor,
Governor, President, Ruler--the effectiveness of your work and the
satisfaction in your work will be determined by the way in which you
relate your thought and your work to the Divine plan, and coordinate
your every activity in reference to the highest welfare of the greater
whole.
However dimly or clearly we may perceive it great changes are taking
place. The simple, direct teachings of the Christ are reaching more and
more the mind, are stirring the heart and through these are dominating
the actions of increasing numbers of men and women. The realisation of
the mutual interdependence of the human family, the realisation of its
common source, and that when one part of it goes wrong all suffer
thereby, the same as when any portion of it advances all are lifted and
benefited thereby, makes us more eager for the more speedy actualising
of the Kingdom that the Master revealed and portrayed.
It was Sir Oliver Lodge who in this connection recently said: "Those who
think that the day of the Messiah is over are strangely mistaken; it has
hardly begun. In individual souls Christianity has flourished and borne
fruit, but for the ills of the world itself it is an almost untried
panacea. It will be strange if this ghastly war fosters and simplifies
and improves a knowledge of Christ, and aids a perception of the
ineffable beauty of his life and teaching; yet stranger things have
happened, and whatever the churches may do, I believe that the call of
Christ himself will be heard and attended to by a larger part of
humanity in the near future, as never yet it has been heard or attended
to on earth."
The simple message of the Christ, with its twofold injunction of Love,
is, when sufficiently understood and sufficiently heeded, all that we
men of earth need to lift up, to beautify, to make strong and Godlike
individual lives and thereby and of necessity the life of the world.
Jesus never taught that God incarnated Himself in him alone. I challenge
any man living to find any such teaching by him. He did proclaim his own
unique realisation of God. Intuitively and vividly he perceived the
Divine life, the eternal Word, the eternal Christ, manifesting in his
clean, strong, upright soul, so that the young Jewish rabbi and prophet,
known in all his community as Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary and
whose brothers and sisters they knew so well,[E] became the
firstborn--fully born--of the Father.
He then pleaded with all the energy and love and fervour of his splendid
heart and vigorous manhood that all men should follow the Way that he
revealed and realise their Divine Sonship, that their lives might be
redeemed--redeemed from the bondage of the bodily senses and the
bondage of merely the things of the outer world, and saved as fit
subjects of and workers in the Father's Kingdom. Otherwise for millions
of splendid earnest men and women today his life-message would have no
meaning.
To make men awake to their real identity, and therefore to their
possibilities and powers as true sons of God, the Father of all, and
therefore that all men are brothers--for otherwise God is not Father of
all--and to live together in brotherly love and mutual cooperation
whereby the Divine will becomes done on earth as it is in heaven--this
is his message to we men of earth. If we believe his message and accept
his leadership, then he becomes indeed our elder brother who leads the
way, the Word in us becomes flesh, the Christ becomes enthroned in our
lives,--and we become co-workers with him in the Father's vineyard.
XII
THE WORLD WAR--ITS MEANING AND ITS LESSONS FOR US
Whatever differences of opinion--and honest differences of opinion--may
have existed and may still exist in America in regard to the great world
conflict, there is a wonderful unanimity of thought that has
crystallised itself into the concrete form--_something must be done in
order that it can never occur again_. The higher intelligence of the
nation must assert itself. It must feel and think and act in terms of
internationalism. Not that the feeling of nationalism in any country
shall, or even can be eradicated or even abated. It must be made,
however, to coordinate itself with the now rapidly growing sense of
world-consciousness, that the growing intelligence of mankind, aided by
some tremendously concrete forms of recent experience, is now
recognising as a great reality.
That there were very strong sympathies for both the Allied Nations and
for the Central Powers in the beginning, goes without saying, How could
it be otherwise, when we realise the diverse and complex types of our
citizenship?
One of the most distinctive, and in some ways one of the most
significant, features of the American nation is that it is today
composed of representatives, and in some cases, of enormous bodies of
representatives, numbering into the millions, of practically every
nation in the world.
There are single cities where, in one case twenty-six, in another case
twenty-nine, and in other cases a still larger number of what are today
designated as hyphenated citizens are represented. The orderly removal
of the hyphen, and the amalgamation of these splendid representatives of
practically all nations into genuine American citizens, infused with
American ideals and pushed on by true American ambitions, is one of the
great problems that the war has brought in a most striking manner to our
attention.
Not that these representatives of many nations shall in any way lose
their sense of sympathy for the nations of their birth, in times of
either peace or of distress, although they have found it either
advisable or greatly to their own personal advantage and welfare to
leave the lands of their birth and to establish their homes here.
The fact that in the vast majority of cases they find themselves better
off here, and choose to remain and assume the responsibilities of
citizenship in the Western Republic, involves a responsibility that
some, if not indeed many, heretofore have apparently too lightly
considered. There must be a more supreme sense of allegiance, and a
continually growing sense of responsibility to the nation, that, guided
by their own independent judgment and animated by their own free wills,
they have chosen as their home.
There is a difference between sympathy and allegiance; and unless a man
has found conditions intolerable in the land of his birth, and this is
the reason for his seeking a home in another land more to his liking and
to his advantage, we cannot expect him to be devoid of sympathy for the
land of his birth, especially in times of stress or of great need. We
can expect him, however, and we have a right to demand his _absolute
allegiance_ to the land of his adoption. And if he cannot give this,
then we should see to it that he return to his former home. If he is
capable of clear thinking and right feeling, he also must realise the
fundamental truth of this fact.
There are public schools in America where as many as nineteen languages
are spoken in a single room. Our public schools, so eagerly sought by
the children of parents of foreign birth, in their intense eagerness
for an education, that is offered freely and without cost to all, can
and must be made greater instruments in converting what must in time
become a great menace to our institutions, and even to the very life of
the nation itself, into a real and genuine American citizenship. Our
best educators, in addition to our clearest thinking citizens, are
realising as never before, that our public-school system chiefly, among
our educational institutions, must be made a great melting-pot through
which this process of amalgamation must be carried on.
We are also realising clearly now that, as a nation, we have been
entirely too lax in connection with our immigration privileges,
regulations and restrictions. We have been admitting foreigners to our
shores in such enormous quantities each year that we have not been able
at all adequately to assimilate them, nor have we used at all a
sufficiently wise discrimination in the admission of desirables or
undesirables.
We have received, or we have allowed to be dumped upon our shores, great
numbers of the latter whom we should know would inevitably become
dependents, as well as great numbers of criminals. The result has been
that they have been costing certain localities millions of dollars every
year. But entirely aside from the latter, the last two or three years
have brought home to us as never before the fact that those who come to
our shores must come with the avowed and the settled purpose of becoming
real American citizens, giving full and absolute allegiance to the
institutions, the laws, the government of the land of their adoption.
If any other government is not able so to manage as to make it more
desirable for its subjects to remain in the land of their birth, rather
than to seek homes in the land with institutions more to their liking,
or with advantages more conducive to their welfare, that government then
should not expect to retain, even in the slightest degree, the
allegiance of such former subjects. A hyphenated citizenship may become
as dangerous to a republic as a cancer is in the human body. A country
with over a hundred hyphens cannot fulfil its highest destiny.
We, as a nation, have been rudely shaken from our long dream of almost
inevitable national security. We have been brought finally, and although
as a nation we have no desire for conquest or empire, and no desire for
military glory, and therefore no need of any great army or navy for
offensive purposes, we have been brought finally to realise that we do,
nevertheless, stand in need of a national strengthening of our arm of
defence. A land of a hundred million people, where one could travel many
times for a sixmonth and never see the sign of a soldier, is brought,
though reluctantly, to face a new state of affairs; but one,
nevertheless, that must be faced--calmly faced and wisely acted upon.
And while it is true that as a nation we have always had the tradition
of non-militarism, it is not true that we have had the tradition of
military or of naval impotence or weakness.
Preparedness, therefore, has assumed a position of tremendous
importance, in individual thought, in public discussion, and almost
universally in the columns of the public press. One of the most vital
questions among us then is, not so much as to how we shall prepare, but
how shall we prepare adequately for defensive purposes, in case of any
emergency arising, without being thrown too far along the road of
militarism, and without an inordinate preparation that has been the
scourge and the bane of many old-world countries for so many years, and
that quite as much as anything has been provocative of the horrible
conflict that has literally been devastating so many European countries.
It is clearly apparent that the best thought in America today calls for
an adequate preparation for purposes of defence, and calls for a
recognition of facts as they are. It also clearly sees the danger of
certain types of mind and certain interests combining to carry the
matter much farther than is at all called for. The question is--How
shall we then strike that happy balance that is the secret of all
successful living in the lives of either individuals or in the lives of
nations?
All clear-seeing people realise that, as things are in the world today,
there is a certain amount of preparedness that is necessary for
influence and for insurance. As within the nation a police force is
necessary for the enforcement of law, for the preservation of law and
order, although it is not at all necessary that every second or third
man be a policeman, so in the council of nations the individual nation
must have a certain element of force that it can fall back upon if all
other available agencies fail. In diplomacy the strong nations win out,
the weaker lose out. Military and naval power, unless carried to a
ridiculous excess does not, therefore, lie idle, even when not in actual
use.
Our power and influence as a nation will certainly not be in proportion
to our weakness. Although righteousness exalteth a nation, it is
nevertheless true that righteousness alone will not protect a
nation--while other nations are fully armed. National weakness does not
make for peace.
Righteousness, combined with a spirit of forbearance, combined with a
keen desire to give justice as well as to demand justice, if combined
with the power to strike powerfully and sustainedly in defence of
justice, and in defence of national integrity, is what protects a
nation, and this it is that in the long run exalteth a nation--_while
things are as they are_.
While conditions have therefore brought prominently to the forefront in
America the matter of military training and military service--an
adequate military preparation for purposes of defence, for full and
adequate defence, the best thought of the nation is almost a unit in the
belief that, for us as a nation, an immense standing army is unnecessary
as well as inadvisable.
No amount of military preparation that is not combined definitely and
completely with an enhanced citizenship, and therefore with an advance
in real democracy, is at all worthy of consideration on the part of the
American people, or indeed on the part of the people of any nation.
Pre-eminently is this true in this day and age.
Observing this principle we could then, while a certain degree of
universal training under some system similar to the Swiss or Australian
system is being carried on, and to serve _our immediate needs_, have an
army of even a quarter of a million men without danger of militarism and
without heavy financial burdens, and without subverting our American
ideas--providing it is an industrial arm. There are great engineering
projects that could be carried on, thereby developing many of our now
latent resources; there is an immense amount of road-building that could
be projected in many parts of, if not throughout the entire country;
there are great irrigation projects that could be carried on in the far
West and Southwest, reclaiming millions upon millions of acres of what
are now unproductive desert lands; all these could be carried on and
made even to pay, keeping busy a large number of men for half a dozen
years to come.
This army of this number of men could be recruited, trained to an
adequate degree of military service, and at the same time could be
engaged in profitable employment on these much-needed works. They could
then be paid an adequate wage, ample to support a family, or ample to
lay up savings if without family. Such men leaving the army service,
would then have a degree of training and skill whereby they would be
able to get positions or employment, all more remunerative than the
bulk of them, perhaps, would ever be able to get without such training
and experience.
An army of this number of trained men, somewhat equally divided between
the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards, the bulk of them engaged in
regular constructive work, _work that needs to be done and that,
therefore, could be profitably done_, and ready to be called into
service at a moment's notice, would constitute a tremendous insurance
against any aggression from without, and would also give a tremendous
sense of security for half a dozen years at least. This number could
then be reduced, for by that time several million young men from
eighteen years up would be partially trained and in first-class physical
shape to be summoned to service should the emergency arise.
In addition to the vast amount of good roads building, whose cost could
be borne in equal proportions by nation, state and county--a most
important factor in connection with military necessity as well as a
great economic factor in the successful development and advancement of
any community--the millions of acres of now arid lands in the West,
awaiting only water to make them among the most valuable and productive
in all the world, could be used as a great solution of our immigration
problem.
Up to the year when the war began, there came to our shores upwards of
one million immigrants every twelve months, seeking work, and most of
them homes in this country. The great bulk of them got no farther than
our cities, increasing congestion, already in many cases acute, and many
of them becoming in time, from one cause or another, dependents, the
annual cost of their maintenance aggregating many millions every year.
With these vast acres ready for them large numbers could, under a wise
system of distribution, be sent on to the great West and Southwest, and
more easily and directly now since the Panama Canal is open for
navigation. Allotments of these lands could be assigned them that they
could in time become owners of, through a wisely established system of
payments. Many of them would thereby be living lives similar to those
they lived in their own countries, and for which their training and
experience there have abundantly fitted them. They would thus become a
far more valuable type of citizens--landowners--than they could ever
possibly become otherwise, and especially through our present
unorganised hit-or-miss system. They would in time also add annually
hundreds of millions of productive work to the wealth of the country.