PART IV. The Dual Aspect of the Group:

THE DUAL ASPECT OF THE GROUP:

A UNION OF INDIVIDUALS, AN INDIVIDUAL IN A LARGER UNION

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XXXIV

THE MORAL STATE AND CREATIVE CITIZENSHIP

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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. 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. 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.

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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

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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. 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, 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.

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; 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’