A Hidden Weakness in Our Democracy

FAITH in democracy has always required a great deal of idealism; some of the noblest minds of the nineteenth century — Carlyle, for instance, and Ruskin — were quite unable to meet the strenuous demands of the new creed. Nor do these demands grow less as the years advance. In our country, the stupendous social experiment initiated over a century ago has had a freer field than elsewhere; and assuredly it remains an experiment still. If we look abroad, we perceive that our republic is on the point of becoming an empire; whether it can achieve that feat and remain a democracy, history impels us to doubt. If we face homeward, remembering the radiant ideal entertained by our forefathers, of a country that should offer to all its sons one heritage of spiritual opportunity, we are forced to confess that the spectacle disappoints.

No true American, however, will accept the disappointment as final. When all is said, our air is buoyant and good to breathe. It is a shock, indeed, that democratic forms prove incompetent to protect their chief representative from the lawless hate that dogs the steps of tyrants. We grieve,finding among ourselves extremes of poverty and luxury. It is both surprising and baffling to discover that a distinctive feature of our civilization so far appears to be the production of Napoleons of finance, who exercise a tyranny as stern as that of a Napoleon of battles. These things are portentous enough, but the end is not yet, and our nation is still in the making. The prophetic soul perceives altitude rather than mass. A child or an early Italian painter, with a mountain in his mind, draws a simple needle-like object that darts upward to the sky with naive directness. God’s mountain is an uplifted world, which ascends not only by steep inclines, but by many level spaces, and includes deep valleys on its mighty upward - striving flanks. All this it behooves us to remember as we contemplate our vast America, — its civilization seething with forces half understood, and constantly generating new forces undreamed of. Our country transcends our powers of observation ; the wisest rail not at events, however undesired, but wait on them with reverence, seeking rather to understand than to arraign.

But this waiting on events degenerates all too easily into the social fatalism which, as has often been pointed out, besets a democracy. It was supposed, when people speculated about democracy instead of experiencing it, that a democratic society would set free, as had never been done before, the forces of personal initiative. This it certainly does in the practical sphere ; from whatever point in our social strata the possessor of the qualities that make for business success may start, his progress upward is rapid and unimpeded. But the immense average tends to absorb the higher faculties or hold them passive. And this is a misfortune; for if democracy means anything more than mob rule, it means a moral responsibility on the part of its every member consciously to coöperate in the creation of a noble national life. Despite the obscuring throng, despite the absorbing claims of private duty or ambition, no American has a right to remain, as he might have done under feudalism, a mere spectator in society and politics. Dimly this is felt: in all of us the social conscience struggles with fatalism masked as humility and with indolence parading as impartiality; and our spirits are full of unrest.

One walk through a tenement-house district, when the people are coming home from work, is enough to make anybody hesitate to assert that the vision of freedom and brotherhood which the nineteenth century so persistently contemplated is getting itself into fact. Suppose a man does more than walk through such a district. Suppose he takes up his abode in it, being anxious to look certain phases of our American society squarely in the face, and shares its life for a season. The adventure is not difficult nor uncommon ; it costs less than a trip to Europe, and is a far better corrective to provincialism.

Our social explorer is likely to have rather a mournful time at first. The pleasing assumptions concerning our “sweet land of liberty” wherein his childhood was swathed will slip one by one from his trembling consciousness, leaving him naked and a-cold. He will grieve that the very aspect of our great cities reveals the mind of the nation as unbeautiful and vulgar. His heart will be gripped by a pain never on earth to leave him, as he meets the material distress rife in the great strata at the social bottom. A moment may come when, in bitterness of spirit, watching the pitiful struggle for existence reduced to its lowest terms, he will cry aloud to his own soul that the democracy which men hailed as the liberator of love has in truth liberated, not love, but greed.

If he is a thoughtful person, however, he will soon pass beyond this first stage of facile discouragement, and a reverence for America will grow upon him even as grows his discontent. But his very sense of the greatness of our opportunity will quicken his perception of the dangers we run and the failures of which we are guilty. And the longer he lives among working people, the more intimately he shares their life, the more serious will become his conviction of a secret danger at the heart of our democracy, — a danger graver than poverty, more ominous even than the bondage to physical labor in which the workers are held. This danger is the intellectual and moral disunion that prevails among us. A nation, to be in any real sense a democratic organism, must possess spiritual unity; its sons must share, in invisible ways, a common life. Grant such a common life, in which thought, desire, emotion, circulate freely, and material inequalities and disasters will matter little; deny it, and the nation falls to pieces, — no world but a chaos, — the forms of political democracy that seem to bind it in one, chains woven of shadow. We have denied it. The American people to-day is united only in outward seeming. Look closer, and you shall see that it is made up of groups mutually incomprehensible; he who would pass from group to group meets traditions and assumptions so different from his own that he halts, like one using a foreign tongue. We breathe the same air, we are governed by the same institutions, but to the eye of truth we move in different worlds.

Probably never did the lusty forces that make for disintegration have things so completely their own way as with us. Even in the Middle Ages, the Catholic faith and the feudal instinct bound together the sharply articulated social order into one living whole. What has taken the place of these vanished powers ? On the other hand, all the elements of disunion that human history has evolved are at play among the peoples gathered on our shores. Racial hostility blends with religious antipathy ; both enhance that class antagonism present in every civilization, but for obvious reasons more conscious and aggressive in a democracy than elsewhere. The dramatic fact, which at once stimulates and appalls, is that these dark-winged spirits of discord seek to hold their mighty sway in a country dedicated as no other land has ever been to the creation of a universal fellowship.

Even among educated Americans the tendency to split into groups mutually indifferent or exclusive is painfully evident, as was signaled in an article in this magazine, for August, 1901, on The New Provincialism. Sectional differences, again, present their unceasing and grievous problems. But at no time is the lack of a common atmosphere so startling, and to the thinker so menacing, as when we pass from the society of the privileged to that of the working people.

At first, our social explorer probably finds the intellectual difference the most baffling. What shall he talk about to his neighbor at an evening party ? He passes in review the topics natural to such an occasion. The latest play? His companion has barely heard the name of the uptown theatre where it draws its nightly thousands. A picture exhibition, then, a popular lecturer, — any one of the casual pleasures enjoyed by his own group, made up of people residing perhaps half an hour away by trolley ? All are as blank to his interlocutor as if the conversation were held in Cairo. A trivial fact, perhaps, but not without its suggestions. When our explorer, having groped about according to the social gifts that are in him, till, if fortunate, he penetrates at last to the region where all life is one, retires, the evening over, to shadows and solitude, he is likely to reflect.

Suppose we reflect with him. Let any one of us watch his own consciousness for a day — ignoring the currents that eddy constantly about individual duties and affections, concentrating his vision on that social self which he shares with his fellow men. He will notice first the dim but potent reactions of his material environment; and he will discover a succession of fine pleasures in all that ministers to the body, — aesthetic elements, adding to what pertains to food, raiment, and the means of preserving physical purity a subtle something that redeems us, in our own estimation, from the brutes. It is hard for most of us to imagine what life would he were we confronted by physical needs in their harsh crudity. But, in our fortunate consciousness, how much lies beyond these first fine delights! What images of beauty and significance, drawn from nature, literature, music, art, not to speak of the larger intellectual conceptions that shape our lives! All these interests form a common world, inhabited by fair and vivid forms, wherein the sons of privilege abide together.

It is a world from which those throngs of our fellow citizens who create our material civilization are of course wholly excluded. The present and visible presses upon them, its cruel weight unrelieved. Factory and shop, in their blank utilitarianism, are too often the exact outward counterpart of the inward vision of the wage-earner. To devout Catholics, indeed, and to orthodox Hebrews, religion, that supreme world poem whereof the entire race is author, comes as a liberating force, with its august and undying assurance that the poetic is the true, and the invisible the only enduring reality. But to vast sections this assurance has become a mockery, and the material aspects of a civilization in which these aspects are perhaps emphasized more exclusively than ever before shut out all else. Is this a light matter? Or is it easy to achieve true fellowship and vital intercourse with men and women who have never entered the inner world wherein our spirits have moved from childhood ?

Let us beware, however, of assuming that all intellectual advantage rests with the privileged. To do this is to fall headlong into the vicious pit of the aristocratic theory. The workers have an intellectual life of their own, apart from ours, determined by race as well as by class and condition. Much sound, healthy, and vigorous thinking goes on among them. I have met keener speculative ardor and more force in argument among the young Hebrews of the East Side in New York than among the young athletes of our universities. The type of thought, the influences at work, are often strange to us. No one, for instance, denies the searching power of Karl Marx in modern thought; for one American who has dipped into him uptown, three, in a different part of the city, will have “capital” at their finger tips. Many writers and thinkers who are forming the life and determining the inner landscape of those who, after all, hold the balance of power in our country are not even names to most of us. But who busies himself with these things, or considers the intellectual life of the masses a matter worth study ? Who, before our late national calamity, had ever heard of Emma Goldman? Yet in her way the woman was a power. And when the revelation came of the fierce forces seething in darkness, how many received it as a solemn call, not to engage in horrified invective nor to utter threats of suppression, but — a far more difficult matter — to account for the existence of these forces in our country of supposed freedom, and to put forth all our love and wisdom in seeking to shed light among the shadows and to draw the alienated into fellowship ?

The hideous and foolish teachings of such a woman are far from being the dominant type of thought among the workers. Moreover, let us avoid the cant which identifies intellectual life with a knowledge of books. One meets at times, in the most book-ignorant toilers, a life-wisdom that, with its direct comprehension of the primal realities, puts our subtle, second-hand theories to shame. We need not go all the way with Tolstoi to feel, as old Langland said, that truth rests often with the ploughman, and that return to fellowship with the people is necessary to the full completion of our living. Whether we approach the question from the side of our poverty or of our wealth, the lack of a common intellectual consciousness between the manual workers and the privileged classes is equally evident.

But the absence of a common ethical consciousness comes in time to appear to our social explorer more serious still. Nothing is more suggestive to the student of our civilization than the strange and interesting variations in ethical type among differing social groups. Already moral science deals less with theory than it did in old days, more with observation ; as time goes on, it must pass beyond the study of the ethical individual, and consider also the subtle and significant differences in moral type developed by differing conditions of race and class. Such an investigation, it may be said in passing, will not start out with the assumption that the atmosphere of wealth, privilege, and the wisdom of this world is best for the development of the moral nature ; indeed, if the ethics of the New Testament continue to be accepted as the high-water mark of ethical idealism, the assumptions may well be the other way. Assumptions aside, however, we may expect rich and perhaps startling results from this hitherto undeveloped and hardly conceived science of distinctly social ethics. Such results cannot be anticipated by the amateur observer; yet our explorer will become more and more keenly aware, the longer he lives among working people, of certain significant characteristics in their moral outlook.

All ethical conceptions rest largely on the golden rule ; that is to say, we instinctively feel that our duty to others consists in that attitude or course of action which we should choose to have observed toward ourselves.

Now, the privileged classes are those which have established certain liens on civilization as it is. It follows that their ideal virtue is justice; that is to say, a strict regard for existing rights. They are wholly honest in their allegiance to this virtue, and most of them are ready to practice it strictly, even in cases unfavorable to themselves. Their regard, however, extends only to rights already actualized, — conquered, as it were, in the material sphere.

The poorer classes, on the other hand, are made up of people who have conquered no such rights. Generosity, not justice, is the virtue they therefore admire and practice. The working man generally needs, to make him the man he might be, more than the miserable pittance which is all he justly deserves, in return for the services which he renders society; and he knows that his own need is his brother’s. It is truism to say that charity and hospitality blossom far more freely in the soil of poverty than in that of wealth; those who have watched the life of the poor can cap anecdotes all day. I recall a charity agent, exasperated beyond endurance because the blankets given to a woman who had only a ragged shawl with which to cover her large family at night had been promptly passed on to another woman with no shawl at all, on the Sidneian principle, “Thy necessity is greater than mine.” Here justice was certainly violated; was something higher than justice perhaps observed? We are slowly beginning to realize — to allude to a more pregnant instance — how different is the aspect presented by the heart of the ward boss, from above and from below: from above, a seething source of corruption; from below an unfailing fountain of generous deeds. It can hardly be doubted that in many cases the boss is to his own consciousness, not the dishonorable politician known to those alien beings his political enemies, but the generous benefactor known to his neighbors and friends.

How may we secure unity of moral trend in a nation where differences are so fundamental ? The rich man sees the poor man improvident, shifty, dishonest; the poor man sees the rich man hardhearted beyond belief. Each judges the other bitterly; both, according to the ancient manner,

Yet if one is sinner, the other cannot cast a stone; and if one follows, often at a sacrifice, the high white light of an ideal, a like quest is not denied to the other, though one guiding star differeth from its fellow in glory. And perhaps both stars are planets, revolving round the central sun, unseen by mortal eyes, of the perfect right.

Back of this unconscious, instinctive generosity of the poor, there is, let us not forget, a dim groping after what seems to them the higher justice also. We can never sufficiently realize that those who think, among the working people, live rightly or wrongly in the atmosphere of a passionately sincere conviction that the world has not treated its poor fairly. The question whether this conviction be in any degree justified does not here concern us; it exists, and exists, inevitably, with especial keenness in a state which purports to be democratic. America claims to offer equal opportunities for full self-realization to all men; the sharp contrast between claim and fact is a moral misfortune. Faint and inoperative in the mass, — a mere “blindfold sense of wrong,” stifling the instinct to initiative, —this conviction of injustice is an actuating passion with the leaders. Nor can any attitude be more cheap and dangerous than that which views this passion as the egotistic and restless greed of the incompetent. It is a passion as free from egotism as the sun ever witnessed. The discontented and embittered are of course to be found among us, — inflammatory elements, fostered in every society since the world began. The problem of dealing with them is distinct, if not simple. But the basis of the social discontent that exists in America is in countless cases no impulse of personal greed; it is rather the grief and disappointment generated in sensitive minds by the contrast between our national pretensions and our national achievement.

Enter in imagination the mind of the ordinary workman; look out with him upon the world. It is a world darkened by a cloud of unrelieved anxiety, gloomy as that which blurs and obscures the sunshine above and around a manufacturing town. Through this gray and shadow-beset atmosphere the sunlight of the universal human joys gleams pale. Not only his own immediate family, not only those personally dear to him, pass before his eyes thus shrouded in shadows, but all the members of his social group. We do not begin to realize the constant disasters and terrors, dismal, commonplace, unnoticed, that make up the drama of life of which the poor are spectators. Sorrows enough we all have to witness, Heaven knows, in whatever social group we happen to be born, but how the tone of the spectacle darkens if we live, for instance, in a city tenement house, where the children of our neighbors die of contagious disease or lingering starvation, where young girls known to us take to the bad as much from the dreariness as from the difficulty of sustaining an honest existence, and where the high light of life among our neighbors is the possession of a “steady job ” at some dull trade! Such an environment generates just what we should expect: listless opportunism or dangerous rage among those of inferior moral fibre; an attitude of loving helpfulness among the more sensitive ; and among all a sense, recognized or not, of strange and bewildering injustice in the social order.

Would you have an illustration ? Apply what we have said concerning the difference in the moral viewpoint among rich and poor to the case of a strike. At no time does the tragic lack of mutual understanding come out in so dramatic a way. Read both capitalist and labor press while any industrial war is waging : you will see that each side honestly believes the other to be actuated by pure greed, hatred, unfairness. Is this ever so? Assuredly not often. In a large proportion of cases — may we guess three out of five ? — justice, as the world counts justice, is on the side of the employer. Contracts have perhaps been made; wages are as high as is consistent with reasonable profit, or even, it may be, with industrial existence ; he has, as he conceives, perfect right to secure the most advantageous labor he can get, whether or no it bear the union stamp. The public, when it understands the situation, seconds the approval of his conscience. Very well; but is the union workman, then, an irrational fanatic, a would-be tyrant toward employer and fellow workman alike ? Step forth, cross the barriers of class, and stand in imagination beside him. Breathe first his general atmosphere, — that large disappointment in the presence of a conceived injustice in which his spirit moves. Realize that his union is to him a sacred thing, — at once strong enough to claim his reverence and weak enough to evoke his impassioned chivalry; realize that the extension of unionism is to his mind essential to the welfare of the whole laboring world, the only protection of the workers against a slavery more and more helpless as organized capital presents an ever sterner front. Once share these feelings in imagination, and while you may or may not approve of the given strike, — for concerning strikes one can of course not generalize, — you will at least comprehend the striker. His stubborn fight for the union principle, even when no melodramatic grievances exist, will no longer evoke your disgust. Even that brutal tyranny of organized over unorganized labor which most outrages the conscience of the public will be, not indeed justified, but interpreted; for you will realize that it is next to impossible for the union man to consider the “scab” as other than a traitor, — false to the cause which can alone bring him salvation, meanly gratifying immediate needs at the cost of the future of the class. We may condemn this attitude : we may even question the fundamental position that only by unionism can the cause of labor be furthered. But no one who has escaped his own horizon, and stood within the mental landscape of the workers, can fail to see how natural is the outlook. Nor will he fail to thrill responsive to a disinterested passion that is in itself contagions; for whatever one may think of the wisdom of the labor men, and whatever defects their private life may hold, the modern world shows no persons more actuated by a love of humanity rising to religious ardor, more heroic in unflinching idealism, than certain in their ranks.

But alas, what employer will realize these things ? As we brood over the strength with which capitalists and laborers are intrenched in their respective positions, we perceive that the difference in their moral outlook is a graver menace by far than the clash of interests. The conflict between capital and labor can never be settled by armed truce nor by nicely balanced adjustments and concessions, but only by a miracle indeed, — the transference of each moral ideal to the mind inhabited by the other.

When may we look for this? For the opposition of the employing and the working class is only a sharp phase of that profound inward disunion which separates our society into “two nations,” and tends to make of our title as a democracy a mockery and a delusion. Were it not for this title and for all it implies, we might perhaps not murmur: we might accept the existence, on a common soil and under common political forms, of groups possessing no common consciousness, as part of the natural order of things. As it is, only two possibilities present themselves to the thoughtful mind: to abandon our assertions, retreating upon the aristocratic theory which in that case will ultimately mould our institutions, or to consecrate ourselves, collectively and individually, to the development of a common life. Unless this can be achieved, it is useless to seek or to gain universal well-being, or even, were the thing thinkable, universal contentment. Our democratic forms remain but shadows; the substance will elude us still.

Surely this shall not be. Nor need we face the situation with despair. Democracy is a living power. Side by side with the forces of disruption other forces, largely unconscious, are at work, making for vital fellowship and shaping the nation into one harmonious whole. To throw what energy he is free to control into coöperation with these forces is the privilege and duty, not of the reformer, not of the government, not of the man round the corner, but of you, and you, and me. For the success or failure of the spiritual democracy depends, in ultimate analysis, wholly upon the attitude in private life of the average man. It is the purpose of these papers ¹ to inquire how we Americans, without abandoning home, profession, or personal interests, may further the cause of social unity, and help to draw all our citizens into one invisible common weal.

Not that our quest can stop here. The study at close range of our social and industrial situation kindles in many minds a burning discontent. Hot protest against the entire industrial order is at large among us, and many not extremists hold that the very structure of our society must be modified before the new world of brotherhood shall appear, This may or may not be; but the discussion of these themes will outlast more than one generation. While it goes on, what beside sharing in it can a man impassioned for the American ideal of fellowship and equal opportunity do ? Let us, with this question in our minds, look very simply at the intellectual, social, and religious relations which members of the alienated classes may bear to one another in the wouldbe democratic state.

Vida D. Scudder.