New Year's Thoughts on Taking Sides

SINCE the battle was clearly joined between the physical forces of good and evil in the world, there could be no question of the side on which the individual American, true to the ideals of his country, must stand. In the worldconflict between right and wrong, the right, as we have seen it in a reassuring certainty that our vision was true, has won. It was a simple matter to take sides in the great issue, and to plant one’s self firmly on the side for which the stars in their courses were bound to fight. To stand anywhere else was but to court defeat and that worst condemnation which comes from within.

Yet, having thrown the whole strength of one’s spirit into the struggle for the stupendous common cause, there was left, even up to the moment of its triumph, ample room for divisionsand disagreements. The methods and instruments for achieving the victory could not have been the human things they are, and have given satisfaction to every participant in the fight and every witness of it. Even had these means been divine, it is conceivable that there is enough of the critical Job in each of us to have found occasions for complaint.

How, indeed, could it have been otherwise? Three persons before a cold fireplace arrive readily at a shivering unanimity of opinion that the fire must be lighted in it at once; but the one of them who strikes the match and pokes the logs may be perfectly certain that each of the others behind his back believes he could do it better and is restraining himself from saying so — if that be possible — only with the greatest difficulty. Multiply your three by any sufficient number, and your individual views become group views, party views, and the taking of sides with one or another group or party becomes as inevitable, and inexorable, as a law of nature.

There are many degrees in the manner of taking sides, covering the entire gamut from the furtive to the blatant. The character of the partisan may appear just as clearly in the quality of his partisanship as in the side he takes. The conservative, who would leave things alone, and the liberal, who tries to change them for the better, are respectively militant and gentle according to their individual natures. One is quite as likely to be a robustious, battle-sniffing person as the other; and this is just as true of private citizens as of semi-public and public characters. To all alike in times of crisis comes the challenge, ‘Under which king, Bezonian?’ and quietly or noisily the march must begin, and continue, beneath a chosen banner. Young men have been advised to seek out and espouse unpopular causes, for the good of their souls. But the unpopularity of a cause is not always the measure of its intrinsic merit, whatever its espousal may accomplish for its followers. The more important thing to keep in mind in choosing your cause is that ‘God and one are a majority,’ and that you are the possible ‘one.’ Having taken sides on such terms as these, popularity and unpopularity drop out of consideration. There is ample reward in the satisfaction of knowing precisely where you stand and why you stand there.

Now that the war is won, an original disposition to believe that everything is settled fades from thought and view. The questions inseparable from the taking of sides become just as pressing as they have ever been. In the great object of making the new world which is to emerge out of the conflict a righteous world, a happier dwelling-place for the sons of men, a field of fairer play, everybody is on the same side, just as all were united in the conviction that the menace of autocratic power must be forever quenched. Of course a new day is coming; of course it must be a better day. The only alternative is ’chaos and old night.’ But how is the sun of this new day to be conducted in any orderly progress from dawn to its noon, and prevented from sinking in due course beneath a sullen or angry western horizon, malign with promise of storms to come. The human instruments and methods to which some control of this process must be intrusted will afford spacious ground for the taking of sides. The logs in the fireplace — to come back from the sun to one of its products — must be lighted and tended; and few of us will be humble enough to believe in our hearts that anyone else can do it quite so well as we. No more of unanimity with regard to the details through which the purpose of the world is to be accomplished will reveal itself in the time now at hand than we have seen in the recent past.

In that past, however, there has been an extraordinary unanimity of spirit in America touching the larger issues of the time. Through whatever means, the war has stood in the eyes of the people as a crusade, a flaming ideal, for the realization of which no sacrifice appeared extravagant. If there are left any of those Americans who two or three years ago proclaimed themselves ashamed of their country, they are now to be placed only by means of their silence. Yet now there is only one side with which they can possibly affiliate — that of their countrymen who could not be induced to part with their national pride. To fortify and secure it, one and all must now join in the supreme effort to win from the winning of the war the very best — no tolerated second-best — that the struggle can be made to yield.

For this broad purpose, and perhaps for this only, we are carrying a virtually non-partisan spirit from war-time into the period of peace. In the matter of details, the possibilities of divergence are without number. When the individual finds himself confronted with the necessity of taking sides with respect to the persons and processes whereby the general purpose is to be attained, he may well beware the danger of losing sight of the really great end in view. If he keeps his eye fixed upon that object, and neglects the negligible smaller things, he will bring to whichever side he joins an element of positive strength. There is nothing more clearly worth remembering at a time like the present than that, in a country organized on the basis of party government, all the patriotism, all the sincerity and honesty of purpose, are not to be found in either of the two larger, or any one of the smaller, parties. Danger for danger, there is not much to choose between fixing the magnifying, sometimes also a distorting, glass upon the merits of your own side and upon the shortcomings of the other. To hold inescapably in view the high objects for which all methods and instruments should be employed is the essential thing. Thus it is that every partisan can increase the vitality and effectiveness of his own party. The goal itself is so much more important than any of the means for reaching it, that the taking of sides may be lifted from the realm of pettiness into that of dedication to the highest of causes.

It is on behalf of such causes that it is possible in this new day to take sides. In the social and economic relations of man with man, there must be a continual pressing forward to that democracy of which Lincoln gave the ultimate definition when he said, ‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.’ In the field of the spirit, embodied in the forms of religion, there must be a quickening which shall make the realities of life and death what they call themselves, instead of those disguised opposites which they have so often been: the men who have dealt face to face with things as they are, will now return to us by tens of thousands, and imitations will no longer satisfy them. The schools and colleges are waking up to the necessity of preparing the minds of the men and women of the coming day to cope with the problems of a freer, larger world. That world itself, through leaguing its nations together for perpetual protection against a repeated plunging of mankind into the miserable sea of its own blood, stands waiting for all of us who are left, to make it the decent, even the pleasantly habitable, world it may still become.

For the true furtherance of any one of these causes, who would not take sides — and all the consequences?