The startling truth that the war is bringing home to many of us is that unity must be something more than a sentiment, it must be an actual system of organization. We are now beginning to see that if you want the fruits of unity, you must have unity, a real unity, a cooperative collectivism. Unity is neither a sentiment nor an intellectual conception, it is a psychological process produced by actual psychic interaction.
How shall we gain a practical understanding of this essential unity of man? By practising it with the first person we meet; by approaching every man with the consciousness of the complexity of his needs, of the vastness of his powers. Much is written of the power of history and tradition in giving unity to a community or nation. This has been overemphasized. If this were the only way of getting unity, there would be little hope for the future in America, where we have to make a unity of people with widely differing traditions, and little hope for the future in Europe where peace is unthinkable unless the past can be forgotten and new ties made on the basis of mutual understanding and mutual obligation. To have democracy we must live it day by day. Democracy is the actual commingling of men in order that each shall have continuous access to the needs and the wants of others. Democracy is not a form of government; the democratic soul is born within the group and then it develops its own forms.
Democracy then is a great spiritual force evolving itself from men, utilizing each, completing his incompleteness by weaving together all in the many-membered community life which is the true Theophany. The world today is growing more spiritual, and I say this not in spite of the Great War, but because of all this war has shown us of the inner forces bursting forth in fuller and fuller expression. The Great War has been the Great Call to humanity and humanity is answering. It is breaking down the ramparts to free the way for the entrance of a larger spirit which is to fill every single being by interflowing between them all. France, England, America—how the beacon lights flash from one to the other—the program of the British Labor Party, the speeches of our American President, the news of the indomitable courage of France—these are like the fires in Europe on St. John’s Eve, which flash their signals from hilltop to hilltop. Even the school children of France and America write letters to each other. American men and women are working for the reconstruction of France as they would work for the reconstruction of their own homes—and all this because we are all sharing the same hope. A new faith is in our hearts. The Great War is the herald of another world for men. The coming of democracy is the spiritual rebirth. We have been told that our physical birth and life are not all, that we are to be born again of water and the spirit. Not indeed of water and spirit, but of blood and spirit, are the warring children of men, a groaning, growing humanity, coming to the Great Rebirth.
XX
The Growth of Democracy in America
The two problems of democracy today are: (1) how to make the individual politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the steady growth towards individualism. The hope of democracy rests on the individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the development of the social consciousness, or that democracy is the development of individualism; until we have become in some degree socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It is not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the individual.
From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray, involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the individual to society, and gave us the false political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century, fostered by Bentham’s ideas of individual happiness, by the laissez-faire of the Manchester school and the new industrial order, by Herbert Spencer’s interpretations of the recent additions to biological knowledge, by Mill,
