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 today 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?
Everyone is claiming today 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 lawmaking. 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 today.
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
