For us the chief impress of the self-revealing story of mankind lies in the perception that all sanctioning power comes from below. From the vast human plenum we have called the multitudes, it arises gently, massively, step by step, stage by stage, height upon height; all of which but signifies the peoples’ dreams of glory taking shape vicariously in their times and places. The spectacular and imposing groups and summits of the feudal superstructure have no other base, no other sanction. Like towering cumulus clouds they float upon thin air.
As there are truths that lie within truths, so are there dreams that lie within dreams. The most ancient of dreams lies indeed within the feudal dream. This dream is none other than the dream of the reality of man.
As truths one by one appear above the surface, ever more powerful, farther reaching as they come from greater depths of life, so the great deep dream of man’s free spirit has been moving upward through the feudal dream. The flair of his powers is now sensing in the thought of the man of today.
With the great inversion of the Earth and the Sun, brought definitely about by so small an object as a telescope which man in his curiosity invented—created—to extend his power of eyesight and the daring thought—the dream—it stood for; with this shock of inversion definitely began the greatest of man’s adventures upon his Earth.
We in present sense and in retrospect call it the modern.
The feudal flow poured on, the germ of the modern growing in embryo apace and inexterminable. Inquiry upon inquiry followed; invention upon invention, discovery upon discovery; and wars and more wars, tremors, and the downfall of mighty superstitions; cunning and betrayal raged in abuses of delegated power, institutions rocked, dogma came forth in the open, knife and torch in hand the feudal flow went on in stealth, the modern power grew and ramified; there was calm and there was turbulence; onward flowed the feudal stream with its new arrangements, its new collapses, its new horrors, its new deaths, its new resurrections, as the power of man’s self-determination, the assertion of his free spirit, none too articulate as yet, none too sane, clarified in growing strength, its inventions seized upon, its uses turned to abuse, yet goading the feudal power into titanic writhings, fears and dreads, desperations, ruses and stratagems, wars and more wars—the dread phantom of awakening multitudes—the resolve to foster hate.
Yet man the worker, the inquirer, ever pushed onward in hope. Came the printing press, the mariner’s compass, the power of steam, railroads, great ships, the discovery and development of new vast hidden riches of earth, the harnessing of the mystical power of electricity, the land telegraph, the ocean cable, the telephone, the growth of libraries, the daily papers, the public schools, the technical schools, the automobile, vast systems of transportation of all kinds, the radio, the aeroplane, the mastery of the air, the mastery of the seas, the mastery of the earth, the increasing mastery of ideas. The immense growth in power of constructive imagination and of the will to do. And all to what end? What may tomorrow and tomorrow bring forth out of bloodstained yesterday and the flowing yesterdays since History’s dawn?
The great drama we herein have called the Modern, unique in the story of mankind, beginning with a small telescope, advancing to the radio, to the measurement of the stars, to the searching out of the utterly minute in Life’s infinitude of variety, to enormous strides in developments of utility, we may say is in character so eye-opening as to constitute the first act in the drama of the universal education of mankind through a series of imposing object lessons, changing situations, shifting scenes. Also, in that act begins the lifting of veils revealing object lessons coming closer up, and closer, from beneath the surface of feudal repression, and of the savage inertia of superstitions born of the habit of fear, and of unawareness, of dread of the reality of man; object lessons—ever object lessons—crowding upon us.
Among the most startling of these object lessons we are coming to apperceive the significance of choice—its dire or its joyous man-made results. Slowly in consequence comes forth from the hitherto invisible, and shapes before us, a presence no gesture can debar, no noise of words deter—the sublime, the warning, the prophetic image of man as Moral Power.
Thus clarifies in the dawning light of our modern day the fuller meaning, the effulgence of the Democratic Vista; the super-power of Democratic Man.
Moral Power, in the intensity of its choice, in the full exercise of its purpose to create a world of sanity, of beauty and of joy, alone can cause to dissolve and fade into thin air as though it had never been, the baleful feudal superstition of dominion and blood-sacrifice.
This moral power residing in the multitudes and awakening to voice, is what Democracy means.
To envisage Democracy as a mechanical, political system merely, to place faith in it as such—or in any abstraction, is to foster an hallucination, to join in the Dance of Death; to confuse the hand of Esau with the voice of Jacob. The lifting of the eyelids of the World is what Democracy means.
The implications of the Democratic Idea branch into endless ramification of science, of art, of all industrial and social activities of human well-being, through which shall flow the wholesome sap of its urge of self-preservation through beneficence, drawn up from roots running ever deeper and spreading ever finer
