The American Democratic Ideal

Familiar as I am with American idiosyncrasies, I was astonished on landing in New York, to find the German military system bitterly assailed as conflicting with the American “democratic ideal,” and I asked myself why this should be. It is true that the German system of universal military service had been the first to be thoroughly organized, but that could not impeach its principle, nor make it conflict with a sound “democratic ideal.” Now, to make my position clear, I wish to say that I have never admired Germany as a whole, although I have known her rather intimately. A generation ago when it was the fashion here almost to worship the Germans, even to their art, their literature, their language, and their manners, when eminent gentlemen, who have no good word for Germany now, used to insist to me at college that nothing but a Germanized education could suffice for the student, I rebelled. I protested that Germany had made no such contribution to our civilization, in comparison, for instance, with France, as to justify in us any such servile attitude, and that I could not admit her claims. In later years I have distrusted her ambitions, I have detested her manners, I have abhorred her language and her art, I have feared her competition, and been jealous of her navy, but I have never questioned in my heart that her military system of universal service was truly democratic, and I have wished that it might be adopted here. It never occurred to me that it could be denounced as undemocratic, or reviled as a tool of the junker class, used by them for their own aggrandizement and for the oppression of the German people. Such an accusation would have seemed to me too shallow to be noticed. I could not comprehend how any sober-minded man who knew the history of the Seven Years’ War and of Jena, could fail to perceive that the German military system was an effect of a struggle of a people for existence, and that the German people and the German army are one. Their vices and their virtues are the same. To imagine that a handful of Prussian squires, most of whom are far from rich, could coerce millions of their countrymen from all ranks in life, who equally with the junkers are trained and armed soldiers, into doing something which they thought harmful, and waging wars which they hated as ruinous or wrong, was and is to me a proposition too absurd to deserve serious refutation.

What then, I asked myself, could be the secret of the hostility of Americans to German universal military service, an hostility which Americans disguised under the phrase of faith in “democratic ideals.” And as I watched this phenomenon and meditated upon what I saw and heard, the suspicion which had long lain half-consciously in my mind, ripened into conviction, that the real tyranny against which my countrymen revolted was the tyranny of universal self-sacrifice, and that they hated German universal military service because it rigorously demanded a sacrifice from every man—from which sacrifice they personally shrank. For, if the German system should be forced upon America, as it might be were Germany to prevail, they would perhaps be constrained to give one year of their lives to their country.

If this inference were sound, it occurred to me that not improbably our “democratic ideal” consisted in the principle that no man or woman should be forced to conform to any standard of duty against their will, or, in short, in the principle of universal selfishness. Then I turned to our women for enlightenment, as the female sex is supposed to set ours an example in unselfishness. To instruct myself I read the modern feminist literature and followed a little the feminist debate, and very shortly I found my question answered.

Since civilization first dawned on earth the family has been the social unit on which all authority, all order, and all obedience has reposed. Therefore the family has been the cement of society and the chief element in cohesion. To preserve the family and thus to make society stable, the woman has always sacrificed herself for it, as the man has sacrificed himself for her upon the field of battle. The obligations and the sacrifices have been correlative. But I beheld our modern women shrilly repudiating such a standard of duty and such a theory of self-sacrifice. On the contrary, they denied that they, as individuals, owed society any duty as mothers or as wives, and maintained that their first duty was to themselves. If they found the bonds of the family irksome, they might renounce them and wander whither they would through the world in order to obtain a fuller life for themselves. This phase of individualism would appear to be an ultimate form of selfishness and the final resolution of society into atoms; but none the less it would also appear to be the feminine interpretation of the “democratic ideal.”

Advancing yet another step I came to the capitalistic class, a class which I take to be a far more powerful class with us than are the Prussian junkers in Germany. Nothing, therefore, can be more important to our present purpose than to appreciate the standard recognized by them. I will take but one test, of many I applied. The railways are to a modern country what the arteries are to the human body. The national life-blood flows through them. They are a prime factor in our prosperity and contentment in time of peace, and our first means of defense in time of war. Though they are vital to our corporate life, our Government confides their administration to capitalists, as trustees, who are supposed to collect for their work as trustees a reasonable compensation, which they levy on the public by a tax on transportation which we call rates. No injustice could be more flagrant and no injury deeper than that such taxes should be unequal or excessive. In what spirit has this most sacred of trusts been performed? The legislation which fills the volumes of our statutes, the cases which cram our law reports, and the wrecks upon the stock market tell the tale better than could any words of mine. It is hardly a tale of self-abnegation to meet a standard of public duty, though it may well be an exemplification of our “democratic ideal.”

Next we come face to face with labor. The spectacle in democratic England of hundreds of thousands of coal miners utilizing the extremity of their country’s agony as a means of extorting from society a selfish pecuniary advantage for themselves, brings before us vividly enough the workman’s understanding of his “democratic ideal.”

Supposing here, for our own edification, we contemplate those of us who are artists and literary men, and ask what our interpretation is of the “democratic ideal.” At this suggestion there rises before my mind a vision of long ago. I was one evening conversing in a club with a well-known painter about some decorations which were attracting attention, were very costly, but which offended my taste as being frankly plutocratic. I observed that, though they brought high prices, I questioned whether they conformed to any true canon of art. Like a flash he turned on me and said: “And who are you to talk of artistic standards? In our world there is but one standard, and that the standard of price. That which sells is good art, that which does not sell is bad art. There can be no appeal from price.” I made no answer for I saw that he was right. Art is a form of expression, and art can, therefore, only express the society which environs it; and our standard is money, or, in other words, the means of self-indulgence. I had been unconsciously thinking of the spirit which produced the old tower of Chartres and the Virgin’s Portal at Paris, when monks, safe in their convents, could concentrate their souls on expressing the aspirations and the self-devotion of their age. I wonder whether we, as literary men, have in mind, when we do our work, an ideal which is our standard, as religion was their standard, or as the verdict at Olympia was the standard of the Greeks; or do we worry little over the form or the substance of our labor, and think mostly of the artifices which may attract the public, and charm the publisher by stimulating sales? If we do the last we exemplify our “democratic ideal” which denies any standard save the standard of self-interest, which is incarnated in price.

I had reached this point in my reflections when it occurred to me to test my inferences by applying them to our collective public thought. After some hesitation I have concluded that, as a unified organism, we are nearly incapable of sustained collective thought, except at long intervals under the severest tension. For instance, during the Civil War, one half of our country sustained what might be called a train of partially digested collective thought through some four years; but on the return to the Union of the southern States our thought became more disorderly than ever. Ordinarily we cannot think except individually or locally. Hence the particular interest must, as a rule, dominate the collective interest, so that scientific legislation is impossible, and no fixed policy can be long maintained. Thus we can formulate no scientific tariff since our tariffs are made by combinations of private and local interests with little or no relation to collective advantage. We can organize no effective army because the money and the effort needed to construct an effective army must be frittered away to gratify localities, nor can we have a well-adjusted navy because we can persevere in no unified plan developed by a central mind. We call our appropriation bill for public works our pork barrel; probably with only too good reason. But the salient point is that in our national legislature the instinct of unity, continuity, and order seldom prevails over individualism or disorder, with the result that our collective administration of public affairs may not unreasonably be termed chaotic.

Descending from the Union to the State the same rule holds. This year a constitution was submitted to the voters of New York, whose object was to check in some small measure the chaos of individualism in state affairs. It was defeated by an enormous majority, because the “democratic ideal” does not tolerate the notion of unity or order at the cost of private self-interest.

But after all the most perfect exemplification of our “democratic ideal,” or the principle of selfishness in public affairs, occurs in our cities. In America there is one city administered on the principle of unity and self-restraint. It is Washington. But I suppose that no other municipality in the land would endure such a yoke, and the reason is plain. In Washington private interests are subordinated to public interests, but our “democratic ideal” contemplates a municipal system which yields an opposite result. Self-interest requires that our municipalities should be so organized that every rich man may buy such franchises as he needs to enrich himself, while every poor man may obtain his job at the public cost. This is the complete subordination of the principle of unity to that of diversity, of order to chaos, of the community to the individual, of self-sacrifice to selfishness. It is, in fine, our pure “democratic ideal.”

I submit most humbly that untold ages of human experience have proved to us that nature is inexorable and demands of us self-sacrifice if we would have our civilization, our country, our families, our art, or our literature survive. Unselfishness is what the words patriotism and maternal love mean. Those words mean that we cannot survive and live for ourselves alone. We cannot be individualistic, or selfish to an extreme, we cannot hope for salvation through our “democratic ideal.” For, if we accept that, we accept the conclusion that our country can never exert her strength in the hour of peril, because we leave to private judgment the sacrifice which each citizen shall make her. We renounce a standard of duty. But surely, sooner or later, that mortal peril must arise, and when we expect it least, either from within or from without, “for ye know not what hour your Lord may come.”

If it be true, as I do apprehend, that our “democratic ideal” is only a phrase to express our renunciation as a nation of all standards of duty, and the substitution therefor of a reference to private judgment; if we men are to leave to ourselves as individuals the decision as to how and when our country may exact from us our lives; if each woman may dissolve the family bond at pleasure; if, in fine, we are to have no standard of duty, of obedience, or, in substance, of right and wrong, save selfish caprice; if we are to resolve our society from a firmly cohesive mass, unified by a common standard of duty and self-sacrifice, into a swarm of atoms selfishly fighting each other for money, as beggars scramble for coin, then I much fear that the hour cannot be far distant, when some superior because more cohesive and intelligent organism, such as nature has decreed shall always lie in wait for its victim, shall spring upon us and rend us as the strong have always rent those wretched because feeble creatures who are cursed with an aborted development.

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