 CHAPTER VIII. THE PROBLEM OF THE PROSPEROUS Subject a column of water, or a boiler, full of steam, to a tremendous pressure, and you develop a marvelous elasticity, Latin, and every atom of the steam or the water. So with the development of life, you bring out its hidden and divine force and elasticity under stress and pressure. It is another form of the law of cost. Thus, on the physical side, if you want a hearty stock, you put on the pressure of conflict. No race of men was ever good for anything who did not have to fight for their lives, if not with other men, at least with climate and nature. So true is this that, as we have already seen, it is not quite easy to allay the skepticism of those who wonder how men will ever keep their blood fresh in an age of universal peace and plenty. The rule is the same in the development of the mind. The men of the earlier generations in America, battling against poverty, with meagerly equipped colleges, with few books, nevertheless got an education quite comparable for effectiveness with that of their fortunate grandchildren of today. The secret was that they worked under pressure, without which, in some form, the mind hardly puts forth its full capacity. The precious moralities have come likewise. When have purity, temperance, integrity, and a noble spirit taken on momentum in the world, and those very times when the surface currents ran strictly against them? Men and women developed a jealous purity in an age of obscenity and license in cities like Babylon, Rome, and Carthage. The new virtue is always making its way against the current of circumstances. Men never loved liberty so much as when the weight of the slave power pressed upon their souls. Never fear that villainy will do any harm to honor. That corruption will break down justice. When the evil weight accumulates, once given the presence of manhood, the Latin elasticity is ready to prevail. Strangely enough, faith in God has never failed in evil times. When the faithful stood alone, when martyrs went to the stake, the law of faith is that it grows stouthearted under stress. The problem of the prosperous now begins to appear. The prosperous classes, never before so numerous, are everywhere trying to evade this strenuous law of effort and pressure, through which, as we have seen, life grows sturdy. They command easy and luxurious physical conditions for their children. Their children are required to do nothing which service can be hired to do for them. Teachers are paid to learn their lessons for them, extravagant pains are lavished on their pleasures. Religion also must be made very easy. Children must be let off from religious observances which they do not happen to fancy. We have the extraordinary spectacle of a generation which owes its success to its obedience to the stern stress of necessity, trying with all its might to contrive to take away from its children the very conditions that made its own life hearty and virile. Moreover, the circumstances of modern society readily exempt the individual, if he chooses, from his normal share of public responsibility. In the old days, the employer lived close to his men, for whose welfare he was obviously responsible. The wealthier educated citizen was a marked man, to whom his community naturally looked for public service. Wealth and education thus created an obligation of leadership. If there were particles of steel in the body politic more carefully tempered than the rest, it was in order that they should act together in the cutting edge of the tool. We have changed all that. Modern business is organized on so colossal scale that millions of employees hardly see the captains of their industry. Thousands of persons draw income from factories, mines, and railroads, which they have never visited. Boards of directors sheltering themselves behind their corporate capacity, approve, or share the proceeds of, transactions for which any individual member of the vast corporation might be ashamed personally to avow himself responsible. What is more startling? Great communities of wealthy people, removing their homes from the bustle and din of the working world, build up stately rows of palaces, or fill great parks with their splendid villas. There is a single town in Massachusetts rich enough in men of education and resources to lead a score of colonies such as established the Commonwealth in the beginning. The fathers or grandfathers of these men were natural leaders, cheerfully carrying civil responsibilities in a hundred New England towns. But this well-to-do class today, so largely endowed with all the capacities to make responsible leaders for the city, the state, the nation, are merely private citizens, often too careless of their civil duties to take the trouble to vote. Youths grow up in the wealthy homes of Beacon Street and Fifth Avenue, on whom no serious burdens rest, who believe that their chief function in life is to be ornamental, to travel abroad, to sail yachts, to discover pleasure. There was a Greek word, idiotes, which meant one who counted for nothing in the state. Our word, idiot, comes from the old route. We are rearing thousands of such political idiots. It is as if we had withdrawn the tempered particles of the steel from the cutting edge of the tool, and it planted them in the half, where the costly temper could do the least possible good. All this is bringing the natural consequences of injured law. While it is not necessary to urge society or the nation has actually deteriorated, while we chronicle a fair measure of improvement in the course of the century, it is nonetheless obvious that we confront very grave social, political, and economic evils. As our industrial machinery becoming more and more complicated, delicate, and at the same time colossal in its proportions requires greater skill, patience, care, and accuracy in its management. As the steel ship presents new problems greater than the little coasting shallop had to meet, so the problems of modern society demand not merely men as good as our fathers, but even better and more thoroughly equipped men. The more intricate social complications require not only good individuals, but more effective organization among them. Is it not evident that mere individualism, irresponsible, and unsocial, however well-intentioned it may be, has had its day? Or if individualism is always good, the signs of the times point to the need of a higher and more social order of individualism. Waste and mischief on a vast scale already menace us. At a time when society needs peculiarly faithful, honest, and well-directed service, we find our great cities under the role of bosses, brains, and machines. We see our national government in distinctly partisan hands, surrounded by a corrupting atmosphere of mercenary scandal. How many men in our Congress can we fully trust? Whom can we name whose one test question at every issue is, what is for the best good of the whole American people? We see likewise new forms of industrial development, inevitable doubtless, but all the more strenuously calling for splendid and conscientious leadership. The great industries of the world, generally organized into trusts, syndicates, department stores, and combines, are as yet at the mercy of the unscrupulous, of adventurers, of egotists whom no one knows how to call to account. At one end of the scale is a multitude of workmen, often altogether out of employment, or again sadly embittered by their suspicions of the selfishness of their employers. While on the other hand is an increasing number of prosperous and educated people, largely members of churches, whose chief concern is not to meet their responsibilities like men and to bring about better human conditions, so much as to keep comfortable, maintain the level of their salaries and incomes, and like the selfish old king of Judea and the face of the impending Babylonian deluge, to have peace at last in their time. Such men as these with a master purpose to make money and a light emphasis on human welfare, without adequate sense of the tremendous obligations of social and industrial leadership, without any passion for justice, cannot be expected today to succeed in the task of administering the powers of the world and distributing its wealth. Meantime, the freedom from weights, pressure, and responsibilities means no increase of joyous life. Joy, in fact, mysteriously depends upon the law of cost. What comes for nothing brings no thrill of life. The man whose face tells the story of the happy life is he whose elastic soul most often responds to grand duties and carries willing burdens. Where do you find a pessimist who question whether life is worth living? They are not among the toilers, they are not commonly the poor, they are not the uneducated and unthinking. The doubters and pessimists are in the classes who owe most for their splendid opportunities and yet give the least in proportion to their endowments. No wonder that men and women who are trying to evade a primal law do not find life greatly worth living. So much for the problem of the prosperous. How can they possibly sail as idle passengers on the grand ship of our modern civilization through fogs and storms requiring the utmost skill, wisdom and courage? We cannot go back a hundred years to the old-fashioned sailing vessel or keep ourselves safe on land. Civilization can take no backward course to Arcadian simplicity. Shall we then, as some stoutly urge, choose the venturesome path of social revolution and displace the prosperous from their easy seats? We shall have occasion to discuss this proposition in a later chapter. For the present, it is enough to say that social revolution does not solve our first and main problem. The problem is to find men of intelligence, capacity, training, fitness and honor to manage our immense and costly machinery. No revolutionary theory shows us where to get capable leaders. When those who ought to be leaders evade the obligations of leadership, the fact that we punish and degrade them does not help us to provide this rare quality of humane, patriotic and high-minded leadership. Admit that a higher order of humane society will be evolved. All the more is the need of great, earnest, wise and devoted leaders to affect the change. The average citizen cares little for any mere issue between the ins and the outs. Inefficient as the ins are, he supposes that the outs may be more hungry and wasteful. The average citizen wants to see the grand business of industry, government and civilization performed with security and efficiency. He begins to perceive that selfish leaders can fit only a narrow and selfish type of society, that irresponsible leaders can never fit or serve anywhere, that a civilized society, a truly Christian nation, must somehow produce civilized leaders and rulers, gentle and brave, men of humanity, men of faith. We are ready to see the answer to our problem. Men must somehow obey the vital law of pressure. By a new turn in the spiral of evolution, the old and barbarous pressure of outward necessity and brute conflict is taken away. It is the mark of civilization that men already emerge into a comparative immunity from the ancient stress of hunger and cold. We see how to provide quite generously for the necessities of vast populations. New inventions put off indefinitely the Malthusian terror of serious overcrowding. Over one great area of the world, we have largely got rid of the old burdens of militarism, race feuds and national jealousy. But the law still holds. It only changes its form. It becomes a moral or spiritual necessity. Relieved with the weight of pressure from without, the man must take upon himself the will and constraint of self-imposed responsibility. He must become ethical if he would live and thrive. In short, education, resources, means, leisure, aptitudes, all constitute an increasing obligation of service, and if required, of public and disinterested leadership. Is a man prosperous? That is, has he thrown off all fear of hunger and cold and destitution? Let him know that he must need to take on himself a whole new order of larger and unselfish concerns, of cares for his neighbors, for his workmen, for the poor, for the state, for the welfare of humanity. Shame on him if he evades the very burdens which his happy position has brought upon his shoulders. Let him hear the ringing call to his manhood from Emerson's Boston hymn. And ye shall succour men to his nobleness to serve, help them who cannot help again, beware from right to swerve. It is very encouraging to find how many individuals there are who hold all that they possess and trust for the welfare of mankind. A considerable class also, while they adopt the old-world idea of their own individual property rights, are ready to make valuable concessions and acknowledgement of obligations which they rather vaguely feel that they owe to society. They generously endow hospitals and colleges out of their plethoric surplus, but the great aim of the prosperous class is still everywhere to enable their children to enjoy themselves. The wonderful appliances of modern education are thus misdirected. The law of pressure and effort by which physical vigor, intellectual power, character, personality, joy, and life are developed is practically denied at school and in college. Even the church lays no real stress on it. We are not, however, without conspicuous examples of a type of education that is exactly fitted to meet the present needs of society and to fit the nobler nature of man. Let me illustrate my meaning of what all education are clearly to do. A very distinguished educator, General S. C. Armstrong, built up a great institution for the blacks and the Indians at Hampton, Virginia. The keynote of his teaching was the responsibility of educated men and women. Why were the few picked out of the millions of their brethren and looked into the level of advanced civilization? Was it that they might earn a better living than others, that they might constitute an aristocracy of superior persons, that their better houses, skill, industry, and culture might give them privileges over their people? On the contrary, these select black boys and girls were given this costly endowment that they might henceforth be more heavily and directly responsible for their race, that if they earn more than the others, they might show others the way to earn also, that if they establish true homes, they might make such homes inspiring examples for others to pattern after, that if they stood above the rest, they might lift the whole level to a permanently nobler humanity. This was the Hampton idea of education. Whenever a boy caught this master idea, he was destined henceforth to live under the self-imposed pressure of a noble responsibility for his race and the nation. He was a man bought with a price. Is it not evident that here is an idea that, whenever seized makes a man a citizen of the universe, he has come under universal laws and conditions. He has ceased to be a mere egotist, a dilettante, a mercenary. If black men and women can be possessed with such an idea, if they can devote their larger earnings, their better social position, their superior skill and culture for high and generous ends, if they can feel the great humanitarian responsibilities of our age and stand at the front to meet its problems, what shall we say of the youth of the Anglo-Saxon stock, with their still more costly education, with their rich and ennobling traditions of liberty, literature, laws, and religion? Who can measure what they who have inherited the wealth of the ages owe to the world? Or can it ever be said that anyone has received a university training who, however much he knows that the details and detached fragments of learning has not yet comprehended that fundamental conception of a divine universe, which brings these details and fragments into orderly, beautiful, and harmonious relations with the life of our common humanity? Here is everything to stir the chivalrous heart of youth, the same law of pressure, which in brutal times seemed a cruel bondage to necessity, which in the animal world meant only the survival of the strongest, which in the competitive struggle for bread seemed to foster selfishness, which when only half understood, as in Mr. Kid's book on social evolution, has been translated so as to set the reason of man and revolt against his religion, is now lifted to the level of the free and willing action of conscious moral agents. It is transferred from the realm of outward forces to the inner and spiritual kingdom. It now becomes the pressure of human sympathy, of duty, of social ideals. Already many appear as typical men of the New Era, thoughtful, observant of facts, reverent of law, who not only know this blended secret, but bow in enthusiastic willingness to accept the weight and obligations of an educated and civilized human life, the life of a son of God. We thus find that a deep necessity is at work in human society. Pressing men almost in spite of themselves to fulfill the marvelous prophecy of social good with which we started. That modern society may hold together, that industries may be permanently organized, that governments may work out their legitimate ends, yes, that men of means and brains may have solid happiness and their children may maintain the honor of their families. It becomes increasingly necessary that the rule of the world shall be, as Jesus foresaw, in the hands of the gentle and friendly. The names of Mark Hopkins, Samuel C. Armstrong, and Seth Lau in education, of Governor Andrew, Sumner, and Carl Schertz in politics, of George Peabody, Peter Cooper, and Mrs. Hemingway in generous beneficence, our arrows pointing where the great and perennial trade winds blow. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of The Coming People. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, The Coming People by Charles F. Dole. Chapter 9. The Ideal Democracy. We are accustomed to hear the fine old common place of our Declaration of Independence, that men are created free and equal. We are familiar with scriptures which declare that God made all men of one blood, and that we must call no man common or unclean. The modern democracy rests on these ideas. It is well to stop for a moment and ask ourselves if we really believe these things and why we so easily think them to be true. To common appearance, men are not equal. On the contrary, as they now are, they are distinguished by startling differences. Who can really prove that all the races of men proceed from a single pair of parents? Who knows that there are not distinctly superior races with immeasurable capacities for improvement, set over against inferior and comparatively unimprovable races, some of which, like the Indians and South Sea Islanders, are destined to die out. The differences among individual men are quite startling. How many of those whom you meet on the street can truthfully count themselves the equals of a Darwin, a Goethe, a Daniel Webster, of Paul or a Luther? It is really a novel and audacious thing that we are attempting in America and calling all men to the suffrage and addressing the beggar on the street with the same title of respect that we use for the most imminent citizen and pronouncing hotentots and negroes our brethren and contemplating the possibility of a fair distribution of the good things of the world with equal chances for the children of the rich and the poor. Footnote one. Of course, the common title, Mr. is simply the more ancient master or lord. We cannot be surprised that not everyone as yet really believes in these fine doctrines. We may forgive timid and conservative people if they apprehend trouble from an unlimited franchise held by millions of illiterate immigrants. If cultured parents are shy of free social intercourse with the families of a degraded poor white neighborhood, not to speak of the blacks, if men of affairs hardly see common terms of value between the mind of the great inventor or the captain of industry and inefficient and unskilled workmen. Taking men as they are, there is not equality. Treating men as they show themselves, you cannot treat them alike, respect them alike, or pay them alike for equal values received. There are men and women who seem to deserve almost infinitely for their services to society. There are those, they may be the rich as well as the poor, who have hardly contributed a useful stroke of work. The democratic idea and especially all socialistic hopes rests on the basis of self-evident facts. The obvious facts are the differences between men, both in capacity and value. The truth is, the democracy, with its doctrine of equality, belongs in the realm of ideal things, or to put it very plainly, of religion. If we did not believe that this is a divine universe, if we had no faith in the ideal justice and in the supreme life of God to whom all belong, if we had not the aspirations and hopes that especially belong to religion, if we were reduced to the conception of a mere physical material world, we should neither have any rational ground to advocate our American democracy, nor any heart to be willing to live and die for it. Democracy and religion march together to victory, or else they must go to the land of dreams. The true democracy is not here now. It is the government that ought to be. It is the ideal state where no longer each shall ask when he votes, what is my own selfish interest, but each shall honestly vote for the welfare of all. The ideal is of a multitude of friendly men, not merely eager as now to obtain their individual rights, but in earnest also to perform their fair share of duties. The democracy presupposes men of manly stature and character. It educates men. It could not have been in an era of barbarism, egotism, greed, selfishness. It did not begin to be possible to at least some men of the order of the idealist, the men of humanity and religion appeared. The time honored prayer says, Thy kingdom come. This does not mean that anyone today expects a miraculous arrangement of human society, ushered in by angels. It means rather that we have the vision of a society which we are set here to bring about. We are spelling out the laws which will affect us as fast as they are obeyed. When we repeat the words of the prayer, we speak our purpose to make the ideal thing real. The question is not merely what mode of government is today most economical or efficient. We can imagine a benign despotism or oligarchy that might safeguard life and property at less waste than we expend in America. But we do not carry on government merely to save waste. The democracy might be even more wasteful in blundering than it is now. We believe in it because of our faith in a better government toward the making of which blunders and waste are part of the price to be paid. The incomplete democracy is the expression of our incomplete efforts. Thus we believe in manhood suffrage, and if you please, and woman suffrage also. Not only is the goal of our endeavors, but also because the problems of suffrage are so many arduous lessons, set us for the achievement of noble manhood and womanhood. The incidental blundering and waste are justified, like the waste of labor in the manual training school. If only we move on toward real government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We admit that we have not reached this sort of government. It is what we purpose. Why then do we call the beggar or the tramp by the title of mister, and give the poorest man an equal vote? We pay tribute to our faith in a coming social regime in which all are masters and mistresses. We trust the man for what he ought to be. Hate, bitterness, pride, arrogance, conscious superiority, vanish from us whenever we think of the ideal human society to which every man belongs. Belongs, do we say? Yes, if this is God's universe, but not otherwise, even in our dreams. The hard-headed businessman sometimes says, almost brutally, Why give my men extra pay? They will waste it and drink. Why give them shorter hours of labor? They do not know how to use leisure. They are better off at work. Grant that the working man does not know how to use his time or his money any better than some rich man whom we know. Why do we still advocate fairer wages and better hours? If we believed in the man only as we see him now, and in the present conditions of human society, we should have no courage to struggle in his behalf. But we believe in an ideal industrial society, and therefore we fear no advanced step, though at times our feet seem to stumble or slip. If this is the divine universe, the very blunders that we make, are our lessons in learning to stand erect and to walk. In this ideal, or divine democracy in which we believe, there is no leveling downward. There is no taking away of real advantage or honorable superiority from one set of men in order to even up the holdings of others. The laws of the world are forever against the success of a materialistic democracy, intent on things instead of men. We believe in a democracy that lifts men upward. Have the few attained greater happiness, security, genuine welfare? We labor together. We organize society. We boldly widen and multiply the functions of government that all may have the essential human advantages which a few now possess. The true democracy must give expression and fulfillment to all the manhood which there is in all. We frankly admit that earlier modes of government, the individualistic traditions of which still survive, proceeded on a different principle. They were for the few and only incidentally for the many. We do not wonder that men whose minds are possessed with the history of such governments are shy of our new democratic experiments. Like Herbert Spencer, they warn us that government ought to do the least possible for the people. We accept the warnings of the past, but we confront new human circumstances and a new ideal of government. We are under the pressure of a new set of facts. We believe, as many do not yet really believe, an evolution. The day may have passed for the appearance of higher physical types and species. The day cannot have passed for the development of a higher moral order. This is indeed the stage of evolution which we should naturally look for next. As the normal man passes up through the tumultuous life of childhood and youth, and to wise and self-controlled maturity, through doubts to broad and settled faith, so the race moves from its childhood toward true civilization, the era of the good spirit. Government therefore inevitably takes on new meanings and enlarged uses. Government moves for a different end from that which men thought of in the days of Charlemagne. This doctrine of the ideal democracy fits into and tallies with a very wonderful conception of the possibilities of the individual man. We say that in some real sense, a man is a child of the universe or a son of God. This means that we do not much care through how many weary ages man has been traveling upward or what the man is today. What interests us, chiefly, is magnificent possibilities before him. Our eye is on the ideal or divine man. We love and respect the man for infinitely more than for what he is now. As in a school, if we are told that a certain child born to a fortune is destined to hold a grand position, the more dull and unpromising he is, the more we are ready to do in order to make him worthy of the great position which he is to occupy. So we feel when you show us a man, though dull and degraded. Tell us that this man in his rags is by birthright the citizen of the divine universe, that unmeasured potentialities are wrapped up in him, that the difference between the average man on the street and the great genius is not so great as the difference between this man as he is and the ideal man such he is destined to become. And we see now what the genuine man of religion used to mean when they spoke of the transcendent value of a single human soul. Nothing less than this is our faith. Nothing less than this superb idea of the individual man gives our American democracy standing room in the rational universe. We are not afraid that the true democracy will undertake to do too much for its citizens. We have reason to fear the power of men who hold office for themselves and for what they may get. We doubtless have to deal with such men for some time to come. But we look forward to an enlightened type of citizenship. Men will hold power in order to confer benefit, to give, not to get. Every individual of this type is in an earnest that others of like sort will appear. It is absurd to suppose if this is God's world that men must always be selfish barbarians. We have here the secret of Christianity. The simple, beautiful, modern teaching brings it out to the light after it has been buried in dogma for centuries. Men had made of Christianity a sort of spiritual aristocracy, well suited for the medieval world. The great church had taught that Jesus' life was unique and exceptional, out of line with all common and unclean humanity. They had boasted of Jesus' earthly descent that he came of the lineage of kings, thus removing him from the common herd. They had taught that by the mystic laying on of priestly hands supernatural powers were conveyed to the few, thus lifted above the brotherhood of the many. Now see the impressiveness of the new teaching. Jesus' life is not exceptional, but illustrative and typical. The more just, transparent, lovable it is made to appear, the better an object lesson it becomes with the possibilities in all human lives. It was simply the normal human life, as it ought to be. What Jesus was, what he felt, what he believed and inspired after, illustrated the ideal possibilities of every human soul. There is not the slightest evidence that this grand human life sprang from a royal line at all. The beauty of it is that it arose from the common people and showed forth what divinity is wrapped up. Not in choice blue blood, but in the common red blood that flows in us all. If there is one thing plain in the New Testament, it is that all that class of persons who think themselves a finer clay than the rest would not have recognized the real Jesus if they could have seen him. This Galilean carpenter's son is not the Christ whom exclusive persons celebrate. The beginnings of Christianity also are almost startling for the object lessons that they presented, the possibilities of the ordinary and average man. Jesus did not even choose the best, or he might at least have had disciples who would not have run away from him. He took his chances with such men as you find on the streets, slow and dull in mind, narrow in their sympathies, unshivel rick and quarrelsome. It is as if he wanted to show what the leaven of a great idea could do with average men. Presently, though not so after the death of their master, these men catch the idea. Lo, they too are sons of God, citizens of his majestic universe, heirs of his own immortality, under orders to serve his good will. Straightway, these men are raised to a new power. They become brave and unselfish. They are leaders and organizers. A great responsibility taken on their shoulders brings out the vital elasticity within them. They become speakers and writers. These things are only typical and illustrative. Human history is full of the records of just such flowering forth of the common stock of our humanity at the quickening touch of a sublime idea. You can dare to call no man common or unclean. Wait, let a great thought, a faith, a hope, a sense of the divine universe, the consciousness of his kinship with God. Once possess a man, and you can never measure the unseen capacities within him. From the story of Peter and James, plain fishermen who would not have understood what now goes on in the cathedrals called by their names, or recognized the pontifical and archipiscable robes and chariots of their supposed successors, to the latest doings of the Salvation Army, human experience is forever gleaming out in sparks of prophetic fire. The fact is, we hardly realize yet how much religion can do for us. Truthfulness, integrity, courage, kindness, faith both in God and man, and enthusiasm flow right out of the heart of our common humanity. Whenever any human soul sees with the idea of the divine universe and as long as that inspiring idea holds sway, these qualities are apart from and deeper than all superficial and conventional culture and refinement, the agreeable veneer of society. Say, rather, these are the solid humane qualities which most aptly take on the pleasing polish of good manners, and without which the most refined manners are hypocrisy. They are the qualities that always command love and respect. I may have seemed to admit that the true democracy is only an ideal. Like all ideal things, however, it proves most practical and workable as soon as you try it. Curiously enough, our democratic form of government, with all its blunderings, is already better and safer than any other government that has ever been tried. So far as it fails, it is not because we have thoroughly trusted and tested it, but rather because under the name of the government and the people, we have suffered the rule of the one or the few. It is wonderful how in the crises of our American history, and especially in the moral issues, as in the contest with the slave power, the appeal to the people and to all the people has been eminently justified. On the other hand, it is startling to find how often the few, the educated, and the wealthy have developed a fatal proneness to get on the wrong side and to act and vote from their prejudices. Though as a whole, the people are certainly slow, yet whenever you will take the trouble to inform them, whenever you appeal to their sense of justice and their chivalry, the sturdy qualities that mark the divine citizenship are energetic among them. You can scarcely take up a newspaper without reading of the instances of courage, devotion, self-sacrifice, heroism, all going to show the splendid possibilities shining out in common human lives, and forever forbidding us from calling any man common, unclean, or inferior. Thus, the facts match our splendid theory. Treat men on their nobler side, look for their best, be patient with them, rebuke them if you must, not because they wrong you, but because they wrong and shame their own divine manhood. Begin with the children in the kindergarten, and expect to find true gentlemen and real ladies among them. Nine, more, think largely of yourself and your work, not as your own, but as gods. Never, by an actor, gesture, cheapen, demean, or dishonor your manhood, and in every case you tend to elicit the facts that you seek. You are on the track of nature and law. You are making the better society, the juster economics, the more righteous government, which you have seen in your vision, lo, it appears already to be safe to trust our ideals, to follow them, to think, plan, act, vote, live, toward their realization. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of The Coming People. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Coming People by Charles F. Dole. Chapter 10. Possible Revolution. Outward changes, economical and political, more or less market, are always going on in the forms and organization of society. But today one can make a specially strong argument that great and radical changes are impending. No one can believe that existing conditions will continue in a world where all things move and change. Waste, extravagance, political corruption, fierce mercantile rivalries, colossal monopolization of wealth and of the industrial plan of the world, masses of dreary poverty. These are natural subjects for profound patriotic and humane concern. Is not the old social and industrial machinery the competitive or wage system showing signs of breaking down beneath its load? The question is quite fair whether any system is just that permits individuals to roll up immense fortunes as the result of lucky speculations or the rise of land values about a great city that permits other individuals to inherit almost unlimited money power as men once inherited duchies and kingdoms while millions of working men with small wages live close to the danger line of debt or even of cold and starvation and are liable to be thrown out of employment for months at a time. When in the face of natural wealth never so abundant and forces of production augmented indefinitely by science and invention so many almost fail to reap any benefit from the resources which surely belong to the race it must at least be confessed that our present system both of production and of distribution is not intelligently or humanely managed its results do not represent an ideal democracy a brotherhood of man no intelligent person has any right to be satisfied with such results The Rockefellers and the Vanderbilt themselves must charitably be supposed to fall short of satisfaction with conditions that menace the equilibrium of society No one can be surprised that men at the depressed end of the economical scale tell us flatly that we must have a new system to match our new ideas of human liberty and equality to fit a religion that bases itself on love to man Our new thoughts of the divine universe tend to emphasize certain ancient teachings Never before our day fairly appreciated as to the true relation of the individual to the whole body to which he belongs Who creates wealth? Who makes the great forces of nature? Who has wrapped up fertility in the soil? Where does inventive thought the prolific parent of every modern discovery come from? The individual by himself is helpless All that he possesses his strength, his skill, his genius, his power of organization has its value from the place in which he stands in human society Has he the gift of oratory? Its training depends on the literature and traditions of generations of the past Its use is nothing without audiences of living men Has the fortunate man the control of a new invention? He did not invent it alone Thousands of investigators and students made it possible for him A million men by their cooperation and use give it mercantile value A man's gifts by nature, by fortune, by inheritance by the combination of a thousand subtle threads of influence permit him to draw a great income from the products of the world How much of this income is strictly and accurately his own to do with as he pleases What merely individualistic claim has he on a dollar's worth of the property and the creating of which he had the help of the world? Religion declares that he is a trustee alike for his gifts and his means He has no right to waste or selfishly to enjoy what is not his alone The facts of the universe pronounce the same judgment The laws concerning property however necessary and useful they may be are the conventions of society They establish the legality but they do not constitute equity Whether it is expedient or not to permit Mr. Astor or Mr. Gole to hold acres of the land of the city of New York The deeper fact holds that the Astor's and Gole's do not create this vast wealth and have no right to lavish it as they please Why should society which is taken back from dukes and princes their claim to transmit by inheritance irresponsible political power continue to suffer generations of Astors great and small to hand down an equally irresponsible and undeserved money power? It is not strange in many question the righteousness of a system which annually turns over a considerable percentage of the income of the nation to men and women who have done nothing useful to merit a luxurious support It must be allowed that a very pleasant and even plausible picture may be painted of the new and better social system which is to take the place of the present regime Mr. Bellamy's happy world where every man is assured a comfortable living and no temptation to treatment unfairly is left will captivate many readers If all of us together may be trusted to manage government better than the despot or the oligarchy managed it Why should not all of us manage the problems of wealth better for all than the selfish few ever could manage them? Is it well for society that any individual shall hold in his own name a power which stretches over synods and controls the sources of production and the forces of nature and levies tribute on the highways and the waterways of the earth? If a few must manage the wealth of the world should men be permitted to select themselves for this mighty responsibility should they not rather be chosen like presidents and governors by those whose united earnings they manage and to whom they should hold themselves responsible for a beneficent use of their power? If it is ever just to compare any scheme as it actually works with another scheme merely on paper we must confess that between the old world system of individual property rights exaggerated as it has grown to be in favor of the rich and the proposed socialism which guarantees every man a place to work the latter surely seems humane, democratic, and Christian There are those who think that not only a new and radically different scheme must come in but that it will come in with the pangs and even possibly the fire and sword of a revolution They infer this woeful prediction from the course of history which has been characterized by frequent revolutions They point to the terrible era that terminated the old aristocratic regime in France They remember our civil war with which we had to atone for the crime of slavery They say it is an old law that all crime must be washed out in blood Is it not national crime they ask today that thousands of miners are forced to live on a pittance? Why should not such death throws marked the outgoing of the present mercantile system as have marked other dying institutions of barbarism? There are also in the present situation certain striking facts that may well make any thoughtful person pause One characteristic of our age is the combination of capital But combinations of capital are showing themselves more unscrupulous more shameless and less susceptible to public opinion than the individuals who constitute the combination The corporations besides having no souls last longer than the lives of the men who make them Men serve these corporations Lawyers plead for them Presidents and directors silence their consciences for them Somewhat as officers fight for their country in an unrighteous war almost with an element of chivalry It is not necessary that all the men in control should be bad or even that they should ever directly vote to perpetrate an injustice It is enough if a great trust a railroad a school book company quietly pockets and divides the proceeds of brazen or consciousness agents and officials If money is paid to secure legislation If great checks go into the hands of partisan bosses ruling a metropolis or a state If legislators are tempted to use their knowledge and votes for gambling on stock exchanges Decent men hushed their better instincts by the subtle device that all this is business Almost as if by an impersonal growth of evil we have fastened upon a hydro-headed tyranny All the more pervasive tenacious and poisonous for the reason that no individual cares to stand a sponsor for it Here it is it made itself Grant that it is not desirable Nevertheless it has in its embrace the choicest business ability of the country It uses the courts both to defend itself and to kill or wear out its enemies It masses its powers at the seats of legislation It uses and commands metropolitan newspapers and even the telegraph wires over which news to its discredit may not run too freely It wields the obstructive forces of social, legal, political and even ecclesiastical conservatism Thousands of men and women drawing their income by its means are interested in the perpetuation of its life Men of warm sympathies who would scorn any act of personal dishonor are more willing to receive their good dividends than to ferret out and veto the wrongful acts by which dividends are augmented Neither if they wish to correct abuses did they know how to proceed or whom to blame They cannot even be certain that the evil reports touching their chosen investments are true Such as aggregate and corporate capitalism like a tremendous machine worked by some new and mysterious force Do you wonder that many say that it must be destroyed outright? It is not easy to see how it can be adapted to gentle and beneficent uses Well not the men who have made this machine and whose living comes from it rally and fight to keep it They are among the ablest men in the land wielding untold resources and unlimited credit They persuade themselves that they are maintaining their rights and defending the established order Opposed to them are the forces of discontent jealousy suspicion bitterness There is greed also and selfishness Here is material for a revolution Nevertheless the time certainly ought not to be ripe to do better than permit the terrible cost of social revolution All history so far from establishing presidents in favor of revolution sets up a long series of warning against the use of this method of attaining human ideals It is a method that belongs peculiarly to the barbarous period It always leaves a brood of evils behind It is like invoking the aid of a fever in order to drive poison out of the body The disease is attended by a succession of relapses Even when the health is recovered sickness is the ignorant way for getting rid of unwholesome or poisonous conditions Intelligence would have prescribed sanitation and diet self-denial instead of indulgence obedience to the obvious laws of health So in the great body politic our vaunted war of independence would never have been incurred if only a few men on both sides of the sea had known what thousands of men know today We had to fight to kill the slave power because we had not enough civilization not to say Christianity north and south to cure the national disease by more intelligent and efficient remedies We are still paying the consequences of our crude and drastic treatment The truth is the word of our age is not revolution but evolution or growth Revolution was among the conceptions of men who thought themselves to be in a dual world fighting the devil and his inimical forces hate, bitterness, cast wars, revolutions, torture innumerable death penalties were men's childish methods of overcoming evil with evil The idea of the divine universe sets these course and primitive methods aside like the Sarian monsters for which the world has no longer use They may survive here and there doubtless to many who take short views they still seem to be our needful companions for all time but already to the clear vision of intelligence and humanity they are becoming anomalous and merely hedonish survival We in America are learning to choose arbitration instead of war We are demanding conciliation in place of industrial conflict a mighty current of public opinion and sympathy to which all classes contribute the rich and the educated as well as the poor runs now towards the support of anybody of oppressed and ill-paid wage earners who make stand for more decent conditions Experience accumulates in England and America to prove that if oppressed men will make the facts of injustice known there were never so many persons whose friendly sympathies will not rest till peaceable remedy is secured Careless as we often appear and immersed in our selfish concerns we do not deliberately propose to tolerate injustice or to profit if we were ever possible to profit by its ill-gotten and perilous gains Aggreived men, on the other hand, never before showed themselves so willing with a noble self-control to keep within those lines of constituted order upon which the welfare of all of us and their own eventual success depend Moreover, so far as we seek a nobler commonwealth this is not a state of mere plenty and comfort of idle ease and fat prosperity it is not enough to give every man a living at the cost of the people with the least possible labor Is it not possible that Mr. Bellamy's world lacks a fine element of strenuousness and heroic endeavor? Does it not look too much as if man had already attained his paradise and had nothing more to struggle for? At any rate, man's soul will never be satisfied by the mere fact that he is well housed and fed There are great inward and moral conditions which it is much more important to satisfy The world that we want to make is one in which men's best selves their divine possibilities are expressed The just and orderly utopian commonwealth of our dreams is good only as it fits and expresses a manhood of which it is worthy It must be a commonwealth in which bitterness and jealousy have not merely been put to sleep in the arms of plenty but have been exercised from men's hearts by goodwill in which mutual respect and sympathy not legal constraints hold society together with their golden bonds in which men have become disinterested not by compulsion or by majority vote or out of vulgar self-interest but because unselfish action in homes and offices and shops and the state springs out of a willing, deliberate and enthusiastic purpose We can see no hope in the methods of revolution They are diametrically opposed to the spirit of that true humane and brotherly life which is essential to genuine democracy and stable society If we suffer the rule of the selfish we cannot rescue ourselves by a mere change of parties or machinery which still leaves selfishness in command The ideal commonwealth must have the men of peace and goodwill in the halls and chairs of office Selfishness is forever splitting society into factions Selfishness and egotism cannot abide in the true and stable commonwealth The selfishness of majorities is as perilous as the selfishness of the few We have already seen that our ideal commonwealth rest upon a faith in a divine universe The commonwealth rest also upon our faith that it is true to man's nature as he grows in manhood both to be free to do as he pleases and also to choose to be just and generous to be free enough to hold wealth and power in his hands and yet to be bound by an intercompulsion to hold all for the common good If we can never produce such men all our dreams and ideals are futile and even revolution would be useless If we are on the way to produce men of this type there is no need of revolution The coming man, as fast as we produce him will give us all we need of readaptation change and reform by his own characteristic method of orderly development by social industrial and political growth To believe in revolution is not to believe in man or in his magnificent future Is it possible to find in state a principle by observing which we shall escape revolution by which, as by Constantine's cross in the sky the coming man shall win a bloodless and beautiful victory End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of The Coming People This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Coming People by Charles F. Dole Chapter 11 The motto of victory What will we not give to possess a definite and absolute program for the reconstruction of society? How delightful it would be if some good and wise pope or an angel from heaven could promulgate by a series of ten commandments what we ought to do By what precise methods we might overcome the evils and abuses of our government correct the unrighteous distribution of our wealth cleanse away the squalor of tenement houses solve the ugly problem of unemployment and bring about universal human welfare and happiness procure for us a valid supernatural edict guaranteeing in advance the wisdom of Mr. Bellamy's plan or the method of the single tax and with what enthusiasm would we take all risk and join the new party or organize the new church to convert the world to our cause As soon as any level-headed person begins to ask definite questions serious difficulties appear in the way of every new scheme for the reconstruction of society In the first place we have a singularly uniform verdict of experience against the possibility of any specific panacea for human ills Again and again the cry has been raised low here or low there but like the fabled spring of perpetual youth that desired panacea has never been found remedies reforms new machinery institutions laws forms customs have their place in value the old and corrupting custom must no doubt give way to the new and finer form but it is a deep law of the world that no outward arrangement however admirable can ever give man lasting satisfaction or social health proclaim the laws of the ideal republic tomorrow into Hedi or Venezuela and you will still have political resistance labor and pain for civilization is essentially from within till the man is ripe his institutions his industrial and economical arrangements his liberties will forever remain imperfect there is no law more inexorable than this it is involved with the very warp and woof of the great thought of evolution the expectation of a panacea physical or social is only in a new form the old world expectation of a miracle or intervention no really thoughtful mind no good evolutionist imagines that the most charming bellamy plan could be made to fit a world of angry hungarian miners of striking cigar makers of grasping monopolist of jay ghouls quays and plats or that any ingenious and elaborate outward contrivance would cure the fundamental evil of human selfishness the better contemplation of any scheme of social reconstruction presupposes a goodly number of men and women who being inwardly reconstructed themselves are prepared to make brave ventures in its behalf and to encounter resistance in order to carry it out the fact that men are very slow to see is that the evils that vex us belong to us and fit our present condition the faulty institutions the bad laws the injustices and inequalities of distribution match the inward and moral condition of society are there a millionaire robbers it is because the millions also are grasping and selfish they desire to be millionaires too are the legislators wasteful and negligent it is because the millions of us waste and spoil and are careless of duty the american people have not yet earned their passage in a paradise and uncivilized people has no right to claim the results titles and appartenances of civilization faster than they are earned and paid for let us grant willingly that outward changes working more exact justice react upon the character of the man who makes them that the improved machinery tends to demand and at least to produce an improved man we are still an honest outwitch among the various new schemes now offered us to select and adopt as our program reformers often liken our present social problems to the question of slavery but that was a simple and distinct moral issue the slaveholder himself could hardly call his system ideal or righteous the general opinion of mankind branded it as barbarous there's hardly one of our modern questions of this simple order here's the temperance problem for instance what sane person can be quite sure that his own method of disposing of it is the only right one and that everything else is wrong but the temperance question is only one issue among the complicated social and economical problems before us all that we can agree to is that many startling evils exist we are all impatient of the processes of an evolving world consuming precious time we want the stroke of a miracle it is a curious fact that anarchists and state socialists promise relief in opposite directions both state socialists and anarchists compare the ideal commonwealth which in their vision they see freed from imperfections with the existing regime as seen from the side of its faults there is no fallacy so frequent and treacherous as this kind of comparison can it be seriously supposed that men can ever enjoy institutions better and more falless than the men who are who manage them give us perfect and civilized men and we shall have little or no need of laws sheriffs and courts give us the right kind of men and we need have no fear of the tyranny of majorities or the stagnating inertia of a colossal bureaucracy let us imagine what even the competitive system might be in the hands of a truly civilized people let the individual be a social and beneficent man let all earn and keep money as honestly as some already earn and use their money let the man struggle not to hold others back but to lift others to his own level let him alter the emphasis of his competition say rather his emulation from the side of getting his dues to the other side namely paying his dues and who shall say that this ideal of industrial freedom does not include all the social justice that the nicest conscience requires it is evident that there is no distinct program of social reform upon which we cannot present expect thoughtful and earnest men to unite so far as we can unite at all our field of vision must be broad and inclusive we must recognize the tenancy and human nature that runs toward individualism and makes a certain class of able men shy of the constraint of laws institutions and systems we must leave room also for those who can see their way only a short distance in advance and therefore have to be opportunist if this word may be taken in a noble sense this is very broad but it is not indefinite we already largely agree that certain specific evils must go certain supreme ends must be attained justice must be done at any cost we must achieve a social order held together not by force or statute law so much as by mutual respect and sympathy we must win room for every man freely to work out his manhood we must help all to be sharers as largely as possible in the world's resources we see the distant goals once these the outlines of mountaintops upon the horizon between us and the hills are unknown forest and rivers we do not dare to promise beforehand by what kind of bridges we shall cross the rivers so we march toward our ideals of human virtue happiness and well-being wherever the opportunity offers we go on and upward one step at a time we purpose to be at the same time both idealist and practical men this is to be opportunist i have not said this with the intent to chill anyone's enthusiasm least of all to keep things as they are the old church tried to unite men and a plan for getting to heaven our new church aims to unite men and bringing about the conditions of heaven here on this earth we hold that this earth is god's world subject to the bracing and imperative laws of the universe we hold that the sovereignty of the world is coming to be in the hands of men who live as god's sons what we want is some simple motto or formula by which as in the days of the primitive gospel we may rally together and win victory is there such a motto of victory simple enough for plain people and children absolutely reasonable to the thinkers profoundly religious imperative to the conscience and persuasive to enthusiasm the motto which i propose is something like this show us whatever is good for mankind and we will try to bring it about tell us whatever means will bring good and we are pledged to use them if we can leave good behind us we shall have made our lives a success if we can enrich mankind through any form of human service we shall have truly lived to do good is to express our nature to express our nature largely is to fulfill our manhood ethics the social instinct religion philosophy all are satisfied when the human life is allied heart and soul to the universe forces of good say then we are here at every step of our way to do good and you have spoken our motto of victory persuade men to say this in earnest and you have established our new and humanitarian church but we are careful not to bind and compel anyone we may not all think the same thing to be good we will be modest we will treat others as generously as we wish to be treated ourselves we recognize that since our first parents original venture with the mythical tree in the garden of Eden man must find the good by experiment by labor sometimes by personal sacrifice by error and failure also marking the wrong way hence forth as dangerous passing slowly the world accumulates the costly products of its earnings and experiences show us oh man whatever is good better best and we follow let me not fail to make the single condition quite plain men have tried to discover what was good or pleasant for themselves they did not know that what is not good for the hive cannot be good for the bee this master principle is the foundation of our new church party our nation it is a total change of the old emphasis we are not here for ourselves but for the good of all or we are only here for our own good as it comes through and with the grander social good of the commonwealth is a certain act then good only for me and not for others i will not do it i will go hungry first is it good for others and does it threaten not to be good for me if it is really good for the whole i will trust though i may not see how that it will be good for me also is it good for the city i will trust that if i do the best for my city it will be well for my friends and my family too is it best for the nation i will trust that it will be well for my state or my party is it necessary for the good of mankind for all the nation then i must vote that my nation shall help accomplish it show us only what is truly best for all and i am here to do it the universe is pledged to sustain that which is best i would not dare or wish to fight against it if indeed the good social moral act were not ordered and upheld by god there would not be any universe the word christian serves well to symbolize the highest actual form as well as the most exalted ideal of the development of divine manhood to be a christian is and broad and universal terms to belong to the new beneficent and victorious order of man doubtless after the fashion or type of Jesus the old-fashioned and merely conventional christian was here to save his own soul show him what was good for himself and he vowed to do it we propose a totally different standard it is a standard that few as yet throughout the long history of religion have comprehended that fewer yet have been willing heartily to adopt we will call no one a christian in modern terms who is not pledged as jesus was to the prompt willing glad some performance of social duty to refuse to serve the good of all disfranchises a man from the citizenship of the universe let us briefly see what our model will do when applied try it with the vexed question of temperance shall we use wine or not not all good men are yet ready to make the same answer but the key to the answer which society is seeking is one in the same we will not use wine if it makes our brother to offend we mean this and no narrow sense we mean if on the whole the use of wine seems to harm human society and to degrade the manhood of our people we will give up its use whichever answer we make we are bound to join hands with others and any just measures to stop the evils of the alcohol habit nay more if we use wine we are the more bound if possible by our sympathies with those who have been wrecked and stirring the same course with ourselves not to let those evils go unabated here is the great economic question of how best to distribute the burdens of government through righteous taxation we may or may not believe in the single tax but we are at one with all honest citizens in our wish not to bear one cent less than our share of the common burdens we would rather pay too much than too little we want no system that tempts men to become shirks let us convert men to be Christians after this practical pattern let us teach them the universe principle embodied in our motto and it will not take long to discover more righteous methods of taxation let us not be afraid to do whatever is just let us make it evident that our proposed reforms represent not our selfishness but our generous intent many persons look with alarm and jealousy on the fortunes that individuals have amassed in a single lifetime our laws have allowed extraordinary prizes as a reward of skill energy ingenuity and the faculty of organization and business the laws have also worked so as to permit enormous fortunes to be made by speculation and dishonesty grant for the present that these huge winnings are incidental to a system that has fostered enterprise and has on the whole and rich the whole country so gracious men ought to see that the time may have come for substantially modifying the amount of tribute that enterprise and ability are allowed to levy upon the product of the world there were never before so many men thinkers teachers poets artists and winners who stand ready to use their powers for the good of all the best men make no high demands for reward and pay would you not think so ill of the men who possess ability for business as to suppose that they will not use their skill and energy unless fabulous prizes are held out to them ask the successful man whether it is fair that he should still claim to keep all that he can get let him own that his claim to unlimited possession is at best merely legal appeal to a chivalrous nature to see that generosity and the truest justice are one the number of those who hold considerable property by inheritance is rapidly growing a large percentage of the total income of the country does goes to the support of men and women who have never labored with hand or brain by law and ancient custom we have established in fact a privileged class persuade the men and women who enjoy inherited fortunes that humanity duty and religion alike require them to accept our comprehensive motto and what will they do they will surely be ready to consider temporarily whether their present privileges are not excessive and contrary to the public interest they will never have the face to resist measures which promise even at their own personal loss to ensure the larger well-being of all the people if on the whole the privilege of such unlimited inheritance is continued they will recognize their enormous obligation to use their fortunes for the public interest what a mockery the profession of the christian religion is in the mouths of men who are not willing to do whatever appears best for the good of their fellows what astounding audacity it is for any class of men to insist upon their right to be supported out of the wealth which they have done nothing to earn we are all socialists today with respect to our public schools our municipal water supply our postal service and many other things which we do quite successfully together no one can say that we may not wisely go farther in this socialistic direction why should not the state control forest and mines why should not the city own and manage its street railways as plans of this sort are from time to time prepare they are always met by the clumsy forces of prejudice and selfish interest they are not even fairly discussed on their merits let us bring up the new generation to be fair-minded and magnanimous let us not fear to try experiments together in the name of the public wheel let us at least be able to show other than selfish causes why the city the state or the nation may not assume new and larger functions neither if we believe in god let us be altogether afraid to trust the people on the other hand let us not be scared by the word anarchist as if it must always mean a red-handed assassin let us interpret the motto of our religion so that the anarchist also if he is a true man may adopt its principle we propose to do whatever the public good commands we believe that the good of all includes the good of each the anarchist proposes to obey this principle as a volunteer rather than by compulsion of majority votes and laws showing that what the public does is good and he will freely contribute his share let the anarchist persuade us if he can that men may be trusted to do what is best without any force except the mild sway of public opinion i have purposely chosen for my illustrations very difficult subjects upon which at present good men differ civilization has been called the art of living together i have wished to show that the great need in living the civilized life is a certain attitude or temper the attitude of fairness the temper of good will brings men together into the ideal society or commonwealth all experience goes to prove that as soon as men desire the same righteous ends their differences presently work out toward harmony even their experiments and errors of judgment become the common means of showing one another what all now wish to know namely what is best for all egotism conceit pride avarice selfishness twist the real and tedious knots in all problems the knots are untied as soon as men ask what is good for us all and are willing when shown the way to do simply that which is right the beauty and wisdom of this universal formula is shown by the fact that under its rule men are being naturally fitted educated and even compelled to where those very institutions and systems which will eventually compose a noble civilization it is certain at present that neither the money kings of wall street with their short views and bad moral perspective nor the politicians at harrisburg albany or washington nor the labor leaders often fastest and greedy offers yet that supreme devotion and capacity needful to guide the steps of mankind into the happy valley of utopia they do not even know the way they're themselves but grant for a moment that the coming world is to be distinctly socialistic and then give us men and women among rich and poor and the ranks of the educated among the thinkers and philosophers among the statesmen among the leaders of labor the captains of industry and the masters of capital committed to the principle of our motto willing to go freely wherever you show them that the good of man requires do you not see that we are preparing men devoted unselfish intelligent to be our guides to show us the way as fast as the multitude of men are able to follow convert men first to the social principle and all the rest will take care of itself the changes first to be made are inward and moral the outward and mechanical system will adjust itself afterwards as the work of the artist fashions itself when once the idea takes shape in his mind this proposed inward conversion is no camera outside the lines of actual human experience on the contrary our noble formula appeals as gospel to the chivalrous nature in all of us show us how to enrich human well-being and the man is not respectable who refuses to listen persuade us that any course of conduct is right and all that is best in us rushes forward to carry the right into action reason conscience the sympathies urge us never before were there so many on this planet whose hearts respond to our motto never were there so many waiting to join the one church that puts all differences aside and only demands of its disciples that they do whatever the voice of the good clearly bids who shall say that the springtime may not already be here for the new church and its new order of chivalry who does not see that after the long winter when ice and snow were the fashion the welcome blossoms appear who shall predict the possibilities when an intelligent generation shall train its children to the brave social chivalrous universe life to share and to give to serve and to love end of chapter 11 chapter 12 of the coming people this libra vox recording is in the public domain the coming people by charles f dole chapter 12 the happy life the hope of the ideal or happy commonwealth as we have already seen is inseparably bound up with our faith and the divine universe that is with our faith and god but the happy commonwealth can have no reality apart from the individuals who make it up the problem is how to secure the largest possible life for individuals perfect the individual and society and the state will soon be organized or right i wish to sum up all that i have said about better social conditions into the simplest terms of religion i wish to show that the coming people who will work out the ideal democracy in the happy society must be essentially religious the happy life for each will be the religious life it grows out of the actual experience of religion it does not depend upon the immediate and successful realization of all our dreams and visions as the crystal may assume perfect form and beauty before the whole mass has yet become crystalline so the individual may take his own orderly place in the divine universe without waiting till all his fellows shall be ready to do the same it is indeed by the orderly movement of individuals and obedience to ideal laws that all human society will at last be affectionately brought into structural order the happy life whenever seen wins others to adopt it everyone has observed certain persons whose religion gives them only uniform happiness and serenity such persons belong to no single denomination they may hold different creeds some of their opinions may seem to us strange or irrational evidently their satisfaction does not depend upon the peculiar dogmas that separate men from one another on the contrary beneath all peculiarities the happy life wherever we see it rest upon the ancient and universal foundations of religion there is no possible monopoly of the great facts and thoughts of the world genuine methodist earnest roman catholics friendly quakers honest unitarians christian scientists and salvationists so far as their religion makes them happy are at one if i may use an old pietistic phrase they have all experienced religion we are accustomed to say that we believe in god few really doubt his existence but thoroughgoing and consistent belief in god is much less common than many suppose the experience of religion is still rather rare in the world there are two stages in any kind of belief the first stage is where we merely hear it having no grounds for disbelief we accept a great many things on the testimony of others we are asked for instance do you know anything about westminster abbey and we all say yes certainly but our knowledge does not give satisfaction it may even go with some sort of discontent or a vague longing to know more but suppose we have actually stood in that massive historic shrine the resting place of the mighty dead the statesmen the poets the heroes we have listened at one of the great musical services when the rich associations of the centuries of english history have swept over our souls as we have looked down the long beautiful aisles and have lifted our eyes to the great vaulted roof a tide of feeling approaching ecstasy has possessed us then let us come home and let someone ask us do you know anything about west minister abbey and we say we have been there so with the great matters of religion and especially with the thought of god we begin in childhood with hardly more than the name of god besides the sort of dem all the name at first carries no feeling with it much less satisfaction and delight but let us rise some day to that higher stage of comprehension and realization when we see what it means to say god and what does it mean it means not only our thought of beauty wisdom order and unity in the world but also a sense of prevailing goodness of an infinite beneficence at the heart of the universe of a real care and love over us in us sustaining us as real is the air in the sunshine more subtle than air and light one may have slowly grown to this thought of the eternal goodness like the good james freeman clark without ever a doubt it may come to the skeptic even from his doubts as a boy reared in some lovely village among the hills who leaves his home to wander around the world only finds out how lovely it is after he returns to it a gray haired man so men often wander long in a wilderness of aimless thought before they find out how beautiful and satisfying is the way of religion to the man of skeptical mind two terrible possibilities are open like ways that lead to death through one way as he looks the forms of evil of tempestuous destroying powers seem to possess the world this is the view of an evil universe it is what we call pessimism through the second way of doubt once he's only the face of the sphinx the infinite mystery this is the way of agnosticism the skeptical mind tries both of these ways it examines whether they are true do the facts of life urge one in either of these ways can one follow them consistently and live the more thoroughly they are studied the more hopelessly paralyzed they both leave the mind they do not satisfy the intellect they starve the affections they baffle the moral sense the mind weary and listless turns back to the solemn and gladsome way of religion let this appear at first a mere possibility a grand perhaps nevertheless the thought of infinite goodness at the heart of the world comes like the quiet shining of the stars after the tempest it fits heart and thought it fits the whole nature of man it satisfies his only reality can satisfy sunshine falls on the world as often as we turn toward the majestic thought of god this means that fear and anxiety are taken away from us the divine life sustains us and we are akin to it real care real sympathy pity and love are over us once grant that beneficence is the sovereign power and in all the great universe there is nothing really to fear for ourselves or for those we love as paul said if god be for us who can be against us it does not make much difference through what form of faith we come to the realization of god the one important thing is that we catch the idea that it becomes more and more real it is doubtless come to the forms and ceremonies of the roman catholic church it came with great purity and significance to the Methodist Wesley it came to the old Hebrew psalmist with the wonderful words the lord is my shepherd and i will lift up my eyes unto the hills it came with power and persuasiveness to the great clear intellect of theodore parker it ever carries with it joy and rest it gives harmony and satisfaction that faith is the best which brings the thought of god most simply and freest of all the tangle of doctrine and controversy blessed forever are those to whom this experience has come we go further than this as travelers coming into an unknown harbor on taking the pilot aboard at once feel confidence without having as yet the slightest idea as they look at the reefs and ledges barring their passage how the pilot will conduct their ship into port so men often catch a happy sense of the beneficent power over them without any definite idea of the divine and rational universe to which they belong the thought of god like the presence of the pilot meets an instinct of faith but it needs to be supplemented and filled out with intelligence let me illustrate a second great thought of religion that goes naturally with the thought of god and especially appeals to and meets the reason we can imagine a stranger looking on a few years ago when the workmen were beginning the congressional library in washington they were laying the foundations the ground was covered with the earth from the excavation one would have been sure that some great public work was going on but no one would have taken much pleasure or satisfaction in it on the contrary one might have been impressed with the noise and confusion in the midst of which the work went on let someone now invite the stranger to come into the architect's office and see the plans he has shown the drawings embodying the beautiful thought of the architect he sees the ground plan and the different elevations he sees in pictured form how the front is to look and the grand portal and the splendidly decorated stairways and halls he is made to understand the ideal meaning of the work through all the present chaos and noise he already contemplates the completed building he has become a sharer in the architect's thought so god permits his children to view the great universe plan we are actually beginning to see if we choose as men never could see before how this majestic work fits together we are accustomed already to the thought of the lines and curves the numbers and the proportions whereby the visible world is made to be the expression of a vast system of ideas we know how the particles of matter like the frost crystals on the window pane group themselves together after exquisite patterns we have been told how plants grow and put forth their leaves in mathematical relations we are not well accustomed as yet to the thought that similar wonderful lines of order go through the social, moral, and political life of man binding history together into a universe plan and building human society into a sublime temple of god the old law givers long ago tracing out those words which we call the ten commandments caught a view of the divine architect's plan they saw the moral lines and proportions according to which human society is built the great Hebrew teachers who discern that all kinds of injustice and cruelty are everlastingly doomed that only such work lasts as is built on righteousness and humanity these men looked on the architect's plan the great teacher who grouped the beatitudes together teaching for all time that mercy justice purity truth and love ruled the world saw as god sees the marvelous plan the forefathers who built our institutions and gave their lives for laws and principles our modern prophets also who saw that slavery could not endure in god's world while freedom is eternal these men entered into the architect's plan they saw what the thought of god is the men today and ever larger numbers who are dreaming dreams of a better social condition who foresee the time when men shall treat each other as brothers these men see the architect's great work his portals his stairways his beautiful halls and the coming temple of humanity god invites his children to the side of the plan of his world no soul ever looks on the magnificent lines and proportions of the ideal temple without a sense of joy and satisfaction our minds as well as our hearts are made to answer to this comprehensive plan of god our minds and hearts are made forever to be discontinued with anything that comes short of this universe plan let anyone try for himself and find out the solid intellectual delight the sense of unity the restfulness the enthusiasm also with which god's universe possesses us so often as we contemplate the beautiful lines of truth justice mercy pity peace and love on which he forever builds let us go further than this we may suppose that it is not a stranger who invites us into the architect's office it is the great architect himself he is our father we will suppose that he not only shows us the wonderful plans but he has a distinct proposition to offer he says i want you to leave your private business whatever it may be and come into my employ i will direct you what to do i will make you a sharer and co-worker in this majestic building it may be that before we were unemployed or we were doing cheap inferior and significant work we were building on foundations that would surely be swept away henceforth we shall build on the everlasting foundations where no honest labor can ever be wasted yes some say we see how this may be with the law givers and legislators the men who built our institutions and liberties the great masters the prophets the teachers and the poets we do not see so easily how god takes all men into his employ but our gospel is for all or it is no gospel here for instance is the tired wife and mother the housekeeper to whom work often seems drudgery and routine the great architect says to her come and work with me build on the lines of my beautiful temple and this true wife and mother the housekeeper building on the lines of truthfulness of justice of tenderness of sympathy is building after god's eternal designs it may be that she has only to carve a single stone that few will see but if she carves by the exquisite pattern if she fashions a real home if she shapes a noble character in her boy or girl do you not see that such stones go into their places in the everlasting shrine god says the same to the teacher the happy teacher builds not for himself he is not called to work for pay or promotion he is under divine orders as truly as the men in old times who heard the splendid words thus say it the lord the ideal things are indeed the words of god the happy teacher builds on the lines of truthfulness fidelity earnestness justice accuracy god's everlasting foundations he is a coworker and share with god the great architect says the same thing to the man of affairs to the merchant or the manufacturer the man seems sometimes to be struggling and merciless competition with his rivals if this is so and the work is built on no structural lines then indeed is the man wretched his mean and despicable actions like wood hay straw and stubble disappear before god's test of fire but let the merchant be working as peter cooper worked as large-hearted men whom we know are working today on the everlasting lines of equity of kindness of truth of reality of beneficence and his work endures human society is nobler forever because he has lived to the happy service of a sharer and co-worker with god the master builder calls every one of our youth as they come forth from our schools and colleges they have the glorious opportunity of living the divine life here and now they are offered the citizenship not of america merely but of the universe no one of them needs to be a failure for their largest possible product and fidelity and devotion and sterling good temper the world makes incessant demand for the men of the order of sir phillip sydney and charles l brace for the women of the spirit of dorthy dicks and florins nightingale and high stations and in humble places alike the world calls for volunteers by the thousand however old we may be in years life lies not behind but before us none of us has more than begun to realize what the great truths of religion will do for us to believe in god and to trust that this is his world to catch the divine plans for the ideal character for the true home for the noble friendship for the honest trade or business for the genuine church for the beautiful commonwealth for nations living together in peace is to lead the happy life to see god's ideals is to see god to live in the presence of the ideal things is to live in the presence of god to lead the happy life is more than to believe in god or to contemplate his shining ideals much more important and practical the happy life consists in acting so as to make the ideal things real better not to profess any religion or name god at all and yet to live and act as if this were a divine world then merely the dream of the kingdom of heaven while doing nothing to bring it about it is possible on the other hand to experience religion that is to know the satisfaction of the happy life and not to know that it is religion to trust to hope for the best to act for the best to love and serve these conditions which sum up all religion and philosophy constitute the happy life it is here that the happy life wrought out by each individual becomes a contribution to the good of all it has been supposed that the interest of the individual was different from the interest of society the good man must sacrifice himself for the well-being of others this may often still seem to be true to do right will long appear to many to be a brave venture but to him who sees as god sees the end in the beginning the good of each is identical with the good of all there is no conflict of interest on the side of the mysteries and immensities of being it is deep personal happiness to trust and to hope like a son of god but happiness like this is also contagious and sweetens a whole neighborhood or community on the side of our manifold human relations it is equal happiness to love and to serve as if indeed all men were children of god like ourselves the happy life is the social life the perfected individual makes the perfect society toward which we strive these things suit our natures on every side they urge us to perfect self-expression in such self-expression of all there is in us of our sense of beauty of wisdom of order harmony justice love humanity there is growing joy contentment peace satisfaction worthy of god's sons this is the eternal or universe life as wittier the poet of liberty sang henceforth my heart shall sigh no more for olden time and holier shore god's love and blessing then and there are now and here and everywhere end of chapter 12 read by max kusimano end of the coming people by charles f dole