Common Feeling Essential to Free Government
What really controls our action is feeling. We are governed by the passions and the most that we can manage by all our social and political endeavors is that the handsome passions shall be in the majority—the passion of sympathy, the passion of justice, the passion of fair dealing, the passion of unselfishness, (if it may be elevated into a passion). If you can once see that a working majority is obtained for the handsome passions, for the feelings that draw us together, rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you have laid the foundation of a community and a free government and, therefore, if you can do nothing else in the community center than draw men together so that they will have common feeling, you will have set forward the cause of civilization and the cause of human freedom.
As a basis of the common feeling you must have a mutual comprehension. The fundamental truth in modern life, as I analyze it, is a profound ignorance. I am not one of those who challenge the promoters of special interests on the ground that they are malevolent, that they are bad men; I challenge their leadership on the ground that they are ignorant men, that when you have absorbed yourself in a particular business through half your life, you have no other point of view than the point of view of that business and that, therefore, you are disqualified by ignorance from giving counsel as to the common interests.
A witty English writer once said: “If you chain a man’s head to a ledger and knock off something from his wages every time he stops adding up, you can’t expect him to have enlightened views about the antipodes.” Simply, if you immerse a man in a given undertaking, no matter how big that undertaking is, and keep him immersed for half a life time, you can’t expect him to see any horizon, you can’t expect him to see human life steadily or see it whole.