Make a list of a few things done in your community outside of the home and school to provide for each of the six wants.
Think of something in which your entire community is deeply interested, such as the improvement of the roads, or the building of a new high school, or a county fair, and explain what wants it provides for.
What wants do the following things provide for: rural mail delivery; weather reports; a corn club (or a similar club); a school garden; a library; the telephone; a hospital; a parent- teacher association?
THE PURPOSE OF DEMOCRACY
We may often hear our common purposes as communities or as a nation stated in different terms than those suggested in the paragraphs above. For example, Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior during the war, said, "Our national purpose is to transmute days of dreary work into happier lives—for ourselves first and for all others in their time." Again, President Wilson said that our purpose in entering the world war was to help "make the world safe for democracy." Although these two statements read differently, they mean very much the same thing; and they both refer in general terms to the things this chapter discusses in more familiar and express terms. For "happier lives" can only result from a more complete satisfaction of our common wants. Our own happiness comes from the satisfaction of our own wants AND FROM HELPING TO SATISFY THE WANTS OF OTHERS. And "democracy" means, in part, that the COMMON WANTS OF ALL shall be properly provided for.
In the Declaration of Independence we read:
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
OUR UNALIENABLE RIGHTS
The statement that "all men are created equal" has troubled many people when they have thought of the obvious inequalities that exist in natural ability and opportunity. But whatever inequalities may exist, people are absolutely equal in their RIGHT to satisfy the wants described in this chapter. These are the "unalienable rights" which the Declaration of Independence sums up in the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That community is best to live in that most nearly provides equal opportunity for all its citizens to enjoy these rights. From the Declaration of Independence to the present day, our great national purpose has been to increase this opportunity, even though at times we have apparently not been conscious of it, and even though we have fallen short of its fulfillment. One of the chief objects of our study is to find out how our communities are seeking to accomplish this purpose.
"The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men … Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge."— Woodrow Wilson, in The New Freedom, pp. 48, 49.