[18] Boys’ Self-Governing Clubs, 4, 5.
[19] Charities and the Commons, Aug. 3. 1907, abridged.
[20] John Graham Brooks, The Social Unrest, 135.
[21] The City Wilderness, 113.
CHAPTER V
THE EXTENSION OF PRIMARY IDEALS
Primary Ideals Underlie Democracy and Christianity—Why They are not Achieved on a Larger Scale—What They Require from Personality—From Social Mechanism—The Principle of Compensation.
It will be found that those systems of larger idealism which are most human and so of most enduring value, are based upon the ideals of primary groups. Take, for instance, the two systems that have most vitality at the present time—democracy and Christianity.
The aspirations of ideal democracy—including, of course, socialism, and whatever else may go by a special name—are those naturally springing from the playground or the local community; embracing equal opportunity, fair play, the loyal service of all in the common good, free discussion, and kindness to the weak. These are renewed every day in the hearts of the people because they spring from and are corroborated by familiar and homely experience. Moreover, modern democracy as a historical current is apparently traceable back to the village community life of the Teutonic tribes of northern Europe, from which it descends through English constitutional liberty and the American and French revolutions to its broad and deep channels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
And Christianity, as a social system, is based upon the family, its ideals being traceable to the domestic circle of a Judaean carpenter. God is a kind father; men and women are brothers and sisters; we are all members one of another, doing as we would be done by and referring all things to the rule of love. In so far as the church has departed from these principles it has proved transient; these endure because they are human.
But why is it that human nature is not more successful in achieving these primary aims? They appear to be simple and reasonable, and one asks why they are so little realized, why we are not, in fact, a moral whole, a happy family.