The material and mental forces of modern civilization have already wrought wonders. Think of it! Less than a century and a half ago the world for the first time heard a plea for the freedom, the dignity, the individuality of man. To-day millions of minds have that gospel as their fundamental creed. And freedom of thought, freedom of action, is the realized ideal of many nations, the realizing ideal of almost all the others. Why should we fear that the idea of manhood will lose its charm; that the democratic ideal, which has real beauty, should prove less attractive than the old ideal of inequality and injustice and inhumanity, which is now seen to be in fact hideous? Why should we fear that as we grow in enlightenment, grow in capacity to think and act with freedom, we should care less and less about thinking and acting with freedom?
What will come out of this vast, unbarriered flood of sunshine of enlightenment, out of these concentrations social called cities, these concentrations industrial called combinations? Who can say? Who would care to destroy life’s chief interest, the veiled future, by foreseeing? One thing we can be assured of—it will not be tyranny. It could not be tyranny, because the light of intellect, of real intelligence, is now in millions of minds, is kindling in millions more.
Of the many misreadings of history perhaps the silliest is that which attributes to former times an idealism greater than that of our own day. And of the many misreadings of our own times certainly the silliest is that which attributes more idealism to such countries as Germany, Austria, and Italy than to these United States.
The Middle Ages are generally cited as the period of intensest and loftiest idealism. But looking past the artistic and literary few of those centuries, looking at nations and peoples, what do we see? Ignorance, squalor, inconceivable physical and mental and moral wretchedness; ferocious tyrannies worse almost than anarchy itself and constantly producing it; stolid and heartless indifference in almost all to the welfare of their fellow-beings; “Every man for himself” the universal cry. No wonder there was a passionate yearning for the life beyond the grave with its promise of escape from a world made hideous by “man’s inhumanity to man.” And in these modern countries where so-called idealism is rampant, we find false and oppressive social and industrial conditions in the ascendant, we find a deplorable incapacity for dealing with the problems of life or an ignorant insensibility to them.
If idealism means inanely beating the empty air, if it means the worship of the vague, the remote and the purely fanciful, then this age cannot be charged with idealism and our country must plead guilty to the charge of gross materialism; and for idealism we must look to seclusions and deserts, where a few surviving dirty and distracted hermits and yogis spend their time in fantastical imaginings. But if idealism means rational, realizable and realizing dreams of a to-morrow that shall be as much better than to-day as to-day is better than yesterday, then the world was never before so idealistic, and America is the chief prophet and chief apostle of idealism.
In this sense the Declaration of Independence is the most idealistic literary product of the human mind; the so-called idealism of superstition, of chivalry, of kingship and aristocracy, of the divinely appointed few taking care of the many, of “never mind this world; all will be righted in the next,” has the cheap, dull glitter of “fool’s gold” and paste diamonds. These fallacies were, and still are, poisonous, because of their interference with the growth of true idealism—the idealism of self-help and helping others to help themselves. And to show them up and then to show them down and out—especially down and out of our colleges and universities—we need another Cervantes and a revised and enlarged Don Quixote.
Never before was the true ideal, humanity, clear and universal. “Light from the East” was the old proverb; the new proverb is “Light from the West!” For ours is the dawn-land of the Golden Age. We are a nation, a race of idealists, of dreamers. Even our plutocrats, with their Americanism submerged and all but suffocated in their wealth, still dream fitfully of justice and equality and universal enlightenment and the brotherhood of man.
We are a nation of dreamers who make their dreams come true!