The anomaly of the first two years of the War was the presence of the vast Russian autocratic empire on the side of the allied democracies. For Russia, however, the War was of the people, rather than of the autocracy at the top, and one saw that Russia would emerge from the War changed and purified. What one could not foresee was that, under the awakening of the people, Russia could pass, in a day, through a Revolution as profound in its character and consequences as the great explosion in France. It would be almost a miracle if so complete a Revolution, in such a vast, benighted empire, were not followed by decades of recurrent chaos and anarchy. If Russia avoids this fate, she will present a unique experience in history. The tendency to abrogate all authority, the spectacle of regiments of soldiers becoming debating societies to discuss whether or not they shall obey orders and fight, are ominous signs for the next period. Emancipated Russia must learn, if necessary through bitter suffering, that liberty is not license, that democracy is not anarchy, but voluntary and intelligent obedience to just laws and the chosen executors of those laws. Meantime, whatever her immediate future may be, Russia's transformation has clarified the issue and justified her place with the allied democracies. However long and confused her struggle, there can be no return to the past, and, in the end, her Revolution means democracy.
Thus, in democracy, the State exists for Man. Other forms of society seek the interest or welfare of an individual, a group or a class, democracy aims at the welfare, that is, the liberty, happiness, growth, intelligence, helpfulness of all the people. Under all the welter of this world struggle, it is therefore these great contrasting ideas that are being tested out, perhaps for all time. What is their relative value for efficiency, initiative, invention, endurance, permanence; beneath all, what is their final value for the happiness and helpfulness of all human beings?
IV
MORAL STANDARDS AND THE MORAL ORDER
There is only one moral order of the universe—one range of moral as of physical law. For instance, the law of gravitation—simplest of physical principles—holds the last star in the abyss of space, rounds the dew-drop on the petal of a spring violet and determines the symmetry of living organisms; but it is one and unchanging, a fundamental pull in the nature of matter itself. So with moral laws: they are not superadded to life by some divine or other authority. They are simply the fundamental principles in the nature of life itself, which we must obey to grow and be happy.
If the moral order is one and unchanging, man does change in relation to it, and moral standards are relative to the stage of his growth. History is filled with illustrations of this relativity of ethical standards.
For instance: human slavery doubtless began as an act of beneficence on the part of some philanthropist well in advance of his age. The first man who, in the dim dawn of history, said to the captive he had made in war, "I will not kill you and eat you; I will let you live and work for me the rest of your life": that man instituted human slavery; but it was distinctly a step upward, from something that had been far worse.
Homer represents Ulysses as the favorite pupil of Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom: why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the shrewdest and most successful liar in classic antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their companionship, and for the same reason that led Homer to glorify him as the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher recognition of the moral order.
Just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding where it applies. In other words, if you see the light shining on your path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not owe obedience in the same way. If you do not obey your light, your punishment is that you lose the light—degenerate to a lower plane, and it is the worst punishment imaginable.
Thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the developed, distinctly immoral. Before the instincts of personal modesty and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. When a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day.