Two remarks may here be added. One relates to a question which has given rise to considerable discussion, namely, the question where the state resides? In a monarchy it seems to reside visibly in the person of the king. Louis XIV is said to have declared “I am the state.” But where does it reside in a democracy? The chief executive, the law-making body, and even the constituencies, are organs of the state. But where does the state itself have its habitation? The state has no separate domicile. So far as it truly exists at all it exists in the minds of the individuals who truly conceive of it. The object of political life is to educate the citizen so that he may more and more truly conceive of the state, so that he may give birth to the state idea within himself. To do this is to pass through one of the necessary phases on the road to personality. In the family the individual is in reactive relations with a few, in the vocation with a larger number. In the state or nation he may be one of a hundred millions or more. Yet it is not the numerical extension as such that constitutes the enlargement. It is rather the diversity of the points of contact, and the complexity of the relations by which the spiritual ideal is more fully illustrated in the finite world in proportion as the circle widens. To engender the idea of the state in oneself is to place oneself ideally into reactive relations with the diverse groups embraced within one’s nation. And to do this is a spiritual achievement of no mean order. I should prefer to use the word “stateship” instead of citizenship. Stateship is attained by one who brings to birth within himself the idea of the state, and in whom that idea becomes a controlling ethical force.
A second remark concerns the perplexed subject of the conflict of duties. The nearer duties are sometimes preferred to the more remote, and at other times we are asked to sacrifice everything to the larger whole. We owe our first devotion, it is said, to the members of our family; but then again we must be willing to sacrifice life itself and the welfare of our family to our country when it calls upon us in its need. Largeness alone certainly does not serve as an ethical ground for preference. The quantitative standard implied in such phrases as “the greatest good of the greatest number” is out of place when we deal with ethical relations, which in their very nature are qualitative. Now the account of the social institutions given in previous chapters as successive stations on the road to the spiritual goal may throw some light on this difficult subject. Normally, the claims of the anterior stations are to be preferred—the claims of the family for instance to those of the vocation, because the family is the matrix of the three-fold reverence, and the individual must pass under the ethical influence of family life before he is fit to use vocational life ethically to good purpose. The anterior groups are not merely smaller, they are germinal. The training received in them is the condition on which spiritual progress depends later on. On the other hand, the later groups are the more complete and more explicated expressions of the spiritual ideal; hence if the very existence of one of the later groups is threatened, or is in danger of being denatured of its spiritual use, then the later group is to be preferred to the earlier, the terminus ad quem, precisely because it is the terminus ad quem, to the terminus a quo.
To give a familiar illustration. In our time, which is a time of transition and doubt, many a religious teacher finds himself in sore straits to decide between the claims of the vocation and the family. As a religious teacher he is pledged to teach only what in his heart of hearts he believes to be true; he is especially under obligation to use words in such a way as to convey to others the same meaning that he attaches to them himself. But this may mean exposing his family to serious privations. The situation is full of perplexity and pain, but the line of choice is plain enough. The claims of his high vocation must in this case take precedence. In like manner, when the existence or the integrity of the state is at issue, the claims of the state as the terminus ad quem override those of the vocation, the family, and the state, and may even demand the sacrifice of the physical existence of the individual himself.
NOTES
1. The idea of democracy is often neatly put—all too neatly, into the following formula: In antiquity the individual existed for the sake of the state, in modern democracy the state exists for the sake of the individual. Both of these statements as they stand are mischievous and misleading and require to be qualified. It is not true that in antiquity the individual existed for the sake of the state in the sense that his separate existence was extinguished. The citizen class in Aristotle’s state, the rulers in Plato’s state, and even a member of one of the inferior classes, each in his own way fulfilled a distinct function. He was not suppressed in the state, he expressed his function by the action appropriate to his station. The philosophic rulers might do the thinking and governing. They were the head of the body politic—others the hands and feet. The underlying conception was what may be called spuriously organic, borrowed more or less from the animal type of organism.
The second limb of the formula is no less superficial. In no modern nation does the state exist, or at bottom is it supposed to exist, for the benefit of the individuals who at any time compose it. If this were the ruling conception, how could the democratic state require its citizens to give up their lives in its defense? If the state existed for the benefit of the individuals, the state would be the means, and the so-called good of the individual the end. And in that case it would surely be irrational to sacrifice the end for the sake of the means, in other words to put an end to one’s life in defense of the state, a mere instrument for the protection and prosperity of one’s own life.
To reply that the state exists for the sake not of one individual but of all (observe however that the formula says “the individual,” and is ambiguous and slippery at this point), nor even only for the sake of all the individuals now living, but also for the sake of the millions yet unborn—to say this is once more to introduce an ideal entity which it was the very object of the formula as quoted to banish. The formula was intended to give us, in place of “the metaphysical entities” of the Greeks and the Germans, a very palpable thing—the good of the individual. The good of the individual seemed to be a palpable thing, though in truth it is the most impalpable thing in the world. And by defining the state in this wise we were supposed to come onto solid ground. But now, behold, it is the good of unborn millions which is to be the object of our devotion, and who can imagine what this good of unborn millions is likely to be?
The fact is that without ideal entities the conception of the state in any noble shape cannot be construed at all. The organic conception must now take the place of the individualistic. The organic conception indeed as it was worked out in antiquity, or as it lived on in the theories of mediæval writers, or as it survives in the works of certain German publicists, who use it to defend the feudalistic structure of society, has rightly fallen into discredit,—not because it is organic, but because it is pseudo-organic, that is, based on the type of the animal organism. The individualistic conception of the state at present current in America and in all modern democracies, is a violent reaction against this false idea of organization. The inestimable germ of truth individualism contains is that no such distinction can be allowed as between head and hands or feet in political life, that all the multitudes of “hands” who work in the factories, for instance, must be respected as personalities having not only hands but also heads and hearts. But individualism, though it affirms this idea, belies it in practice, as the actual state of society in America and elsewhere abundantly proves. And it is bound to do so, because personality implies more than material well-being, either for a single individual or for all individuals now living or for all future individuals. Personality implies truly organic relations to other fellow-beings—and this can only be achieved by organizing the society in which men live.
The way taken has been, by reaction from pseudo-organization, to extreme individualism and concomitant materialism. The way out lies in the direction of genuine organization.
2. Certain evils observable in the workings of American democracy may be traced to the following causes:
(a) The people as a whole are still in the pioneer stage. A country enormously rich in material resources stimulates wealth-production. A host of immigrants escaped from poverty abroad are stung into wealth-getting here. The frontier line is now far to the West, but the influence of the pioneer movement still in progress flows back upon the Eastern states.
(b) More important still are the evils due to the crude individualistic idea of democracy just characterized. If the state exists for the good of the individual, and if the good of the individual is conceived to be the acquisition of wealth, then private business will take precedence of the public business. Yet under the democratic system of frequent elections the public business demands constant attention. In consequence, a special class of professional politicians arises, comprising a minority of disinterestedly patriotic men, and a majority of persons whose private business is not sufficiently remunerative to divert them from the public service. The appearance of the political dictator called “boss” is the inevitable outcome of these conditions. This army of professional politicians, and in particular the vulgar figure at their hand, is the chief disgrace of the American democracy, and has been the target of incessant invective by American writers. But it is idle to stigmatize the effect and overlook the cause, to squander invective upon the symptom and at the same time to leave the malady untouched. The malady itself is the individualistic conception of democracy, and until this is replaced by a better one, the evil in question may be modified in form but will certainly not disappear.
A way must be found for the citizen to attend to his private business, which is coming to be more and more exacting, and to the public business at the same time. The system of vocational representation offers an opportunity in this direction. Citizens will be voting in their vocational groups for measures intended to advance their vocational interests, but will be taught to advance them in such a way that the related interests of other groups, or the public interest, shall be thereby promoted.
3. Proportional representation, which is at present being tested abroad, and earnestly considered in France, England and Germany, may be a bridge leading over from the present plan of geographical to that of vocational representation. The proportional system itself, it is true, is still based on the individualistic idea. It is a movement on behalf of submerged minorities. It quarrels with the present arrangement for the reason that the will of the greater number of individuals, but not of all individuals, is brought to bear on public decisions. But if adopted it may well offer, without violent change, a way for the collective representation of vocational groups.
4. Citizenship should be graded. A youth of twenty-one is scarcely prepared to exercise the duties of the citizen intelligently. As long as the view prevails that the functions of the state are to be restricted to a minimum, it is perhaps not wholly absurd to admit a mere stripling to a share in the conduct of government. But the sphere of government is steadily enlarging, and its problems are becoming more and more intricate. Twenty-five would certainly be a better minimum age. Under vocational representation there is likely to be an Upper House consisting of members who have served in the Lower House. Citizens who have attained the age of twenty-five might be empowered to vote for members of the Lower House, those who have attained the age of thirty-five for members of the Upper House, but these are details upon which it is unfitting to expatiate here. The point I have in mind is that citizenship should be graded.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATIONAL CHARACTER SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMED: THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY, OR THE ORGANIZATION OF MANKIND
There is such a thing as a national character.[91] The national character is reflected in the language, literature, laws and customs, arts, institutions and religion of a people. Even when the religion professed by different peoples is the same in name it is strongly tinctured in the different countries by the national differences. Compare for example the Christianity of Prussia with that of France, or that of England with that of Russia.
The national character, like that of the individual, has its plus and minus qualities, its excellent and its repellent traits.
The national character is to be spiritualized by raising the plus traits to the Nth degree.
To this end, as before, the three-fold reverence and especially the third reverence is the means. The backward peoples of the earth are the paramount object of reverence. The more advanced peoples are to bring to light the spiritual life latent in the backward. In order to do so, they are to carry out the principle of reverence toward past civilization, to sift out what is vital in the work of previous generations. And further, they are to conform to the second principle of reverence, that toward contemporaries approximately on the same level, i.e., toward the other civilized nations. No single nation is really competent to undertake the great task of awaking the stationary peoples of India and China, of educating the primitive peoples of Africa. A union of the civilized nations should be formed in order that together they may jointly accomplish the pedagogy of the less developed. The educational point of view once again appears as the ethical. The relation of the less developed to the more advanced peoples should be analogous to that of the child towards the parents. Just as neither the father singly nor the mother alone can release spiritual life in the offspring, so the different civilized nations, each of which has its own gift, its own plus traits, are to interact for the purpose of jointly awakening the creative energies within the slumbering souls of the undeveloped peoples.