And while they built and served and exploited, other men endowed with far greater idealism than practical sense planned new forms of government, new laws, advertised panaceas, all guaranteed to produce security and justice. Each generation has had its Henry George, its Bellamy, its Bryan, intent on persuading mankind that he had found the way, could lead men to the good life.
In each generation employer and employee have faced the decision—war or cooperation. If war has been the answer in the majority of cases, there have always been those who have gone ahead building up a great mass of evidence of what men inspired by good will, free from suspicion and self-interest, can do in industry by patient cooperative experiments.
Side by side with these exhibits have gone magnificent governmental attempts to correct abuses, to make man’s life in the Republic freer, securer, more just, efforts to carry out the avowed purpose of the government we started a hundred and fifty years ago. And these efforts are alike in essentials—the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson, the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt, the fight for a larger freedom of opportunity of Grover Cleveland, the struggle to wipe out slavery of Abraham Lincoln.
Again and again in these generations have we seen the great airship of democracy lift from the ground, stagger, gather itself together, soar, sail, while those who had chosen the pilot and loaded in his cargo watched the flight with confidence and exultation. This time their dream had come true.
But the ship has always come back, its journey unfinished, and doubters have jeered at those who believed in it, cried out that it would never fly, that freedom, equal opportunity were only foolish fancies; men, they gloated, function only under strong single rulers. Dictatorship alone makes efficient government—national power and glory. The state, not the individual, is the end.
There is no denying that these repeated failures or half-successes have made cynics of many who have had a hand in the flights, or at least been sympathetic watchers.
It has been sickening to see hopes grow dim under the hammering of reality, to see a generation lose its first grand fire and sink into apathy, cynicism. One asks oneself if man has the staying power ever to realize his ideals. One is inclined when this hour of futility comes to agree with Arthur Balfour that human life is but a disreputable episode on one of the minor planets. As far as I am concerned that smart and cynical estimate never could stand a good night’s sleep.
If I find little satisfaction or hope in examining and comparing one by one my four successive generations, I find considerable in looking at them as a whole. When I do that, I see not a group of cycles rolling one after another along a rocky and uneven road but a spiral—the group moves upward. To be sure it is not a very steady spiral, but I am convinced that is the real movement.
Could there be greater evidence that this is true than that the world as a whole has today come to conscious grips over that most fundamental of problems: Shall all men cooperate in an effort to make a free, peaceful, orderly world, or shall we consent that strong men make a world to their liking, forcing us to live in it? more than that, train us to carry it on?
It is well that the issue should be clear, so clear that each of us must be forced to choose.