Even more hopeful, if not so clear to many people, is the increasing knowledge that we are getting of man as an individual and as a mass, coming to us particularly from men of science. What we have yet to find out, apparently, is what we can expect of man under this or that circumstance, what words and what promises stir him, what persuades him to cooperation or to revolt, why he follows a particular type of leader at a particular time and how long he can be counted on. Once we know better what we can get out of man under particular circumstances we can plan our action with something like the certainty with which the electrician plans his machine. He knows the nature of the current, what it will do and not do. He puts no strain on it which experiment has proved fatal.
When we reach that knowledge and control of human forces we shall know why the League of Nations works so badly, why we have before us the terrible and apparently uncheckable shambles of Spain and China, why an intolerable outbreak of racial and religious prejudice should shame us at this period of our history, why we must be prepared to meet the savage outbreaks of men and peoples still contemptuous of contracts, unamenable to ideals of honor, peace, and conciliation.
One consolation in any effort to socialize and democratize our plans of life is that the mass of men want a simple world. In every country they ask little more than security, preferably of their own making, freedom to build in the way they like so far as possible. They will follow any system or any leader that promises them that. Politicians would do a better job for men if they wrote fewer constitutions, devised fewer automatic cures, gave more attention to disciplining and training common men and women the world over to honest labor, to cooperation with their fellows, to sacrifice when necessary, keeping alive in them their natural spark of freedom.
How are we going to do it? That is the gravest question we face. In 1921 I went to Washington to report Secretary Hughes’ Conference on the Limitation of Armaments. It seemed to me that I had better do some preliminary reading on the problems, so I went to a wise man at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for advice. He turned out to be a philosopher.
“First,” said he, “read ‘Don Quixote’: he will tell you what they cannot do. Then read Aesop’s Fables: that will tell you what they can do. But above all read the King James Version of the Bible, which tells you that peace on earth is promised only to men of good will.”
There you have it. If we want peace we must make men of common sense, knowing what can be done and what cannot be done, also men of good will.
How are we to do that? I see no more promising path than each person sticking to the work which comes his way. The nature of the work, its seeming size and importance matter far less than its right relation to the place where he finds himself. If the need at the moment is digging a ditch or washing the dishes, that is the greatest thing in the world for the moment. The time, the place, the need, the relation are what decide the value of the act.
It is by following this natural path that new and broader roads open to us, moments of illumination come. There is the only reliable hope of the world. It takes in all of us but puts it up hard to each of us to fit the day’s work into the place where we stand, not crowding into another’s place: no imitation, no hurry, growth always, knowing that light and power come only with growth, slow as it is.
Madame Curie so saw it. Asked what a woman’s contribution to a better world should be, she replied that it began at home, then spread to those immediately connected, her immediate friends, then the community in which she lived; and if the work proved to meet a need of the world at large it spread there. But the important thing was the beginning, and that beginning, Madame Curie insisted, was in the home, the center of small things.
Work backed by such a faith makes life endurable. I doubt if I could have come into my eighties with anything like the confidence I feel in the ultimate victory of freedom, the ultimate victory of man’s self-respect, if I had not groped my way through work into some such faith.