2. Reform of Punishment.—Emerson's bitter words are still too applicable. "Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief and burglar and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him so."[220] Reformatories, whose purpose is change of disposition, not mere penalization, have been founded; but there are still many more prisons than reformatories. And, if it be argued that most criminals are so hardened in evil-doing that reformatories are of no use, the answer is twofold. We do not know, because we have never systematically and intelligently tried to find out; and, even if it were so, nothing is more illogical than to turn the unreformed criminal, at the end of a certain number of months or years, loose to prey again upon society. Either reform or else permanent segregation is the logical alternative. Indeterminate sentences, release on probation, discrimination of classes of offenders, separation of the first and more or less accidental and immature offender from the old and experienced hand, special matrons for women offenders, introduction of education and industrial training into penitentiaries, the finding of employment for those released—all mark improvements. They are, however, as yet inchoate. Intelligent members of society need to recognize their own responsibility for the promotion of such reforms and for the discovery of new ones.
3. Increase of Administrative Efficiency.—In the last one hundred years, society has rapidly grown in internal complexity. Commercial changes have brought about an intense concentration of population in cities; have promoted migratory travel and intercourse, with destruction of local ties; have developed world markets and collective but impersonal (corporate) production and distribution. Many new problems have been created, while at the same time many of the old agencies for maintaining order have been weakened or destroyed, especially such as were adapted to small groups with fixed habits. A great strain has thus been put upon the instrumentalities of justice. Pioneer conditions retarded in America the development of the problems incident upon industrial reconstruction. The possibility of moving on, of taking up new land, finding unutilized resources of forest and mine, the development of new professions, the growth of population with new needs to be met, stimulated and rewarded individual enterprise. Under such circumstances there could be no general demand for public agencies of inspection, supervision, and publicity. But the pioneer days of America are practically ended. American cities and states find themselves confronted with the same problems of public health, poverty and unemployment, congested population, traffic and transportation, charitable relief, tramps and vagabondage, and so forth, that have troubled older countries.
We face these problems, moreover, with traditions which are averse to "bureaucratic" administration and public "interference." Public regulation is regarded as a "paternalistic" survival, quite unsuited to a free and independent people. It would be foolish, indeed, to overlook or deny the great gains that have come from our American individualistic convictions: the quickening of private generosity, the growth of a generalized sense of noblesse oblige—of what every successful individual owes to his community; of personal initiative, self-reliance, and versatile "faculty"; of interest in all the voluntary agencies which by education and otherwise develop the individuality of every one; and of a demand for equality of opportunity, a fair chance, and a square deal for all. But it is certain that the country has reached a state of development, in which these individual achievements and possibilities require new civic and political agencies if they are to be maintained as realities. Individualism means inequity, harshness, and retrogression to barbarism (no matter under what veneer of display and luxury), unless it is a generalized individualism: an individualism which takes into account the real good and effective—not merely formal—freedom of every social member.
Hence the demand for civic organs—city, state, and federal,—of expert inquiry, inspection, and supervision with respect to a large number of interests which are too widespread and too intricate to be well cared for by private or voluntary initiative. The well-to-do in great cities may segregate themselves in the more healthful quarters; they may rely upon their automobiles for local transportation; they may secure pure milk and unadulterated foods from personal resources; they may, by their combined "pull," secure good schools, policing, lighting, and well-paved streets for their own localities. But the great masses are dependent upon public agencies for proper air, light, sanitary conditions of work and residence, cheap and effective transportation, pure food, decent educative and recreative facilities in schools, libraries, museums, parks.
The problems which fall to the lot of the proper organs of administrative inspection and supervision are essentially scientific problems, questions for expert intelligence conjoined with wide sympathy. In the true sense of the word political, they are political questions: that is, they relate to the welfare of society as an organized community of attainment and endeavor. In the cant sense of the term political, the sense of conventional party-issues and party-lines, they have no more to do with politics than have the multiplication table and the laws of hygiene. Yet they are at present almost hopelessly entangled with irrelevant "political" issues, and are almost hopelessly under the heel of party-politicians whose least knowledge is of the scientific questions involved, just as their least interest is for the human issues at stake. So far "civil service reform" has been mainly negative: a purging away of some of the grosser causes which have influenced appointments to office. But now there is needed a constructive reform of civil administration which will develop the agencies of inquiry, oversight, and publicity required by modern conditions; and which will necessitate the selection of public servants of scientifically equipped powers.
§ 3. POLITICAL RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS
No hard and fast line can be drawn between civil society and the State. By the State, however, we denote those conditions of social organization and regulation which are most fundamental and most general:—conditions which are summed up in and expressed through the general will as manifested in legislation and its execution. As a civil right is technically focused in the right to use the courts, "to sue and be sued," that is in the right to have other claims adjudicated and enforced by a public, impartial authority, so a political right is technically summed up in the power to vote—either to vote directly upon laws or to vote for those who make and carry out laws. To have the right in a legislative assembly to speak for or against a certain measure; to be able to say "yea" or "nay" upon a roll-call; to be able to put into a ballot-box a piece of paper with a number of names written thereon, are not acts which of themselves possess the inherent value of many of the most ordinary transactions of daily life. But the representative and potential significance of political rights exceeds that of any other class of rights. Suffrage stands for direct and active participation in the regulation of the terms upon which associated life shall be sustained, and the pursuit of the good carried on. Political freedom and responsibility express an individual's power and obligation to make effective all his other capacities by fixing the social conditions of their exercise.
Growth of Democracy.—The evolution of democratically regulated States, as distinct from those ordered in the interests of a small group, or of a special class, is the social counterpart of the development of a comprehensive and common good. Externally viewed, democracy is a piece of machinery, to be maintained or thrown away, like any other piece of machinery, on the basis of its economy and efficiency of working. Morally, it is the effective embodiment of the moral ideal of a good which consists in the development of all the social capacities of every individual member of society.
Present Problems: 1. Distrust of Government.—Present moral problems connected with political affairs have to do with safeguarding the democratic ideal against the influences which are always at work to undermine it, and with building up for it a more complete and extensive embodiment. The historic antecedent of our own governmental system was the exercise of a monopoly by a privileged class.[221] It became a democratic institution partly because the King, in order to secure the monopoly, had to concede and guarantee to the masses of the people certain rights as against the oligarchical interests which might rival his powers; and partly because the centralization of power, with the arbitrary despotism it created, called out protests which finally achieved the main popular liberties: safety of life and property from arbitrary forfeiture, arrest, or seizure by the sovereign; the rights of free assembly, petition, a free press, and of representation in the law-making body.
Upon its face, the struggle for individual liberty was a struggle against the overbearing menace of despotic rulers. This fact has survived in an attitude towards government which cripples its usefulness as an agency of the general will. Government, even in the most democratic countries, is still thought of as an external "ruler," operating from above, rather than as an organ by which people associated in pursuit of common ends can most effectively coöperate for the realization of their own aims. Distrust of government was one of the chief traits of the situation in which the American nation was born. It is embodied not only in popular tradition, and party creeds, but in our organic laws, which contain many provisions expressly calculated to prevent the corporate social body from effecting its ends freely and easily through governmental agencies.[222]