"Must all those dead lie still?
Must not the night disgorge
The ghosts of Bunker Hill,
The ghosts of Valley Forge,
Or England's mightier son
The ghost of Washington?
"No ghost where Lincoln fell?
No ghosts for seeing eyes?
I know an old cracked bell
Shall make ten million rise,
When his immortal ghost
Calls to the slumbering host."
But the chief element in the child's ideal should be democracy. His idea of "classes" and of "masses" should be that a democracy has none.
"Imagine!" cried a gaily dressed young woman one day, "that shop-girl is actually trying to be a lady!"—yet that shop-girl was gentle and refined and far more of a lady than the silly rich girl who so vulgarly criticized her.
"I wish we had more clearly defined classes here in America," remarked an apparently loyal American woman (she was wearing conspicuously an American flag brooch). "It is a much more comfortable way."
She represents a considerable section among us, who would like a return to titles and class decorations in our social system. You have doubtless observed that such people always expect themselves to be included in the gentry-and-nobility class. Our forefathers, with a vision and a valor far in advance of their time, fought and died on purpose to abolish such distinctions, and may they never return! Some undiscerning ones insist that we are as truly "classified" as is any European monarchy; but they do not seem to realize that with us caste and class change with almost every generation. The great name and estate are not handed down by primogeniture from father to son.
"The only 'lower orders,'" said Horace Mann, "are those who do nothing for the good of mankind. The word 'classes' is not a good American word. In a republic there should be but two classes,—the educated and the uneducated; and the one should gradually merge into the other until all are educated."
He summed up the whole matter thus: "The law of caste includes within itself every iniquity, because it lives by the practical denial of human brotherhood."
Teach your children this lesson thoroughly.
Pasteur defined democracy as "that form of government which permits every individual citizen to develop himself to do his best for the common good." We must come to recognize that "common good" means not only the good of our own nation but that of the world. May not Pasteur's definition be used as a basis for the great democratic principle to which we look forward as the security for the peace of the world?
The Athenian's patriotism was for Athens. The Spartan's was for Sparta, the Roman's was far more for the city of Rome than for the empire. Ours should be, first, for our own land, but then for the world. It would be a traitor and a craven who would in a shipwreck save another man's wife before his own, if he could help it. So patriotism, like charity, begins at home. But equally true is what Lowell wrote: