Is loyalty, then, something about which there is nothing to be learned? Is there no counterfeit and caricature of loyalty? No mask behind which men hide their indolence and complacency and thoughtlessness? You meet a man whom you have not seen in long years, and you say to him: “Why, you have not changed a bit, you are precisely the same as in the old days.” Have you praised him, necessarily? If he left you as a child, looking and speaking and thinking and acting like a child, ought he not to have changed? Does a fruit remain what it was as bud and blossom? Life is development—but development is a constant self-changing. Development is an incessant dis-loyalty to what is already there. And if man, just because he is man, and has a will of his own and can set himself against the law of development, should sell his life to the force of inertia—would not that be a crime against life? And yet, even such a deed men call loyalty! Men say that they want to be faithful to the heritage of the fathers. Which is often enough simply to say that they mean to store away their heritage where it will be kept from the world’s light and air that would destroy it—but where, also, it can enter into no human intercourse, serve no life, fulfil no end of life. This loyalty of unchangeableness to the heritage puts the talent in a napkin, and there can be no increase. Men say that they mean to abide faithful to their faith unto death. Often enough this is only stubbornness and narrowness. It requires no art and no merit to exercise such faithfulness. All one needs to do is to close one’s eyes and ears to what lies beyond the bounds of this faith, to forego the questionings and uncertainties that others must pass through,—and then to send in one’s claim to the reward and gratitude due such loyalty! Today it is quite the thing at college commencements to spy out the men who are models of such loyalty and to say: “Look how firm and steadfast and rock-like they are!” But it cannot be denied that much of this illustrious loyalty is nothing but natural or voluntary incapacity to think more widely than others have taught them to think, or, for the matter of that, permitted them to think. Back of this bragging about principles which are vainly declared to be unshakable, there is frequently nothing but an ill-natured obstinacy whose so-called principles have no other basis than the self-interest to which they are contributary. It was this loyalty to the finished,—finished cult, finished belief, finished customs and practices, finished religion and morality,—that stoned the prophets and crucified Jesus. It was this kind of loyalty that the mediaeval church imposed upon the “Faithful,” imprisoning the conscience therein for time and for eternity. Bound by an oath of loyalty, the priest renounced the world; the monk and nun under monastic vows dedicated their lives to the church, their services to “heaven.” And hence it marked an epoch when Luther called their loyalty a sin, and went forth into the world, the home, the vocation, the business, breaking the vows of priest and cloister. Was such disloyalty to a sacred obligation loyalty in the sixteenth century, and shall it be blasphemy in the twentieth? Is it not rather a blasphemy to preach to men a loyalty which obligates them to forego the use of their best and noblest powers, which condemns them to spiritual standstill in the eternal progressive movement of life?
Take some illustrations which will test insight and courage. There is the constitution of the United States. Shall we assume toward it the loyalty of fixedness and finality, or the loyalty of change? No man of veneration and equipoise would favor capricious or precipitate or superfluous change in so noble a document. But, for all that, the experience of life made the constitution for life’s sake, and the maker is more than the made. If our national life pass—as pass it has—into new seas and under new stars, where life needs a change of the constitution, then the principle which prompted the people to frame the constitution in the first place requires them to change it to meet the new needs of our growing and changing national life. The superficial loyalty to the changeless letter must yield to the profound loyalty to the ever-changing spirit. The constitution is for the sake of the people, not the people for the sake of the constitution. They, rather than it, are sacred.
Similarly, there is the modern problem of marriage, the family, and the home. Shall ours be the old loyalty that holds the customs of the past inviolable, marriage indissoluble, the inherited patterns of home and family unchangeable—the loyalty of fixedness and finishedness; or shall it be the loyalty of change in all these matters to meet the changing needs and situations of our burdened and bewildered modernity? Again, no man of sanctity and sanity and stability of soul can favor any arbitrary radicalism that is subversive of time-honored institutions for no better reason than a fleeting fancy, or the passing of the romance of the honeymoon, or raw self-will, or an unanticipated burden or hardship. But, for all that, the marriage institution, like all others, is for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the institution. It was life that originated our domestic ideas and customs and conventions and codes; and if ever life, in the interest of its well-being and progress, requires changes suited to new needs and new days, then the “new loyalty” to life that ever changes must replace the old loyalty to codes that never change. Codes, too, are for the sake of life, not life for the sake of codes. No loyalty to the letter that means disloyalty to the spirit.
And there is the everlasting problem of education. Education in the past had for its subject matter symbols—reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the like. The new education has for its subject matter realities—nature and history. The old education taught topics or subjects; the new education teaches boys and girls. According to the old education, knowledge precedes action; according to the new education, action precedes knowledge. In the old education things were done to the pupils; in the new education the pupils do things.
The old school teacher was a “star and dwelt apart”—that is, his aloofness and superiority were indispensable. He taught from above. The new school teacher is down among the students, a democrat of democrats. The old school teacher communicated knowledge from without; the new school teacher develops interest from within. The old education was atomistic, the new organic. The old education was a donation to the pupils, the new is an achievement by them. The old education proceeded on the assumption that man is primarily intellect; the new that he is primarily will. The old education preceded life and fitted for it; the new education is a part of life itself.
It is a great change. According to the old theory, there was perfection to start with, perfection at the top. All that we needed was to pipe it down through aqueducts so well constructed that nothing that was in could get out, nothing that was without could get in; and thus—thus only—would the vain and empty world and life be filled with value and verity and virtue—donation on the one side, reception on the other.
But the time came when men asked: if there is perfection to start with, why start? Why paint the lily? And if there is perfection to start with, how does there come to be imperfection? How can imperfection come from perfection? Ugly questions, these! Soon the world was turned upside down.
The new theory holds that matters began very humbly and struggled and fought their way slowly upward. Ascent from below, not descent from above. No values or verities or virtues donated, all achieved. Education an evolution, not a communication.
Some business men favor the old education. Their world is one of mechanism and authority. They think that they do not need men with initiative, spontaneity, freedom. That is their prerogative, as it was of the king of old. They need the mechanical, the automatic, the impersonal in man. This fits into their world. This is what the old education stands for. The new education unfolds and matures personalities. Personalities make good masters but poor servants.
Business men as a class are perhaps our best men. But the very conditions of business economy and certainty are the impersonal, the unfree, the mechanical. So business has warped the judgment of some good men and led them astray on the most fundamental problem in the history of the race.