You see there are many questions which will tax all our thinking powers properly to answer. Really, however, the kind of a state which gives every boy his opportunity to make the most of himself, is just like one great family. You know in the family, Jimmy has a chance equal to that of Bob, and Bill and Frank share alike in everything. Why? Because they are brothers. Don’t you see then that democracy is but another name for brotherhood? If all men are brothers, if they really are brothers, and mean brotherhood when they say brotherhood, most of our perplexing questions would settle themselves right off.
The idea seems very simple; it is simple. Its working out, however, is not so simple.
How shall we put at work this idea of democracy? That’s not so simple, and men everywhere are studying how best to bring into action this simple principle of democracy, brotherhood. One of the best of the schools working out this idea is the Ford Hall Town Meeting. I want to show you just what it is doing, and how its example affects you.
Really to understand the Town Meeting you must know something about the “Ford Hall Idea,” for the Town Meeting is but its latest development. Like many other ideas, this one centers about one man. I don’t mean that this man discovered it. No. The Idea was as old as time. Hebrew prophets taught it. David sang it. Jesus lived it. Paul preached it. This man made a new application of the old vision. He was, eight years ago, an ordinary business man, who was more and more grieved at the way people went on misunderstanding one another. Class was clashing with class. Men didn’t know what other men thought, and because they didn’t know, they doubted; because they doubted, they feared. And, the worst, men evidently didn’t care to find out what other men thought. They seemed to hunt for points of differences instead of points upon which they could agree. This was the situation that George W. Coleman saw.
He began to wonder what he could do to bring men together. He felt sure that if they could only know each other, they would find so many points where they did agree that they would forget those upon which they did not agree. If that much progress proved impossible, he thought that at least they would see the real merit on both sides, see the sincerity of each other, and make a working agreement which would put tolerance in the place of hate.
Mr. Coleman was at that time president of the Boston Baptist Social Union to which Daniel Sharp Ford had left a building on Beacon Hill, Boston, and an income to be used “to soften the inevitable conflict between capital and labor in Boston.” Mr. Ford was the owner of The Youth’s Companion. “There is my chance,” said Mr. Coleman. “What can better carry out the spirit of Mr. Ford’s will than a Sunday night service where the Jew and the Baptist, the Methodist and the Socialist, the Congregationalist and the Catholic, the Churched and the Unchurched, can get together and discuss the vital things of life, and learn to know each other.”
The Social Union agreed, and now for seven winters every Sunday night has seen twelve hundred earnest men and women gathered in Ford Hall to listen to one who has a message and is not afraid to let the other man talk back. The speaker speaks, and then the listeners ask questions. They have the right to talk out in meeting, you see, and understand the great difference between being talked at and being talked with. At the Ford Hall Meetings, speaker and audience talk with each other.
Of course, much of the success of Ford Hall has come from the choice of the subjects of the addresses. No one would think, for example, of discussing the Alsace-Lorraine affair, interesting as it all is to the student of history, and fitting as it would be for the Debating Club. Nor would a speaker at Ford Hall discuss the authorship of the book of Amos, for example, important as is such a question for a theological school. But the teachings of Amos on the questions of land ownership, the points of similarity between Amos and Henry George—that’s different, you see. It is right that we should know whether Cook or Peary discovered the North Pole, but that problem does not affect the life of the man who lives in the congested city slum. He would go right on living just the same whether there was a North Pole or wasn’t. The racial differences between the Slavs and the Yankees suggest interesting questions, but they assume a different importance when they are related to the immigration of those Slavs to America. In the first instance, the Ford Hall audience would be but politely interested; in the second discussion they would be vitally concerned.
If we can group these questions under one class, then, we should say Ford Hall Folks, as they have come to call themselves, are concerned in Social Civics. The Idea, then, that Mr. Coleman had, was that if a place could be provided where men and women of all races and beliefs and creeds and of no creeds could get together to discuss together Social Civics—that is, those questions which vitally concern the common life of all—that they would learn to know each other, to understand each other, to respect each other’s point of view. In short they would become neighbors instead of enemies.