That is the problem of modern life which is so specialized that it is almost devitalized, so disconnected that the tides of life will not flow.
Means to the Unity of Communities
My interest in this movement, as it has been described to me, has been touched with enthusiasm because I see in it a channel for the restoration of the unity of communities. Because I am told that things have already happened which bear promise of this very thing.
I was told what is said to be a typical story of a very fine lady, a woman of very fine natural parts, but very fastidious, whose automobile happened to be stalled one night in front of an open schoolhouse where a meeting was going on over which her seamstress was presiding. She was induced by some acquaintances of hers whom she saw going into the building, to go in, and was at first filled with disdain; she didn’t like the looks of some of the people, there was too much mixture of the sort she didn’t care to associate with—an employe of her own was presiding—but she was obliged to stay a little while, it was the most comfortable place to stay while her automobile was repaired, and before she could get away she had been touched with the generous contagion of the place. Here were people of all sorts talking about things that were interesting, that revealed to her things that she had never dreamed of before with regard to the vital common interests of persons whom she had always thought unlike herself, so that the community of the human heart was revealed to her, the singleness of human life.
Worth Any Effort to Promote
Now if this thing does that, it is worth any effort to promote it. If it will do that, it is the means by which we shall create communities. And nothing else will produce liberty—you cannot have liberty where men do not want the same liberty, you cannot have it where they are not in sympathy with one another, you cannot have it where they do not understand one another, you cannot have it when they are not seeking common things by common means, you simply cannot have it; we must study the means by which these things are produced.
In the first place, don’t you see that you produce communities by creating common feeling? I know that a great emphasis is put upon the mind, in our day, and as a university man I should perhaps not challenge the supremacy of the intellect, but I have never been convinced that mind was really monarch in our day, or in any day that I have yet read of, or, if it is monarch, it is one of the modern monarchs that rules and reigns but does not govern.
Common Feeling Essential to Free Government
What really controls our action is feeling. We are governed by the passions and the most that we can manage by all our social and political endeavors is that the handsome passions shall be in the majority—the passion of sympathy, the passion of justice, the passion of fair dealing, the passion of unselfishness, (if it may be elevated into a passion). If you can once see that a working majority is obtained for the handsome passions, for the feelings that draw us together, rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you have laid the foundation of a community and a free government and, therefore, if you can do nothing else in the community center than draw men together so that they will have common feeling, you will have set forward the cause of civilization and the cause of human freedom.
As a basis of the common feeling you must have a mutual comprehension. The fundamental truth in modern life, as I analyze it, is a profound ignorance. I am not one of those who challenge the promoters of special interests on the ground that they are malevolent, that they are bad men; I challenge their leadership on the ground that they are ignorant men, that when you have absorbed yourself in a particular business through half your life, you have no other point of view than the point of view of that business and that, therefore, you are disqualified by ignorance from giving counsel as to the common interests.