The interest of individual liberty in relation to the organization of democracy demands simply that the individual officeholder should possess an amount of power and independence adequate to the efficient performance of his work. The work of a justice of the Supreme Court demands a power that is absolute for its own special work, and it demands technically complete independence. An executive should, as a rule, serve for a longer term, and hold a position of greater independence than a legislator, because his work of enforcing the laws and attending to the business details of government demands continuity, complete responsibility within its own sphere, and the necessity occasionally of braving adverse currents of public opinion. The term of service and the technical independence of a legislator might well be more restricted than that of an executive; but even a legislator should be granted as much power and independence as he may need for the official performance of his public duty. The American democracy has shown its enmity to individual political liberty, not because it has required its political favorites constantly to seek reëlection, but because it has since 1800 tended to refuse to its favorites during their official term as much power and independence as is needed for administrative, legislative, and judicial efficiency. It has been jealous of the power it delegated, and has tried to take away with one hand what it gave with the other.

Taking American political traditions, ideals, institutions, and practices as a whole, there is no reason to believe that the American democracy cannot and will not combine sufficient opportunities for individual political distinction with an effective ultimate popular political responsibility. The manner in which the combination has been made hitherto is far from flawless, and the American democracy has much to learn before it reaches an organization adequate to its own proper purposes. It must learn, above all, that the state, and the individuals who are temporarily responsible for the action of the state, must be granted all the power necessary to redeem that responsibility. Individual opportunity and social welfare both depend upon the learning of this lesson; and while it is still very far from being learned, the obstacles in the way are not of a disheartening nature.

With the economic liberty of the individual the case is different. The Federalists refrained from protecting individual political rights by incorporating in the Constitution any limitation of the suffrage; but they sought to protect the property rights of the individual by the most absolute constitutional guarantees. Moreover, American practice has allowed the individual a far larger measure of economic liberty than is required by the Constitution; and this liberty was granted in the expectation that it would benefit, not the individual as such, but the great mass of the American people. It has undoubtedly benefited the great mass of the American people; but it has been of far more benefit to a comparatively few individuals. Americans are just beginning to learn that the great freedom which the individual property-owner has enjoyed is having the inevitable result of all unrestrained exercise of freedom. It has tended to create a powerful but limited class whose chief object it is to hold and to increase the power which they have gained; and this unexpected result has presented the American democracy with the most difficult and radical of its problems. Is it to the interest of the American people as a democracy to permit the increase or the perpetuation of the power gained by this aristocracy of money?

A candid consideration of the foregoing question will, I believe, result in a negative answer. A democracy has as much interest in regulating for its own benefit the distribution of economic power as it has the distribution of political power, and the consequences of ignoring this interest would be as fatal in one case as in the other. In both instances regulation in the democratic interest is as far as possible from meaning the annihilation of individual liberty; but in both instances individual liberty should be subjected to conditions which will continue to keep it efficient and generally serviceable. Individual economic power is not any more dangerous than individual political power—provided it is not held too absolutely and for too long a time. But in both cases the interest of the community as a whole should be dominant; and the interest of the whole community demands a considerable concentration of economic power and responsibility, but only for the ultimate purpose of its more efficient exercise and the better distribution of its fruits.

That certain existing American fortunes have in their making been of the utmost benefit to the whole economic organism is to my mind unquestionably the fact. Men like Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, Mr. James J. Hill, and Mr. Edward Harriman have in the course of their business careers contributed enormously to American economic efficiency. They have been overpaid for their services, but that is irrelevant to the question immediately under consideration. It is sufficient that their economic power has been just as much earned by substantial service as was the political power of a man like Andrew Jackson; and if our country is to continue its prosperous economic career, it must retain an economic organization which will offer to men of this stamp the opportunity and the inducement to earn distinction. The rule which has already been applied to the case of political power applies, also, to economic power. Individuals should enjoy as much freedom from restraint, as much opportunity, and as much responsibility as is necessary for the efficient performance of their work. Opinions will differ as to the extent of this desirable independence and its associated responsibility. The American millionaire and his supporters claim, of course, that any diminution of opportunity and independence would be fatal. To dispute this inference, however, does not involve the abandonment of the rule itself. A democratic economic system, even more than a democratic political system, must delegate a large share of responsibility and power to the individual, but under conditions, if possible, which will really make for individual efficiency and distinction.

The grievance which a democrat may feel towards the existing economic system is that it makes only partially for genuine individual economic efficiency and distinction. The political power enjoyed by an individual American rarely endures long enough to survive its own utility. But economic power can in some measure at least be detached from its creator. Let it be admitted that the man who accumulates $50,000,000 in part earns it, but how about the man who inherits it? The inheritor of such a fortune, like the inheritor of a ducal title, has an opportunity thrust upon him. He succeeds to a colossal economic privilege which he has not earned and for which he may be wholly incompetent. He rarely inherits with the money the individual ability possessed by its maker, but he does inherit a "money power" wholly independent of his own qualifications or deserts. By virtue of that power alone he is in a position in some measure to exploit his fellow-countrymen. Even though a man of very inferior intellectual and moral caliber, he is able vastly to increase his fortune through the information and opportunity which that fortune bestows upon him, and without making any individual contribution to the economic organization of the country. His power brings with it no personal dignity or efficiency; and for the whole material and meaning of his life he becomes as much dependent upon his millions as a nobleman upon his title. The money which was a source of distinction to its creator becomes in the course of time a source of individual demoralization to its inheritor. His life is organized for the purpose of spending a larger income than any private individual can really need; and his intellectual point of view is bounded by his narrow experience and his class interests.

No doubt the institution of private property, necessitating, as it does, the transmission to one person of the possessions and earnings of another, always involves the inheritance of unearned power and opportunity. But the point is that in the case of very large fortunes the inherited power goes far beyond any legitimate individual needs, and in the course of time can hardly fail to corrupt its possessors. The creator of a large fortune may well be its master; but its inheritor will, except in the case of exceptionally able individuals, become its victim, and most assuredly the evil social effects are as bad as the evil individual effects. The political bond which a democracy seeks to create depends for its higher value upon an effective social bond. Gross inequalities in wealth, wholly divorced from economic efficiency on the part of the rich, as effectively loosen the social bond as do gross inequalities of political and social standing. A wholesome social condition in a democracy does not imply uniformity of wealth any more than it implies uniformity of ability and purpose, but it does imply the association of great individual economic distinction with responsibility and efficiency. It does imply that economic leaders, no less than political ones, should have conditions imposed upon them which will force them to recognize the responsibilities attached to so much power. Mutual association and confidence between the leaders and followers is as much a part of democratic economic organization as it is of democratic political organization; and in the long run the inheritance of vast fortunes destroys any such relation. They breed class envy on one side, and class contempt on the other; and the community is either divided irremediably by differences of interest and outlook, or united, if at all, by snobbish servility.

If the integrity of a democracy is injured by the perpetuation of unearned economic distinctions, it is also injured by extreme poverty, whether deserved or not. A democracy which attempted to equalize wealth would incur the same disastrous fate as a democracy which attempted to equalize political power; but a democracy can no more be indifferent to the distribution of wealth than it can to the distribution of the suffrage. In a wholesome democracy every male adult should participate in the ultimate political responsibility, partly because of the political danger of refusing participation to the people, and partly because of the advantages to be derived from the political union of the whole people. So a wholesome democracy should seek to guarantee to every male adult a certain minimum of economic power and responsibility. No doubt it is much easier to confer the suffrage on the people than it is to make poverty a negligible social factor; but the difficulty of the task does not make it the less necessary. It stands to reason that in the long run the people who possess the political power will want a substantial share of the economic fruits. A prudent democracy should anticipate this demand. Not only does any considerable amount of grinding poverty constitute a grave social danger in a democratic state, but so, in general, does a widespread condition of partial economic privation. The individuals constituting a democracy lack the first essential of individual freedom when they cannot escape from a condition of economic dependence.

The American democracy has confidently believed in the fatal prosperity enjoyed by the people under the American system. In the confidence of that belief it has promised to Americans a substantial satisfaction of their economic needs; and it has made that promise an essential part of the American national idea. The promise has been measurably fulfilled hitherto, because the prodigious natural resources of a new continent were thrown open to anybody with the energy to appropriate them. But those natural resources have now in large measure passed into the possession of individuals, and American statesmen can no longer count upon them to satisfy the popular hunger for economic independence. An ever larger proportion of the total population of the country is taking to industrial occupations, and an industrial system brings with it much more definite social and economic classes, and a diminution of the earlier social homogeneity. The contemporary wage-earner is no longer satisfied with the economic results of being merely an American citizen. His union is usually of more obvious use to him than the state, and he is tending to make his allegiance to his union paramount to his allegiance to the state. This is only one of many illustrations that the traditional American system has broken down. The American state can regain the loyal adhesion of the economically less independent class only by positive service. What the wage-earner needs, and what it is to the interest of a democratic state he should obtain, is a constantly higher standard of living. The state can help him to conquer a higher standard of living without doing any necessary injury to his employers and with a positive benefit to general economic and social efficiency. If it is to earn the loyalty of the wage-earners, it must recognize the legitimacy of his demand, and make the satisfaction of it an essential part of its public policy.

The American state is dedicated to such a duty, not only by its democratic purpose, but by its national tradition. So far as the former is concerned, it is absurd and fatal to ask a popular majority to respect the rights of a minority, when those rights are interpreted so as seriously to hamper, if not to forbid, the majority from obtaining the essential condition of individual freedom and development—viz. the highest possible standard of living. But this absurdity becomes really critical and dangerous, in view of the fact that the American people, particularly those of alien birth and descent, have been explicitly promised economic freedom and prosperity. The promise was made on the strength of what was believed to be an inexhaustible store of natural opportunities; and it will have to be kept even when those natural resources are no longer to be had for the asking. It is entirely possible, of course, that the promise can never be kept,—that its redemption will prove to be beyond the patience, the power, and the wisdom of the American people and their leaders; but if it is not kept, the American commonwealth will no longer continue to be a democracy.

IV

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY

We are now prepared, I hope, to venture upon a more fruitful definition of democracy. The popular definitions err in describing it in terms of its machinery or of some partial political or economic object. Democracy does not mean merely government by the people, or majority rule, or universal suffrage. All of these political forms or devices are a part of its necessary organization; but the chief advantage such methods of organization have is their tendency to promote some salutary and formative purpose. The really formative purpose is not exclusively a matter of individual liberty, although it must give individual liberty abundant scope. Neither is it a matter of equal rights alone, although it must always cherish the social bond which that principle represents. The salutary and formative democratic purpose consists in using the democratic organization for the joint benefit of individual distinction and social improvement.

To define the really democratic organization as one which makes expressly and intentionally for individual distinction and social improvement is nothing more than a translation of the statement that such an organization should make expressly and intentionally for the welfare of the whole people. The whole people will always consist of individuals, constituting small classes, who demand special opportunities, and the mass of the population who demand for their improvement more generalized opportunities. At any particular time or in any particular case, the improvement of the smaller classes may conflict with that of the larger class, but the conflict becomes permanent and irreconcilable only when it is intensified by the lack of a really binding and edifying public policy, and by the consequent stimulation of class and factional prejudices and purposes. A policy, intelligently informed by the desire to maintain a joint process of individual and social amelioration, should be able to keep a democracy sound and whole both in sentiment and in idea. Such a democracy would not be dedicated either to liberty or to equality in their abstract expressions, but to liberty and equality, in so far as they made for human brotherhood. As M. Faguet says in the introduction to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvième Siècle," from which I have already quoted: "Liberté et Égalité sont donc contradictoires et exclusives l'une et l'autre; mais la Fraternité les concilierait. La Fraternité non seulement concilierait la Liberté et l'Égalité, mais elle les ferait gêneratrices l'une et l'autre." The two subordinate principles, that is, one representing the individual and the other the social interest, can by their subordination to the principle of human brotherhood, be made in the long run mutually helpful.

The foregoing definition of the democratic purpose is the only one which can entitle democracy to an essential superiority to other forms of political organization. Democrats have always tended to claim some such superiority for their methods and purposes, but in case democracy is to be considered merely as a piece of political machinery, or a partial political idea, the claim has no validity. Its superiority must be based upon the fact that democracy is the best possible translation into political and social terms of an authoritative and comprehensive moral idea; and provided a democratic state honestly seeks to make its organization and policy contribute to a better quality of individuality and a higher level of associated life, it can within certain limits claim the allegiance of mankind on rational moral grounds.

The proposed definition may seem to be both vague and commonplace; but it none the less brings with it practical consequences of paramount importance. The subordination of the machinery of democracy to its purpose and the comprehension within that purpose of the higher interests both of the individual and society, is not only exclusive of many partial and erroneous ideas, but demands both a reconstructive programme and an efficient organization. A government by the people, which seeks an organization and a policy beneficial to the individual and to society, is confronted by a task as responsible and difficult as you please; but it is a specific task which demands the adoption of certain specific and positive means. Moreover it is a task which the American democracy has never sought consciously to achieve. American democrats have always hoped for individual and social amelioration as the result of the operation of their democratic system; but if any such result was to follow, its achievement was to be a happy accident. The organization and policy of a democracy should leave the individual and society to seek their own amelioration. The democratic state should never discriminate in favor of anything or anybody. It should only discriminate against all sorts of privilege. Under the proposed definition, on the other hand, popular government is to make itself expressly and permanently responsible for the amelioration of the individual and society; and a necessary consequence of this responsibility is an adequate organization and a reconstructive policy.

The majority of good Americans will doubtless consider that the reconstructive policy, already indicated, is flagrantly socialistic both in its methods and its objects; and if any critic likes to fasten the stigma of socialism upon the foregoing conception of democracy, I am not concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of democracy is socialistic, if it is socialistic to consider democracy inseparable from a candid, patient, and courageous attempt to advance the social problem towards a satisfactory solution. It is also socialistic in case socialism cannot be divorced from the use, wherever necessary, of the political organization in all its forms to realize the proposed democratic purpose. On the other hand, there are some doctrines frequently associated with socialism, to which the proposed conception of democracy is wholly inimical; and it should be characterized not so much socialistic, as unscrupulously and loyally nationalistic.

A democracy dedicated to individual and social betterment is necessarily individualist as well as socialist. It has little interest in the mere multiplication of average individuals, except in so far as such multiplication is necessary to economic and political efficiency; but it has the deepest interest in the development of a higher quality of individual self-expression. There are two indispensable economic conditions of qualitative individual self-expression. One is the preservation of the institution of private property in some form, and the other is the radical transformation of its existing nature and influence. A democracy certainly cannot fulfill its mission without the eventual assumption by the state of many functions now performed by individuals, and without becoming expressly responsible for an improved distribution of wealth; but if any attempt is made to accomplish these results by violent means, it will most assuredly prove to be a failure. An improvement in the distribution of wealth or in economic efficiency which cannot be accomplished by purchase on the part of the state or by a legitimate use of the power of taxation, must be left to the action of time, assisted, of course, by such arrangements as are immediately practical. But the amount of actual good to the individual and society which can be effected at any one time by an alteration in the distribution of wealth is extremely small; and the same statement is true of any proposed state action in the interest of the democratic purpose. Consequently, while responsible state action is an essential condition of any steady approach to the democratic consummation, such action will be wholly vain unless accompanied by a larger measure of spontaneous individual amelioration. In fact, one of the strongest arguments on behalf of a higher and larger conception of state responsibilities in a democracy is that the candid, courageous, patient, and intelligent attempt to redeem those responsibilities provides one of the highest types of individuality—viz. the public-spirited man with a personal opportunity and a task which should be enormously stimulating and edifying.

The great weakness of the most popular form of socialism consists, however, in its mixture of a revolutionary purpose with an international scope. It seeks the abolition of national distinctions by revolutionary revolts of the wage-earner against the capitalist; and in so far as it proposes to undermine the principle of national cohesion and to substitute for it an international organization of a single class, it is headed absolutely in the wrong direction. Revolutions may at times be necessary and on the whole helpful, but not in case there is any other practicable method of removing grave obstacles to human amelioration; and in any event their tendency is socially disintegrating. The destruction or the weakening of nationalities for the ostensible benefit of an international socialism would in truth gravely imperil the bond upon which actual human association is based. The peoples who have inherited any share in Christian civilization are effectively united chiefly by national habits, traditions, and purposes; and perhaps the most effective way of bringing about an irretrievable division of purpose among them would be the adoption by the class of wage-earners of the programme of international socialism. It is not too much to say that no permanent good can, under existing conditions, come to the individual and society except through the preservation and the development of the existing system of nationalized states.

Radical and enthusiastic democrats have usually failed to attach sufficient importance to the ties whereby civilized men are at the present time actually united. Inasmuch as national traditions are usually associated with all sorts of political, economic, and social privileges and abuses, they have sought to identify the higher social relation with the destruction of the national tradition and the substitution of an ideal bond. In so doing they are committing a disastrous error; and democracy will never become really constructive until this error is recognized and democracy abandons its former alliance with revolution. The higher human relation must be brought about chiefly by the improvement and the intensification of existing human relations. The only possible foundation for a better social structure is the existing order, of which the contemporary system of nationalized states forms the foundation.

Loyalty to the existing system of nationalized states does not necessarily mean loyalty to an existing government merely because it exists. There have been, and still are, governments whose ruin is a necessary condition of popular liberation; and revolution doubtless still has a subordinate part to play in the process of human amelioration. The loyalty which a citizen owes to a government is dependent upon the extent to which the government is representative of national traditions and is organized in the interest of valid national purposes. National traditions and purposes always contain a large infusion of dubious ingredients; but loyalty to them does not necessarily mean the uncritical and unprotesting acceptance of the national limitations and abuses. Nationality is a political and social ideal as well as the great contemporary political fact. Loyalty to the national interest implies devotion to a progressive principle. It demands, to be sure, that the progressive principle be realized without any violation of fundamental national ties. It demands that any national action taken for the benefit of the progressive principle be approved by the official national organization. But it also serves as a ferment quite as much as a bond. It bids the loyal national servants to fashion their fellow-countrymen into more of a nation; and the attempt to perform this bidding constitutes a very powerful and wholesome source of political development. It constitutes, indeed, a source of political development which is of decisive importance for a satisfactory theory of political and social progress, because a people which becomes more of a nation has a tendency to become for that very reason more of a democracy.

The assertion that a people which becomes more of a nation becomes for that very reason more of a democracy, is, I am aware, a hazardous assertion, which can be justified, if at all, only at a considerable expense. As a matter of fact, the two following chapters will be devoted chiefly to this labor of justification. In the first of these chapters I shall give a partly historical and partly critical account of the national principle in its relation to democracy; and in the second I shall apply the results, so achieved, to the American national principle in its relation to the American democratic idea. But before starting this complicated task, a few words must be premised as to the reasons which make the attempt well worth the trouble.

If a people, in becoming more of a nation, become for that very reason more of a democracy, the realization of the democratic purpose is not rendered any easier, but democracy is provided with a simplified, a consistent, and a practicable programme. An alliance is established thereby between the two dominant political and social forces in modern life. The suspicion with which aggressive advocates of the national principle have sometimes regarded democracy would be shown to have only a conditional justification; and the suspicion with which many ardent democrats have regarded aggressive nationalism would be similarly disarmed. A democrat, so far as the statement is true, could trust the fate of his cause in each particular state to the friends of national progress. Democracy would not need for its consummation the ruin of the traditional political fabrics; but so far as those political bodies were informed by genuinely national ideas and aspirations, it could await confidently the process of national development. In fact, the first duty of a good democrat would be that of rendering to his country loyal patriotic service. Democrats would abandon the task of making over the world to suit their own purposes, until they had come to a better understanding with their own countrymen. One's democracy, that is, would begin at home and it would for the most part stay at home; and the cause of national well-being would derive invaluable assistance from the loyal coöperation of good democrats.

A great many obvious objections will, of course, be immediately raised against any such explanation of the relation between democracy and nationality; and I am well aware that these objections demand the most serious consideration. A generation or two ago the European democrat was often by way of being an ardent nationalist; and a constructive relation between the two principles was accepted by many European political reformers. The events of the last fifty years have, however, done much to sever the alliance, and to make European patriots suspicious of democracy, and European democrats suspicious of patriotism. To what extent these suspicions are justified, I shall discuss in the next chapter; but that discussion will be undertaken almost exclusively for obtaining, if possible, some light upon our domestic situation. The formula of a constructive relation between the national and democratic principles has certain importance for European peoples, and particularly for Frenchmen: but, if true, it is of a far superior importance to Americans. It supplies a constructive form for the progressive solution of their political and social problems; and while it imposes on them responsibilities which they have sought to evade, it also offers compensations, the advantage of which they have scarcely expected.

Americans have always been both patriotic and democratic, just as they have always been friendly both to liberty and equality, but in neither case have they brought the two ideas or aspirations into mutually helpful relations. As democrats they have often regarded nationalism with distrust, and have consequently deprived their patriotism of any sufficient substance and organization. As nationalists they have frequently regarded essential aspects of democracy with a wholly unnecessary and embarrassing suspicion. They have been after a fashion Hamiltonian, and Jeffersonian after more of a fashion; but they have never recovered from the initial disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson. If there is any truth in the idea of a constructive relation between democracy and nationality this disagreement must be healed. They must accept both principles loyally and unreservedly; and by such acceptance their "noble national theory" will obtain a wholly unaccustomed energy and integrity. The alliance between the two principles will not leave either of them intact; but it will necessarily do more harm to the Jeffersonian group of political ideas than it will to the Hamiltonian. The latter's nationalism can be adapted to democracy without an essential injury to itself, but the former's democracy cannot be nationalized without being transformed. The manner of its transformation has already been discussed in detail. It must cease to be a democracy of indiscriminate individualism; and become one of selected individuals who are obliged constantly to justify their selection; and its members must be united not by a sense of joint irresponsibility, but by a sense of joint responsibility for the success of their political and social ideal. They must become, that is, a democracy devoted to the welfare of the whole people by means of a conscious labor of individual and social improvement; and that is precisely the sort of democracy which demands for its realization the aid of the Hamiltonian nationalistic organization and principle.


CHAPTER VIII

I

NATIONALITY AND DEMOCRACY; NATIONAL ORIGINS

Whatever the contemporary or the logical relation between nationality and democracy as ideas and as political forces, they were in their origin wholly independent one of the other. The Greek city states supplied the first examples of democracy; but their democracy brought with it no specifically national characteristics. In fact, the political condition and ideal implied by the word nation did not exist in the ancient world. The actual historical process, which culminated in the formation of the modern national state, began some time in the Middle Ages—a period in which democracy was almost an incredible form of political association. Some of the mediæval communes were not without traces of democracy; but modern nations do not derive from those turbulent little states. They derive from the larger political divisions into which Europe drifted during the Dark Ages; and they have grown with the gradually prospering attempt to bestow on the government of these European countries the qualities of efficiency and responsibility.

A complete justification of the foregoing statements would require a critical account of the political development of Western Europe since 400 B.C.; but within the necessary limits of the present discussion, we shall have to be satisfied with the barest summary of the way in which the modern national states originated, and of the relation to democracy which has gradually resulted from their own proper development. A great deal of misunderstanding exists as to the fundamental nature of a national as compared to a city or to an imperial state, because the meaning of the national idea has been obscured by the controversies which its militant assertion has involved. It has been identified both with a revolutionary and a racial political principle, whereas its revolutionary or racial associations are essentially occasional and accidental. The modern national state is at bottom the most intelligent and successful attempt which has yet been made to create a comparatively stable, efficient, and responsible type of political association.

The primary objects sought in political association are internal order, security from foreign attack, the authoritative and just adjustment of domestic differences and grievances, and a certain opportunity for individual development; and these several objects are really reducible to two, because internal order cannot be preserved among a vigorous people, in case no sufficient opportunity is provided for individual development or for the adjustment of differences and grievances. In order that a state may be relatively secure from foreign attack, it must possess a certain considerable area, population, and military efficiency. The fundamental weakness of the commune or city state has always been its inability to protect itself from the aggressions of larger or more warlike neighbors, and its correlative inability to settle its own domestic differences without foreign interference. On the other hand, when a state became sufficiently large and well organized to feel safe against alien aggression, it inevitably became the aggressor itself; and it inevitably carried the conquest of its neighbors just as far as it was able. But domestic security, which is reached by constant foreign aggression, results inevitably in a huge unwieldy form of imperial political organization which is obliged by the logic of its situation to seek universal dominion. The Romans made the great attempt to establish a dominion of this kind; and while their Empire could not endure, because their military organization destroyed in the end the very foundation of internal order, they bequeathed to civilization a political ideal and a legal code of inestimable subsequent value.

As long as men were obliged to choose between a communal or an imperial type of political organization,—which was equivalent merely to a choice between anarchy and despotism,—the problem of combining internal order with external security seemed insoluble. They needed a form of association strong enough to defend their frontiers, but not sufficiently strong to attack their neighbors with any chance of continued success; and such a state could not exist unless its unity and integrity had some moral basis, and unless the aggressions of exceptionally efficient states were checked by some effective inter-state organization. The coexistence of such states demanded in its turn the general acceptance of certain common moral ties and standards among a group of neighboring peoples; and such a tie was furnished by the religious bond with which Catholic Christianity united the peoples of Western Europe—a bond whereby the disorder and anarchy of the early Middle Ages was converted into a vehicle of political and social education. The members of the Christian body had much to fear from their fellow-Christians, but they also had much to gain. They shared many interesting and vital subjects of consultation; and even when they fought, as they usually did, they were likely to fight to some purpose. But beyond their quarrels Catholic Christians comprised one universe of discourse. They were somehow responsible one to another; and their mutual ties and responsibilities were most clearly demonstrated whenever a peculiarly unscrupulous and insistent attempt was made to violate them. As new and comparatively strong states began to emerge from the confusion of the early Middle Ages, it was soon found that under the new conditions states which were vigorous enough to establish internal peace and to protect their frontiers were not vigorous enough to conquer their neighbors. Political efficiency was brought to a much better realization of its necessary limits and responsibilities, because of the moral and intellectual education which the adoption of Christianity had imposed upon the Western peoples.

One of the earliest examples of political efficiency in mediæval Europe was the England of Edward I, which had begun to exhibit certain characteristics of a national state. Order was more than usually well preserved. It was sheltered by the Channel from foreign attack. The interest both of the nobles and of the people had been considered in its political organization. A fair balance was maintained among the leading members of the political body, so that the English kings could invade France with united national armies which easily defeated the incoherent rabble of knights and serfs whereby they were opposed. Nevertheless, when the English, after the manner of other efficient states, tried to conquer France, they were wholly unable to extinguish French resistance, as the similar resistance of conquered peoples had so frequently been extinguished in classic times. The French people rallied to a king who united them in their resistance to foreign domination; and the ultimate effect of the prolonged English aggression was merely the increasing national efficiency and the improving political organization of the French people.

The English could not extinguish the resistance of the French people, because their aggression aroused in Frenchmen latent power of effective association. Notwithstanding the prevalence of a factious minority, and the lack of any habit or tradition of national association, the power of united action for a common purpose was stimulated by the threat of alien domination; and this latent power was unquestionably the result in some measure of the discipline of Christian ideas to which the French, in common with the other European peoples, had been subjected. That discipline had, as has already been observed, increased men's capacity for fruitful association one with another. It had stimulated a social relationship much superior to the prevailing political relationship. It had enabled them to believe in an idea and to fight devotedly on its behalf. It is no accident, consequently, that the national resistance took on a religious character, and in Jeanne d'Arc gave birth to one of the most fragrant figures in human history. Thus the French national resistance, and the national bond thereby created, was one political expression of the power of coöperation developed in the people of Europe by the acceptance of a common religious bond. On the other hand, the use which the English had made of their precocious national organization weakened its foundations. The aggressive exercise of military force abroad for an object which it was incompetent to achieve disturbed the domestic balance of power on which the national organization of the English people rested. English political efficiency was dependent partly upon its responsible exercise; and it could not survive the disregard of domestic responsibilities entailed by the expense in men and money of futile external aggression.

The history of Europe as it emerged from the Middle Ages affords a continuous illustration of the truth that the increasing political efficiency of the several states was proportioned to the exercise of their powers in a responsible manner. The national development of the several states was complicated in the beginning by the religious wars; but those peoples suffered least from the wars of religion who did not in the end allow them to interfere with their primary political responsibilities. Spain, for instance, whose centuries of fighting with the Moors had enormously developed her military efficiency, used this military power solely for the purpose of pursuing political and religious objects antagonistic or irrelevant to the responsibilities of the Spanish kings towards their own subjects. The Spanish monarchy proclaimed as its dominant political object the maintenance by force of the Catholic faith throughout Europe; and for three generations it wasted the superb military strength and the economic resources of the Spanish people in an attempt to crush out Protestantism in Holland and England and to reinforce militant Catholicism in France. Upon Germany, divided into a number of petty states, partly Protestant, and partly Catholic, but with the Imperial power exerted on behalf of a Catholic and anti-national interest, the religious wars laid a heavy hand. Her lack of political cohesion made her the prey of neighboring countries whose population was numerically smaller, but which were better organized; and the end of the Thirty Years' War left her both despoiled and exhausted, because her political organization was wholly incapable of realizing a national policy or of meeting the national needs. Great Britain during all this period was occupied with her domestic problems and interfered comparatively little in continental affairs; and the result of this discreet and sensible effort to adapt her national organization to her peculiar domestic needs was in the eighteenth century an extraordinary increase of national efficiency. France also emerged from the religious wars headed by a dynasty which really represented national aspirations, and which was alive in some respects to its responsibilities toward the French people. The Bourbon monarchy consolidated the French national organization, encouraged French intellectual and religious life, and at times sought in an intelligent manner to improve the economic conditions of the country. For the first time in the history of continental Europe something resembling a genuinely national state was developed. Differences of religious opinion had been subordinated to the political and social interests of the French people. The crown, with the aid of a succession of able ministers, suppressed a factious nobility at home, and gradually made France the dominant European Power. A condition of the attainment of both of these objects was the loyal support of the French people, and the alliance with the monarchy, as the embodiment of French national life, of Frenchmen of ability and purpose.

The French monarchy, however, after it had become the dominant power in Europe, followed the bad example of previous states, and aroused the fear of its neighbors by a policy of excessive aggression. In this instance French domineering did not stimulate the national development of any one neighbor, because it was not concentrated upon any one or two peoples. But it did threaten the common interests of a number of European states; and it awakened an unprecedented faculty of inter-state association for the protection of these interests. The doctrine of the Balance of Power waxed as the result of this experience into a living principle in European politics; and it imposed an effective check upon the aggression of any single state. France was unable to retain the preponderant position which she had earned during the early years of the reign of Louis XIV; and this mistake of the Bourbon monarchy was the cause of its eventual downfall. The finances of the country were wrecked by its military efforts and failures, the industrial development of the people checked, and their loyalty to the Bourbons undermined. A gulf was gradually created between the French nation and its official organization and policy.

England, on the other hand, was successfully pursuing the opposite work of national improvement and consolidation. She was developing a system of government which, while preserving the crown as the symbol of social order, combined aristocratic leadership with some measure of national representation. For the first time in centuries the different members of her political body again began to function harmoniously; and she used the increasing power of aggression thereby secured with unprecedented discretion and good sense. She had learned that her military power could not be used with any effect across the Channel, and that under existing conditions her national interests in relation to the other European Powers were more negative than positive. Her expansive energy was concentrated on the task of building up a colonial empire in Asia and America; and in this task her comparative freedom from continental entanglements enabled her completely to vanquish France. Her success in creating a colonial empire anticipated with extraordinary precision the course during the nineteenth century of European national development.

In contemplating the political situation of Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century the student of the origin of the power and principle of nationality will be impressed by its two divergent aspects. The governments of the several European states had become tolerably efficient for those purposes in relation to which, during the sixteenth century and before, efficiency had been most necessary. They could keep order. Their citizens were protected to some extent in the enjoyment of their legal rights. The several governments were closely associated chiefly for the purpose of preventing excessive aggression on the part of any one state and of preserving the Balance of Power. Unfortunately, however, these governments had acquired during the turbulent era an unlimited authority which was indispensable to the fundamental task of maintaining order, but which, after order had been secured, was sufficient to encourage abuse. Their power was in theory absolute. It was an imitation of Roman Imperialism, and made no allowance for those limitations, both in its domestic and foreign expressions, which existed as a consequence of national growth and the international system. Their authority at all times was keyed up to the pitch of a great emergency. It was supposed to be the immediate expression of the common weal. The common weal was identified with the security of society and the state. The security of the state dictated the supreme law. The very authority, consequently, which was created to preserve order and the Balance of Power gradually became an effective cause of internal and external disorder. It became a source not of security, but of individual and social insecurity, because a properly organized machinery for exercising such a power and redeeming such a vast responsibility had not as yet been wrought.

The rulers of the continental states in the eighteenth century explained and excused every important action they took by what was called "La Raison d'État"—that is, by reasons connected with the public safety which justified absolute authority and extreme measures. But as a matter of fact this absolute authority, instead of being confined in its exercise to matters in which the public safety was really concerned, was wasted and compromised chiefly for the benefit of a trivial domestic policy and a merely dynastic foreign policy. At home the exercise of absolute authority was not limited to matters and occasions which really raised questions of public safety. In their foreign policies the majority of the states had little idea of the necessary and desirable limits of their own aggressive power. Those limits were imposed from without; and when several states could combine in support of an act of international piracy, as in the case of the partition of Poland, Europe could not be said to have any effective system of public law. The partition of Poland, which France could and should have prevented, was at once a convincing exposure of the miserable international position to which France had been reduced by the Bourbons, and the best possible testimony to the final moral bankruptcy of the political system of the eighteenth century.

II

THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In 1789 the bombshell of the French Revolution exploded under this fabric of semi-national and semi-despotic, but wholly royalist and aristocratic, European political system. For the first time in the history of European nations a national organization and tradition was confronted by a radical democratic purpose and faith. The two ideas have been face to face ever since; and European history thereafter may, in its broadest aspect, be considered as an attempt to establish a fruitful relation between them. In the beginning it looked as if democracy would, so far as it prevailed, be wholly destructive of national institutions and the existing international organization. The insurgent democrats sought to ignore and to eradicate the very substance of French national achievement. They began by abolishing all social and economic privileges and by framing a new polity based in general upon the English idea of a limited monarchy, partial popular representation, and equal civil rights; but, carried along by the momentum of their ideas and incensed by the disloyalty of the king and his advisers and the threat of invasion they ended by abolishing royalty, establishing universal suffrage and declaring war upon every embodiment, whether at home or abroad, of the older order. The revolutionary French democracy proclaimed a creed, not merely subversive of all monarchical and aristocratic institutions, but inimical to the substance and the spirit of nationality. Indeed it did not perceive any essential distinction between the monarchical or legitimist and the national principles; and the error was under the circumstances not unnatural. In the European political landscape of 1793 despotic royalty was a much more conspicuous fact than the centuries of political association in which these monarchies had been developed. But the eyes of the French democrats had been partially blinded by their own political interests and theories. Their democracy was in theory chiefly a matter of abstract political rights which remitted logically in a sort of revolutionary anarchy. The actual bonds whereby men were united were ignored. All traditional authority fell under suspicion. Frenchmen, in their devotion to their ideas and in their distrust of every institution, idea, or person associated with the Old Régime, hacked at the roots of their national cohesion and undermined the foundations of social order.

To a disinterested political philosopher of that day the antagonism between the principle of political authority and cohesion, as represented by the legitimate monarchies, and the principle of popular Sovereignty represented by the French democracy, may well have looked irretrievable. But events soon proved that such an inference could not be drawn too quickly. It is true that the French democracy, by breaking so violently the bonds of national association, perpetuated a division between their political organization and the substance of their national life, which was bound in the end to constitute a source of weakness. Yet the revolutionary democracy succeeded, nevertheless, in releasing sources of national energy, whose existence had never before been suspected, and in uniting the great body of the French people for the performance of a great task. Even though French national cohesion had been injured in one respect, French national efficiency was temporarily so increased that the existing organization and power of the other continental countries proved inadequate to resist it. When the French democracy was attacked by its monarchical neighbors, the newly aroused national energy of the French people was placed enthusiastically at the service of the military authorities. The success of the French armies, even during the disorders of the Convention and the corruption of the Directory, indicated that revolutionary France possessed possibilities of national efficiency far superior to the France of the Old Régime.

Neither the democrats nor Napoleon had, in truth, broken as much as they themselves and their enemies believed with the French national tradition; but unfortunately that aspect of the national tradition perpetuated by them was by no means its best aspect. The policy, the methods of administration, and the actual power of the Committee of Public Safety and of Napoleon were all inherited from the Old Régime. Revolutionary France merely adapted to new conditions the political organization and policy to which Frenchmen had been accustomed; and the most serious indictment to be made against it is that its excesses prevented it from dispensing with the absolutism which social disorder and unwarranted foreign aggression always necessitate. The Revolution made France more of a nation than it had been in the eighteenth century, because it gave to the French people the civil freedom, the political experience, and the economic opportunities which they needed, but it did not heal the breach which the Bourbons had made between the political organization of France and its legitimate national interests and aspirations. France in 1815, like France in 1789, remained a nation divided against itself,—a nation which had perpetuated during a democratic revolution a part of its national tradition most opposed to the logic of its new political and social ideas. It remained, that is, a nation whose political organization and policy had not been adapted to its domestic needs, and one which occupied on anomalous and suspected position in the European international system.

On the other hand, French democracy and Imperialism had directly and indirectly instigated the greater national efficiency of the neighboring European states. Alliances among European monarchs had not been sufficient to check the Imperial ambitions of Napoleon, as they had been sufficient to check the career of Louis XIV, because behind a greater general was the loyal devotion and the liberated energy of the French people; but when outrages perpetrated on the national feelings of Germans and Spaniards added an enthusiastic popular support to the hatred which the European monarchs cherished towards a domineering upstart, the fall of Napoleon became only a question of time. The excess and the abuse of French national efficiency and energy, consequent upon its sudden liberation and its perpetuation of an illogical but natural policy of national aggression, had the same effect upon Europe as English aggression had upon the national development of France. Napoleon was crushed under a popular uprising, comparable to that of the French people, which had been the condition of his own aggrandizement. Thus, in spite of the partial antagonism between the ideas of the French Revolutionary democracy and the principle of nationality the ultimate effect of the Revolution both in France and in Europe was to increase the force and to enlarge the area of the national movement. English national sentiment was enormously stimulated by the strenuous wars of the Revolutionary epoch. The embers of Spanish national feeling were blown into spasmodic life. The peoples of Italy and Germany had been possessed by the momentum of a common political purpose, and had been stirred by promises of national representation. Even France, unstable though its political condition was, had lost none of the results of the Revolution for which it had fought in the beginning; and if the Bourbons were restored, it was only on the implicit condition that the monarchy should be nationalized. The Revolutionary democracy, subversive as were its ideas, had started a new era for the European peoples of national and international construction.

Of course, it was by no means obvious in 1815 that a constructive national and international principle had come to dominate the European political system. The Treaty of Vienna was an unprincipled compromise among the divergent interests and claims of the dominant Powers, and the triumphant monarchs ignored their promises of national reform or representation. For one whole generation they resolutely suppressed, so far as they were able, every symptom of an insurgent democratic or national idea. They sought persistently and ingeniously to identify in Europe the principle of political integrity and order with the principle of the legitimate monarchy. But obscurantist as were the ideas and the policy of the Holy Alliance, the political system it established was an enormous improvement upon that of the eighteenth century. Not only was the sense of responsibility of the governing classes very much quickened, but the international system was based on a comparatively moral and rational idea. For the first time in European history a group of rulers, possessing in theory absolute authority and forming an apparently irresistible combination, exercised this power with moderation. They did not combine, as in the case of the partition of Poland, to break the peace and prey upon a defenseless neighbor, but to keep the peace; and if to keep the peace meant the suppression wherever possible of liberal political ideas, it meant also the renunciation of aggressive foreign policies. In this way Europe obtained the rest which was necessary after the havoc of the Revolutionary wars, while at the same time the principle on which the Holy Alliance was based was being put to the test of experience. Such a test it could not stand. The people of Europe were not content to identify the principle of political order, whether in domestic or foreign affairs, with that of legitimate monarchy and with the arbitrary political alignments of the Treaty of Vienna. Such a settlement ignored the political forces and ideas which, while originating in Revolutionary France, had none the less saved Europe from the consequences of French Revolutionary and Imperial aggression.

Beginning in 1848, Europe entered upon another period of revolutionary disturbance, which completely destroyed the political system of the Holy Alliance. At the outset these revolutions were no more respectful of national traditions than was the French Revolution; and as long as they remained chiefly subversive in idea and purpose, they accomplished little. But after some unsuccessful experimentation, the new revolutionary movement gradually adopted a national programme; and thereafter, its triumphs were many and varied. For the first time in political history the meaning of the national principle began to be understood; and it became in the most explicit manner a substantial and a formative political idea.

The revolutionary period taught European statesmen and political thinkers that political efficiency and responsibility both implied some degree of popular representation. Such representation did not necessarily go as far as thorough-going democrats would like. It did not necessarily transfer the source of political authority from the crown to the people. It did not necessarily bring with it, as in France, the overthrow of those political and social institutions which constituted the traditional structure of the national life. But it did imply that the government should make itself expressly responsible to public opinion, and should consult public opinion about all important questions of public policy. A certain amount of political freedom was shown to be indispensable to the making of a nation, and the granting of this amount of political freedom was no more than a fulfillment of the historical process in which the nations of Europe had originated.

The people of Europe had drifted into groups, the members of which, for one reason or another, were capable of effective political association. This association was not based at bottom on physical conditions. It was not dependent on a blood bond, because as a matter of fact the racial composition of the European peoples is exceedingly mixed. It was partly conditioned on geographical continuity without being necessarily caused thereby, and was wholly independent of any uniformity of climate. The association was in the beginning largely a matter of convenience or a matter of habit. Those associations endured which proved under stress of historical vicissitudes to be worthy of endurance. The longer any particular association endured, the more firm it became in political structure and the more definite in policy. Its citizens became accustomed to association one with another, and they became accustomed to those political and social forms which supplied the machinery of joint action. Certain institutions and ideas were selected by the pressure of historical events and were capitalized into the effective local political and social traditions. These traditions constituted the substance of the political and social bond. They provided the forms which enabled the people of any group to realize a joint purpose or, if necessary, to discuss serious differences. In their absence the very foundation of permanent political cohesion was lacking. For a while the protection of these groups against domestic and foreign enemies demanded, as we have seen, the exercise of an absolute political authority and the severe suppression of any but time-honored individual or class interests; but when comparative order had been secured, a higher standard of association gradually came to prevail. Differences of conviction and interest among individuals and classes, which formerly were suppressed or ignored, could no longer be considered either as so dangerous to public safety as to demand suppression or as so insignificant as to justify indifference. Effective association began to demand, that is, a new adjustment among the individual and class interests, traditions, and convictions which constituted the substance of any particular state; and such an adjustment could be secured only by an adequate machinery of consultation and discussion. Cohesion could no longer be imposed upon a people, because they no longer had any sufficient reason to submit to the discipline of such an imposition. It had to be reached by an enlarged area of political association, by the full expression of individual and class differences, and finally by the proper adjustment of those differences in relation to the general interest of the whole community.

As soon as any European state attained, by whatever means, a representative government, it began to be more of a nation, and to obtain the advantages of a more nationalized political organization. England's comparative domestic security enabled her to become more of a nation sooner than any of her continental neighbors; and her national efficiency forced the French to cultivate their latent power of national association. In France the government finally succeeded in becoming nationally representative without much assistance from any regular machinery of representation; but under such conditions it could not remain representative. One of its defects as a nation to-day is its lack of representative institutions to which Frenchmen have been long accustomed and which command some instinctive loyalty. Stimulated by French and English example, the other European states finally understood that some form or degree of popular representation was essential to national cohesion; and little by little they have been grafting representative institutions upon their traditional political structures. Thus the need of political and social cohesion was converted into a principle of constructive national reform. A nation is more or less of a nation according as its members are more or less capable of effective association; and the great object of a genuinely national domestic policy is that of making such association candid, loyal, and fruitful. Loyal and fruitful association is far from demanding mere uniformity of purpose and conviction on the part of those associated. On the contrary it gains enormously from a wide variety of individual differences,—but with the essential condition that such differences do not become factious in spirit and hostile to the utmost freedom of intercourse. But the only way of mitigating factiousness and misunderstanding is by means of some machinery of mutual consultation, which may help to remedy grievances and whose decision shall determine the political action taken in the name of the whole community. The national principle, that is, which is precisely the principle of loyal and fruitful political association, depends for its vitality upon the establishment and maintenance of a constructive relation between the official political organization and policy and the interests, the ideas, and the traditions of the people as a whole. The nations of Europe, much as they suffered from the French Revolution and disliked it, owe to the insurgent French democracy their effective instruction in this political truth.

It follows, however, that there is no universal and perfect machinery whereby loyal and fruitful national association can be secured. The nations of Europe originated in local political groups, each of which possessed its own peculiar interests, institutions, and traditions. Their power of fruitful national association depended more upon loyalty to their particular local political tradition and habits than upon any ideal perfection in their new and experimental machinery for distributing political responsibility and securing popular representation. A national policy and organization is, consequently, essentially particular; and, what is equally important, its particular character is partly determined by the similarly special character of the policy and organization of the surrounding states. The historical process in which each of the European nations originated included, as an essential element, the action and reaction of these particular states one upon the other. Each nation was formed, that is, as part of a political system which included other nations. As any particular state became more of a nation, its increasing power of effective association forced its neighbors either into submission or into an equally efficient exercise of national resistance. Little by little it has been discovered that any increase in the loyalty and fertility of a country's domestic life was contingent upon the attainment of a more definite position in the general European system; and that, on the other hand, any attempt to escape from the limitations imposed upon a particular state by the general system was followed by a diminished efficiency in its machinery of national association.

The full meaning of these general principles can, perhaps, be best explained by the consideration in relation thereto of the existing political condition of the foremost European nations—Great Britain, France, and Germany. Each of these special cases will afford an opportunity of exhibiting a new and a significant variation of the relation between the principles of nationality and the principles of democracy; and together they should enable us to reach a fairly complete definition of the extent to which, in contemporary Europe, any fruitful relation can be established between them. What has already been said sufficiently indicates that the effective realization of a national principle, even in Europe, demands a certain infusion of democracy; but it also indicates that this democratic infusion cannot at any one time be carried very far without impairing the national integrity. How far, then, in these three decisive cases has the democratic infusion been carried and what are the consequences, the promise, and the dangers of each experiment?

III

NATIONALITY AND DEMOCRACY IN ENGLAND

It has already been observed that England was the first European state both in mediæval and modern times to reach a high degree of national efficiency. At a period when the foreign policies of the continental states were exclusively but timidly dynastic, and when their domestic organizations illustrated the disadvantages of a tepid autocracy, Great Britain had entered upon a foreign policy of national colonial expansion and was building up a representative national domestic organization. After several centuries of revolutionary disturbance the English had regained their national balance, without sacrificing any of the time-honored elements in their national life. The monarchy was reconstituted as the symbol of the national integrity and as the crown of the social system. The hereditary aristocracy, which was kept in touch with the commoners because its younger sons were not noble and which was national, if not liberal, in spirit, became the real rulers of England; but its role was supplemented by an effective though limited measure of general representation. This organization was perfected in the nineteenth century. Little by little the area of popular representation was enlarged, until it included almost the whole adult male population; and the government became more and more effectively controlled by national public opinion. As a result of this slowly gathering but comprehensive plan of national organization, the English have become more completely united in spirit and purpose than are the people of any other country. The crown and the aristocracy recognize the limitations of their positions and their inherited responsibilities to the gentry and the people. The commoners on their side are proud of their lords and of the monarchy and grant them full confidence. It is a unique instance of mutual loyalty and well-distributed responsibility among social classes, differing widely in station, occupations, and wealth; and it is founded upon habit of joint consultation, coupled, as the result of the long persistence of this habit, with an unusual similarity of intellectual and moral outlook.

The result, until recently, was an exceptional degree of national efficiency; and in scrutinizing this national efficiency the fact must be faced that the political success of Great Britain has apparently been due, not merely to her adoption of the practice of national representation, but to her abhorrence of any more subversive democratic ideas. On the one hand, the British have organized a political system which is probably more sensitively and completely responsive to a nationalized public opinion than is the political system of the American democracy. On the other hand, this same nationalized political organization is aristocratic to the core—aristocratic without scruple or qualification. What is the effect of this aristocratic organization upon the efficiently and fertility of the English political system? Has it contributed in the past to such efficiency? Does it still contribute? And if so, how far?

The power of the English aristocracy is no doubt to be justified, in part, by the admirable service which has been rendered to the country by the nobility and the gentry. During the eighteenth and a part of the nineteenth centuries the political leadership of the English people was on the whole both efficient and edifying. During all this period their continental competitors were either burdened with autocratic obscurantism or else were weakened by civil struggles and the fatal consequences of military aggression. In the meantime Great Britain pursued a comparatively tranquil course of domestic reform and colonial and industrial expansion. She was the European Power whose political and industrial energies were most completely liberated and most successfully used; and as a consequence she naturally drifted into an extremely self-satisfied state of mind in respect to her political and economic organization and policy. But during the last quarter of the nineteenth century political and economic conditions both began to change. The more important competing nations had by that time overcome their internal disorders, and by virtue of their domestic reforms had released new springs of national energy. Great Britain had to face much severer competition in the fields both of industrial and colonial expansion; and during all of these years she has been losing ground. Her expansion has not entirely ceased; but industrially she is being left behind by Germany and by the United States, and her recent colonial acquisitions have been attained only at an excessive cost. Inasmuch as she has succeeded in retaining her relative superiority on the sea, she has maintained her special position in the European political system; but the relatively greater responsibilities of the future coupled with her relatively smaller resources make her future international standing dubious. It looks as if there might be something lacking in the national organization and policy with which Great Britain has been so completely content.

Many Englishmen recognize that their national organization has diminished in efficiency, and they are considering various methods of meeting the emergency. But to an outsider it does not look as if any remedy, as yet seriously proposed, was really adequate. The truth is, that the existing political, social, and economic organization of Great Britain both impairs and misleads the energy of the people. It was adequate to the economic and political conditions of two generations ago, but it is at the present time becoming more and more inadequate. It is inferior in certain essential respects to the economic and political organization of Great Britain's two leading competitors—Germany and the United States. It is lacking in purpose. It is lacking in brains. It is lacking in faith.

Just as Great Britain benefited enormously during a century and a half from her political precocity, so she is now suffering from the consequences thereof. The political temperament of her people, their method of organization, and their national ideals all took form at a time when international competition for colonies and trade was not very sharp, and when democracy had no philosophic or moral standing. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the country was longing for domestic peace, and it was willing to secure peace at any price save that of liberty. The leadership of the landed aristocracy and gentry secured to the British people domestic peace and civil liberty, and in return for these very great blessings they sold themselves to the privileged classes. These privileged classes have probably deserved their privileges more completely than has the aristocracy of any other country. They have been patriotic; they have shed their blood and spent their money on what they believed to be the national welfare; they introduced an honorable and an admirable esprit de corps into the English public service; and they have been loyal to the great formative English political idea—the idea of liberty. They have granted to the people from time to time as much liberty as public opinion demanded, and have in this way maintained to the present day their political and social prestige. But although they have been, on the whole, individually disinterested, they have not been and they could not be disinterested as a class. Owning as they did much of the land, they had as a class certain economic interests. Possessing as they did certain special privileges, they had as a class certain political interests. These interests have been scrupulously preserved, no matter whether they did or did not conflict with the national interest. Their landed proprietorship has resulted in certain radical inequalities of taxation and certain grave economic drawbacks. Their position as a privileged class made them hospitable only to those reforms which spared their privileges. But their privileges could not be spared, provided Englishmen allowed rational ideas any decisive influence in their political life; and the consequence of this abstention from ideas was the gradual cultivation of a contempt for intelligence, an excessive worship of tradition, and a deep-rooted faith in the value of compromise. In the interest of domestic harmony they have identified complacent social subserviency with the virtue of loyalty, and have erected compromise into an ultimate principle of political action.

The landed aristocracy and gentry of England have been obliged to face only one serious crisis—the prolonged crisis occasioned by the transformation of Great Britain from an agricultural to an industrial community. The way the English privileged classes preserved their political leadership during a period, in which land was ceasing to be the source of Great Britain's economic prosperity, is an extraordinary illustration of their political tact and social prestige. But it must be added that their leadership has been preserved more in name than in substance. The aristocracy managed to keep its prestige and its apparent power during the course of the industrial revolution, but only on condition of the abandonment of the substance thereof. The nobility and the gentry became the privileged servants of the rising middle class. They bought off their commercial and industrial conquerors with the concession of free trade, because at the time such a concession did not seem to injure their own interests; and they agreed to let the English business man practically dictate the national policy. In this way they preserved their political and social privileges and have gradually so identified the interests of the well-to-do middle class with their interest that the two have become scarcely distinguishable. The aristocracy of privilege and the aristocracy of wealth are absolutely united in their devotion to the existing political organization and policy of the United Kingdom.

This bargain appeared to work very well for a while; but indications are accumulating that a let-alone economic policy has not preserved the vitality of the British economic system. The English farmer has lost ambition, and has been sacrificed to the industrial growth of the nation, while the industrial growth itself no longer shows its former power of expansion. The nation passed the responsibility for its economic welfare on to the individual; and the individual with all his energy and initiative seems unable to hold his own against better organized competition. Its competitors have profited by the very qualities which Great Britain renounced when she accepted the anti-national liberalism of the Manchester school. They have shown under widely different conditions the power of nationalizing their economic organization; and in spite of the commission of many errors, particularly in this country, a system of national economy appears to make for a higher level of economic vitality than a system of international economy. "At the present time," says Mr. O. Elzbacher in his "Modern Germany," "when other nations are no longer divided against themselves, but have become homogeneous unified nations in fact and nations in organization, and when the most progressive nations have become gigantic institutions for self-improvement and gigantic business concerns on coöperative principles, the spasmodic individual efforts of patriotic and energetic Englishmen and their unorganized individual action prove less efficient for the good of their country than they were formerly." The political leaders of England abandoned, that is, all leadership in economic affairs and allowed a merely individualistic liberalism complete control of the fiscal and economic policy of the country. The government resigned economic responsibility at the very time when English economic interests began to need vigilant protection and promotion; and as a consequence of this resignation the English governing class practically surrendered its primary function. What seemed to be an easy transferal to more competent shoulders of the national responsibility for the economic welfare of the country has proved to be a betrayal of the national interest.

Fiscal reform alone will, however, never enable Great Britain to compete more vigorously with either the United States or Germany. The diminished economic vitality of England must be partly traced to her tradition of political and social subserviency, which serves to rob both the ordinary and the exceptional Englishmen of energy and efficiency. American energy, so far as it is applied to economic tasks, is liberated not merely by the abundance of its opportunities, but by the prevailing idea that every man should make as much of himself as he can; and in obedience to this idea the average American works with all his might towards some special personal goal. The energy of the average Englishman, on the other hand, is impaired by his complacent acceptance of positions of social inferiority and by his worship of degrading social distinctions; and even successful Englishmen suffer from a similar handicap. The latter rarely push their business successes home, because they themselves immediately begin to covet a place in the social hierarchy, and to that end are content with a certain established income. The pleasure which the average Englishman seems to feel in looking up to the "upper classes" is only surpassed by the pleasure which the exceptional Englishman seems to feel in looking down on the "lower classes." Englishmen have always congratulated themselves because their nobility was not a caste; but the facts that the younger sons of the peers are commoners, and that a distinguished commoner may earn a peerage, only makes the poison of these arbitrary social discriminations the more deadly. An Englishman always has a chance of winning an irrelevant but very gratifying social and political privilege. He may by acceptable services of the ordinary kind become as good as a lord. Some such ambition is nearly always the end to which the energy of the successful Englishman is directed, and its particular nature hinders him from realizing the special purpose of his own life with an unimpeded will.

The net result of the English system is to infect English social, political, military, and industrial life with social favoritism, and the poison of the infection is only mitigated by the condition that the "favorites" must deserve their selection by the maintenance of a certain standard. This standard was formed a good many years ago when the conditions of efficiency were not so exacting as they are to-day. At that time it was a sufficiently high standard and made, on the whole, for successful achievement. It demanded of the "favorite" that he be honest, patriotic, well-educated, gentlemanly, courageous, and a "good sort," but it wholly failed to demand high special training, intense application, unremitting energy, or any exclusive devotion to one's peculiar work. If an Englishman comes up to the regular standard, he can usually obtain his share of the good things of English life; but if he goes beyond, he falls under the social disqualification of being abnormal and peculiar. The standard, consequently, is not now an efficient standard; and it is frequently applied with some laxity to the members of the privileged classes. A tacit conspiracy naturally exists among people in such a position to make it easy for their associates, friends, and relatives. The props and chances offered to a boy born into this class make the very most of his probably moderate deserts and abilities, and in occupying a position of responsibility he inevitably displaces a more competent substitute. In our own country the enjoyment of such political favors is known as a "pull," and is a popular but disreputable method of political advancement, whereas in England the whole social, and a large part of the political, structure is constituted on the basis of a systematic and hereditary "pull." The spirit thereof is highly honored in the most sacred precincts of English life. It is supported heartily and unscrupulously by English public opinion, and its critics are few and insignificant.

When Englishmen come to understand the need of dissociating their national idea from its existing encumbrances of political privilege and social favoritism, they will be confronted by a reconstructive task of peculiar difficulty. The balance of the national life, which has been so slowly and painfully recovered, will be endangered by the weakening of any of its present supports. For centuries the existing system has been wrought with the utmost patience and patriotism; and an Englishman may well shudder at the notion of any essential modification. The good of the system is so mixed with the evil that it seems impossible to extricate and eradicate the latter without endangering English national cohesion. Their traditional faith in compromise, their traditional dread of ideas, their traditional habit of acting first and reasoning afterwards, has made the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency—just as it has made the best English social type a gentleman, but a gentleman absolutely conditioned, tempered, and supplemented by a flunky.

While the process of becoming more of a democracy may very well injure—at any rate for a while—English national consistency, England's future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy. She has built her national organization on the idea that the national welfare is better promoted by a popular loyalty which entails popular immobility, than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and less subservient intellectual and moral energy. In so doing she has for the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national political and social organization—the advantage of combining great popular energy with loyalty and fertility of association. No doubt certain nations, because of their perilous international situation, may be obliged to sacrifice the moral and economic individuality of the people to the demands of political security and efficiency. But Great Britain suffered from no such necessity. After the fall of Napoleon, she was more secure from foreign interference than ever before in her history; and she could have afforded, with far less risk than France, to identify her national principle with the work of popular liberation and amelioration. As a matter of fact, the logic of the reform movement which began in England soon after the Treaty of Vienna, required the adoption by England either of more democracy or of less. The privileged classes should either have fought to preserve their peculiar responsibility for the national welfare, or else, if they were obliged to surrender their inherited leadership, they should have also surrendered their political and social privileges. But Englishmen, terrified by the disasters which French democratic nationalism had wrought upon France, preferred domestic harmony to the perils of any radical readjustment of the balance of their national life. The aristocracy and the middle classes compromised their differences; and in the compromise each of them sacrificed the principle upon which the vitality of its action as a class depended, while both of them combined to impose subordination on the mass of the people.

Englishmen have, it is true, always remained faithful to their dominant political idea—the idea of freedom, and the English political and economic system is precisely the example of the ultimate disadvantage of basing national cohesion upon the application of such a limited principle. This principle, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, always operates for the benefit of a minority, whose whole object, after they have once won certain peculiar advantages, is to secure their perpetuation. The wealthy middle class, which at one time was the backbone of the Liberal party, has for the most part gone over to the Conservatives, because its interest has become as much opposed to political and economic egalitarianism as is that of the aristocracy: and the mass of the English people, whose liberation can never be accomplished under the existing régime of political and economic privilege, looks with complacency and awe upon the good time enjoyed by their betters. Popular bondage is the price of national consistency. A century of industrial expansion and over half a century of free trade has left the English people miserably poor and contentedly hopeless; and in the future the people cannot depend upon any increase even of the small share of the benefits of industrial expansion, which they have hitherto obtained, because the national expansion is itself proceeding at a much slower rate. The dole, which is now being accorded in the shape of old-age pensions, may fairly be compared to the free transportation to their homes with which the Bank of Monte Carlo assuages the feelings of its destitute victims. The national organization and policy is so arranged that the majority must lose. The result will be inevitably a diminution of the ability of the United Kingdom to hold its own in competition with its economic and political rivals; and in all probability this pressure from the outside will eventually force the English nation to reconsider the basis of its political and economic organization and policy.

IV

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALITY IN FRANCE

The recent history and the present position of France illustrate another phase of the interdependence of the national and the democratic principles. The vitality of English national life has been impaired by its identification with an inadequate and aristocratic political principle. In France the effective vitality of the democracy has been very much lowered by certain flaws in the integrity of French national life. France is strong where England is weak and is weak where England is strong; and this divergence of development is by no means accidental. Just because they were the first countries to become effectively nationalized, their action and reaction have been constant and have served at once to develop and distinguish their national temperaments. The English invasions accelerated the growth of the French royal power and weakened domestic resistance to its ambitions. The English revolutions of the seventeenth century made the Bourbons more than ever determined to consolidate the royal despotism and to stamp out Protestantism. The excesses of the French royal despotism brought as a consequence the excesses of the Revolutionary democracy. The Reign of Terror in its turn made Englishmen more than ever suspicious of the application of rational political ideas to the fabric of English society. So the ball was tossed back and forth—the national temperament of each people being at once profoundly modified by this action and reaction and for the same cause profoundly distinguished one from the other. The association has been more beneficial to France than to England, because the French, both before and after the Revolution, really tried to learn something from English political experience, whereas the English have never been able to discover anything in the political experience of their neighbors, except an awful example of the danger of democratic ideas and political and social rationalism.

The ideas of the French democracy were in the beginning revolutionary, disorderly, and subversive of national consistency and good faith. No doubt the French democracy had a much better excuse for identifying democracy with a system of abstract rights and an indiscriminate individualism than had the American democracy. The shadow of the Old Régime hung over the country; and it seemed as if the newly won civil and political rights could be secured only by erecting them into absolute conditions of just political association and by surrounding them with every possible guarantee. Moreover, the natural course of the French democratic development was perverted by foreign interference and a constant condition of warfare; and if the French nation had been allowed to seek its own political salvation without interference, as was this English nation, the French democracy might have been saved many an error and excess. But whatever excuses may be found for the disorders of the French democracy, the temporary effect of the democratic idea upon the national fabric was, undoubtedly, a rending of the roots of their national stability and good feeling. The successive revolutionary explosions, which have constituted so much of French history since 1789, have made France the victim of what sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive conceptions of French national well-being. The democratic radicals are "intransigeant." The party of tradition and authority is "ultramontane." The majority of moderate and sensible people are usually in control; but their control is unstable. The shadow of the Terror and the Commune hangs over every serious crisis in French politics. The radicals jump to the belief that the interests and rights of the people have been betrayed and that the traitors should be exterminated. Good Frenchmen suffer during those crises from an obsession of suspicion and fear. Their mutual loyalty, their sense of fair play, and their natural kindliness are all submerged under a tyranny of desperate apprehension. The social bond is unloosed, and the prudent bourgeois thinks only of the preservation of person and property.

This aspect of the French democracy can, however, easily be over-emphasized and usually is over-emphasized by foreigners. It is undoubtedly a living element in the composition of the contemporary France; but it was less powerful at the time of the Commune than at the time of the Terror, and is less powerful to-day than it was in 1871. French political history in the nineteenth century is not to be regarded as a succession of meaningless revolutions, born of a spirit of reckless and factious insubordination, but as the route whereby a people, inexperienced in self-government, have been gradually traveling towards the kind of self-government best fitted to their needs. It is entirely possible that the existing Republic, modified perhaps for the purpose of obtaining a more independent and a more vigorous executive authority, may in the course of time give France the needed political and social stability. That form of government which was adopted at the time, because it divided Frenchmen the least, may become the form of government which unites Frenchmen by the strongest ties. Bismarck's misunderstanding of the French national character and political needs was well betrayed when he favored a Republic rather than a Legitimist monarchy in France, because a French Republic would, in his opinion, necessarily keep France a weak and divided neighbor. The Republic has kept France divided, but it has been less divided than it would have been under any monarchical government. It has successfully weathered a number of very grave domestic crises; and its perpetuity will probably depend primarily upon its ability to secure and advance by practical means the international standing of France. The Republic has been obliged to meet a foreign peril more prolonged and more dangerous than that which has befallen any French government since 1600. From the time of Richelieu until 1870, France was stronger than any of her continental neighbors. Unless they were united against her she had little to fear from them; and her comparative strength tempted her to be aggressive, careless, and experimental in her foreign policy. That policy was vacillating, purposeless, and frequently wasteful of the national resources. Eventually, it compromised the international position of France. After 1871, for the first time in almost three hundred years, the very safety of France in a time of peace became actively and gravely imperiled. The third Republic reaped the fruit of all the former trifling with the national interest of France and that of its neighbors; and the resulting danger was and is so ominous and so irretrievable that it has made and will make for internal stability. If the Republic can provide for French national defense and can keep for France the position in Europe to which she is entitled, the Republic will probably endure. And in that case it will certainly deserve to endure, because it will have faced and overcome the most exacting possible national peril.

Even the most loyal friend of France can, however, hardly claim that the French democracy is even yet thoroughly nationalized. It has done something to obtain national cohesion at home, and to advance the national interest abroad; but evidences of the traditional dissociation between French democracy and French national efficiency and consistency are still plainly visible. Both the domestic and the foreign policies of the Republic have of late years been weakened by the persistence of a factious and anti-national spirit among radical French democrats.

The most dangerous symptom of this anti-national democracy is that an apparently increasing number of educated Frenchmen are rebelling against the burdens imposed upon the Republic by its perilous international position. They are tending to seek security and relief, not by strengthening the national bond and by loyalty to the fabric of their national life, but by personal disloyalty and national dissolution. The most extreme of democratic socialists do not hesitate to advocate armed rebellion against military service in the interest of international peace. They would fight their fellow-countrymen in order to promote a union with foreigners. How far views of this kind have come to prevail, an outsider cannot very well judge; but they are said to be popular among the school teachers, and to have impaired the discipline of the army itself. Authoritative French journals claim that France cannot afford to run the risk of incurring the ill-will of Germany, even in a good cause, because the country is no longer sure of its military efficiency. There is no present danger of this anti-nationalist democracy capturing control of the French government, as did the revolutionary democracy at an earlier date; but its existence is a source of weakness to a nation whose perilous international situation requires the most absolute patriotic devotion on the part of her sons.

Unfortunately, it is also true that the official domestic policy of the Republic is not informed by a genuinely national spirit. Just as the English national interest demands the temporary loosening of traditional bonds for the sake of securing national cohesion at a smaller sacrifice of popular vitality, so, on the contrary, the French national interest demands more of the English spirit of compromise for the sake of national consistency. The wounds dealt to the integrity of French national life by the domestic conflicts of four generations require binding and healing. The Third Republic has on the whole been more national in its domestic policy than were any of the preceding French governments for over two hundred years; but it has still fallen far short of its duty in that respect. The healing of one wound has always been followed by the opening of another. Irreconcilable differences of opinion still subsist; and they are rarely bridged or dissolved by any fundamental loyalty of patriotic feeling. The French have as yet been unable to find in their democracy any conscious ideal of mutual loyalty which provides a sufficient substitute for a merely instinctive national tradition. They have not yet come to realize that the success of their whole democratic experiment depends upon their ability to reach a good understanding with their fellow-countrymen, and, that just in so far as their democracy fails to be nationally constructive, it is ignoring the most essential condition of its own vitality and perpetuity.

The French democracy is confronted by an economic, as well as a political, problem of peculiar difficulty. The effects of the Revolution were no less important upon the distribution of wealth in France than upon the distribution of political power. The people came into the ownership of the land; and in the course of time the area of this distribution has been increased rather than diminished. Furthermore, the laws under which property in France is inherited have promoted a similarly wide distribution of personal estate. France is a rich country; and its riches are much more evenly divided than is the case in Great Britain, Germany, or the United States. There are fewer large fortunes, and fewer cases of poverty. The average Frenchman is a small, but extremely thrifty proprietor, who abhors speculation and is always managing to add something to his accumulations; and the French economic system is adapted to this peculiar distribution of wealth. The scarcity in France of iron and coal has checked the tendency to industrial organization on a huge scale. The strength of the French industrial system does not consist in the large and efficient use of machinery, but in its multitude of skilled craftsmen and the excellence of their handiwork. In a system of this kind, labor naturally receives a large percentage of the gross product, and a larger proportion of wage-earners reach an independent economic position. At first sight it looks as if France was something like a genuine economic democracy, and ought to escape the evils which threaten other countries from an economic organization, in which concentrated capital plays a more important part.

But the situation is not without another and less favorable aspect. France, in becoming a country of small and extremely thrifty property owners, has also become a country of partial economic parasites with very little personal initiative and energy. Individual freedom has been sacrificed to economic and social equality; and this economic and social equality has not made for national cohesion. The bourgeois, the mechanic, and the farmer, in so far as they have accumulated property, are exhibiting an extremely calculating individualism, of which the most dangerous symptom is the decline in the birth-rate. Frenchmen are becoming more than ever disinclined to take the risks and assume the expense of having more than one or two children. The recent outbreak of anti-militarism is probably merely another illustration of the increasing desire of the French bourgeois for personal security, and the opportunity for personal enjoyment. To a foreigner it looks as if the grave political and social risks, which the French nation has taken since 1789, had gradually cultivated in individual Frenchmen an excessive personal prudence, which adds to the store of national wealth, but which no more conduces to economic, social, and political efficiency than would the incarceration of a fine army in a fortress conduce to military success. A nation or an individual who wishes to accomplish great things must be ready, in Nietsche's phrase, "to lived angerously"—to take those risks, without which no really great achievement is possible; and if Frenchmen persist in erecting the virtue of thrift and the demand for safety into the predominant national characteristic, they are merely beginning a process of national corruption and dissolution.

That any such result is at all imminent, I do not for a moment believe. The time will come when the danger of the present drift will be understood, and will create its sufficient remedy; and all good friends of democracy and human advancement should hope and believe that France will retain indefinitely her national vitality. If she should drift into an insignificant position in relation to her neighbors, a void would be created which it would be impossible to fill and which would react deleteriously upon the whole European system. But such a result is only to be avoided by the general recognition among Frenchmen that the means which they are adopting to render their personal position more secure is rendering their national situation more precarious. The fate of the French democracy is irrevocably tied up with the fate of French national life, and the best way for a Frenchman to show himself a good democrat is to make those sacrifices and to take those risks necessary for the prestige and welfare of his country.

V

THE RELATION OF GERMAN NATIONALITY TO DEMOCRACY

The German Empire presents still another phase of the relation between democracy and nationality, and one which helps considerably towards an understanding of the varied possibilities of that relationship. The German national organization and policy was wrought in a manner entirely different from that of either France or England. In the two latter countries political freedom was conquered only as the result of successive revolutions; and the ruling classes were obliged to recognize the source of these political reformations by renouncing all or a large part of their inherited responsibilities. In Germany, on the other hand, or rather in Prussia as the maker of modern Germany, the various changes in the national organization and policy, which have resulted in the founding of a united nation, originated either with the crown or with the royal counselors. The Prussian monarchy has, consequently, passed through the revolutionary period without abandoning its political leadership of the Prussian state. It has created a national representative body; but it has not followed the English example and allowed such a body to tie its hands; and it has remained, consequently, the most completely responsible and representative monarchy in Europe.

Up to the present time this responsibility and power have on the whole been deserved by the manner in which they have been exercised. German nationality as an efficient political and economic force has been wrought by skillful and patriotic management out of materials afforded by military and political opportunities and latent national ties and traditions. During the eighteenth century the Prussian monarchy came to understand that the road to effective political power in Germany was by way of a military efficiency, disproportionate to the resources and population of the Kingdom. In this way it was able to take advantage of almost every important crisis to increase its dominion and its prestige. Neither was Prussian national efficiency built up merely by a well-devised and practicable policy of military aggression. The Prussian monarchy had the good sense to accept the advice of domestic reformers during its period of adversity, and so contributed to the economic liberation and the educational training of its subjects. Thus the modern German nation has been at bottom the work of admirable leadership on the part of officially responsible leaders; and among those leaders the man who planned most effectively and accomplished the greatest results was Otto von Bismarck.


It requires a very special study of European history after 1848 to understand how bold, how original, how comprehensive, and how adequate for their purpose Bismarck's ideas and policy gradually became; and it requires a very special study of Bismarck's own biography to understand that his personal career, with all its transformations, exhibits an equally remarkable integrity. The Bismarck of from 1848 to 1851 is usually described as a country squire, possessed by obscurantist mediæval ideas wholly incompatible with his own subsequent policy. But while there are many superficial contradictions between the country squire of 1848 and the Prussian Minister and German Chancellor, the really peculiar quality of Bismarck's intelligence was revealed in his ability to develop a constructive German national policy out of the prejudices and ideas of a Prussian "junker." Bismarck, in 1848, was primarily an ardent Prussian patriot who believed that the monarchy was divinely authorized to govern the Prussian people, and that any diminution of this responsibility was false in principle and would be baleful in its results. These ideas led him, in 1848, to oppose the constitution, granted by Frederick William IV and to advocate the repression of all revolutionary upheavals. He never essentially departed from these principles; but his experience gradually taught him that they were capable of a different and more edifying application. The point of view from which his policy, his achievements, and his career can best be understood is that of a patriotic Prussian who was exclusively, intelligently, and unscrupulously devoted to the welfare (as he conceived it) of his country and his king. As a loyal Prussian he wished to increase Prussian influence among the other German states, because that was the only way to improve her standing and greatness as a European Power; and he soon realized that Austria constituted the great obstacle to any such increase of Prussian influence. He and he only drew the one sufficient inference from this fact. Inasmuch as Prussia's future greatness and efficiency depended absolutely on the increase of her influence in Germany, and inasmuch as Austria barred her path, Prussia must be prepared to fight Austria, and must make every possible provision, both diplomatic and military, to bring such a war to a successful issue. Such a purpose meant, of course, the abandonment of the policy which Prussia had pursued for a whole generation. The one interest which Bismarck wanted the Prussian government to promote was the Prussian interest, no matter whether that interest meant opposition to the democracy or coöperation therewith; and the important point in the realization of this exclusive policy is that he soon found himself in need of the help of the German democratic movement. His resolute and candid nationalism in the end forced him to enter into an alliance with the very democracy which he had begun by detesting.

It must be admitted, also, that he had in the beginning reason to distrust the Prussian and the German democracy. The German radicals had sought to compass the unification of Germany by passing resolutions and making speeches; but such methods, which are indispensable accessories to the good government of an established national community, were utterly incompetent to remove the obstacles to German unity. These obstacles consisted in the particularism of the German princes, the opposition of Austria, and looming in the background the possible opposition of France; and Bismarck alone thoroughly understood that such obstacles could be removed by war and war only. But in order to wage war successfully, a country must be well-armed; and in the attempt to arm Prussia so that she would be equal to asserting her interests in Germany, Bismarck and the king had to face the stubborn opposition of the Prussian representative assembly. Bismarck did not flinch from fighting the Prussian assembly in the national interest any more than he flinched under different circumstances from calling the German democracy to his aid. When by this policy, at once bold and cautious, of Prussian aggrandizement, he had succeeded in bringing about war with Austria, he fearlessly announced a plan of partial unification, based upon the supremacy of Prussia and a national parliament elected by universal suffrage; and after the defeat of Austria, he successfully carried this plan into effect. It so happened that the special interest of Prussia coincided with the German national interest. It was Prussia's effective military power which defeated Austria and forced the princes to abate their particularist pretensions. It was Prussia's comparatively larger population which made Bismarck insist that the German nation should be an efficient popular union rather than a mere federation of states. And it was Bismarck's experience with the anti-nationalism "liberalism" of the Prussian assembly, elected as it was by a very restricted suffrage, which convinced him that the national interest could be as well trusted to the good sense and the patriotism of the whole people as to the special interests of the "bourgeoisie." Thus little by little the fertile seed of Bismarck's Prussian patriotism grew into a German semi-democratic nationalism, and it achieved this transformation without any essential sacrifice of its own integrity. He had been working in Prussia's interest throughout, but he saw clearly just where the Prussian interest blended with the German national interest, and just what means, whether by way of military force or popular approval, were necessary for the success of his patriotic policy.

When the Prussian Minister-President became the Imperial Chancellor, he pursued in the larger field a similar purpose by different means. The German national Empire had been founded by means of the forcible coercion of its domestic and foreign opponents. It remained now to organize and develop the new national state; and the government, under Bismark's lead, made itself responsible for the task of organization and development, just as it had made itself responsible for the task of unification. According to the theories of democratic individualistic "liberalism," such an effort could only result in failure, because from the liberal point of view the one way to develop a modern industrial nation was simply to allow the individual every possible liberty. But Bismarck's whole scheme of national industrial organization looked in a very different direction. He believed that the nation itself, as represented by its official leaders, should actively assist in preparing an adequate national domestic policy, and in organizing the machinery for its efficient execution. He saw clearly that the logic and the purpose of the national type of political organization was entirely different from that of a so-called free democracy, as explained in the philosophy of the German liberals of 1848, the Manchester school in England, or our own Jeffersonian Democrats; and he successfully transformed his theory of responsible administrative activity into a comprehensive national policy. The army was, if anything, increased in strength, so that it might remain fully adequate either for national defense or as an engine of German international purposes. A beginning was made toward the creation of a navy. A moderate but explicit protectionist policy was adopted, aimed not at the special development either of rural or manufacturing industries, but at the all-round development of Germany as an independent national economic unit. In Prussia itself the railways were bought by the government, so that they should be managed, not in the interest of the shareholders, but in that of the national economic system. The government encouraged the spread of bettor farming methods, which have resulted in the gradual increase in the yield per acre of every important agricultural staple. The educational system of the country was made of direct assistance to industry, because it turned out skilled scientific experts, who used their knowledge to promote industrial efficiency. In every direction German activity was organized and was placed under skilled professional leadership, while at the same time each of these special lines of work was subordinated to its particular place in a comprehensive scheme of national economy. This "paternalism" has, moreover, accomplished its purpose. German industrial expansion surpasses in some respects that of the United States, and has left every European nation far behind. Germany alone among the modern European nations is, in spite of the temporary embarrassment of Imperial finance, carrying the cost of modern military preparation easily, and looks forward confidently to greater successes in the future. She is at the present time a very striking example of what can be accomplished for the popular welfare by a fearless acceptance on the part of the official leaders of economic as well as political responsibility, and by the efficient and intelligent use of all available means to that end.

Inevitably, however, Germany is suffering somewhat from the excess of her excellent qualities. Her leaders were not betrayed by the success of their foreign and domestic policies to attempt the immediate accomplishment of purposes, incommensurate with the national power and resources; but they were tempted to become somewhat overbearing in their attitude toward their domestic and foreign opponents. No doubt a position which was conquered by aggressive leadership must be maintained by aggressive leadership; and no doubt, consequently, the German Imperial Power could not well avoid the appearance and sometimes the substance of being domineering. But the consequence of the Bismarckian tradition of bullying and browbeating one's opponents has been that of intensifying the opposition to the national policy and of compromising its success. France has been able to escape from the isolation in which she was long kept by Bismarck after the war, and has gradually built up a series of understandings with other Powers, more or less inimical to Germany. The latter's standing in Europe is not as high as it was ten years ago, in spite of the increased relative efficiency of her army, her navy, and her economic system. Moreover, an equally serious and dangerous opposition has been created at home. The government has not succeeded in retaining the loyal support of a large fraction of the German people. A party which is composed for the most part of workingmen, and which has been increasing steadily in the number of its adherents, is utterly opposed to the present policy and organization of the Imperial government; and those Social Democrats have for the most part been treated by the authorities with repressive laws and abusive epithets. Thus a schism is being created in the German national system which threatens to become a source of serious weakness to the national efficiency and strength.

That the existence of some such domestic opposition is to a certain extent unavoidable must be admitted. A radical incompatibility exists between the national policy of the Imperial and Prussian governments and the Social Democratic programme; and the Imperial authorities could not conciliate the Social Democrats without abandoning the peculiar organization and policy which have been largely so responsible for the extraordinary increase in the national well-being. On the other hand, it must also be remembered that the Prussian royal power has maintained its nationally representative character and its responsible leadership quite as much by its ability to meet legitimate popular grievances and needs as by its successful foreign policy. The test of German domestic statesmanship hereafter will consist in its ability to win the support of the industrial democracy, created by the industrial advance of the country, without impairing the traditional and the existing practice of expert and responsible leadership. The task is one of extreme difficulty, but it is far from being wholly impossible, because the Social Democratic party in Germany is every year becoming less revolutionary and more national in its outlook. But at present little attempt is being made at conciliation; and the attitude of the ruling classes is such that in the near future none is likely to be made. In this respect they are false to the logic of the origin of German political unity. The union was accomplished with the assistance of the democracy and on a foundation of universal suffrage. As Germany has become more of a nation, the democracy has acquired more substantial power; but its increase in numbers and weight has not been accompanied by any increase of official recognition. The political organization of Germany is consequently losing touch with those who represent one essential aspect of the national growth. It behooves the ruling classes to tread warily, or they may have to face a domestic opposition more dangerous than any probable foreign opposition.

The situation is complicated by the dubious international standing of the German Empire. She is partly surrounded by actual and possible enemies, against whom she can make headway only by means of continuous vigilance and efficient leadership; while at the same time her own national ambitions still conflict in some measure with the interests of her neighbors. Her official foreign policy since 1872 has undoubtedly been determined by the desire to maintain the peace of Europe under effective guarantees, because she needed time to consolidate her position and reap the advantages of her increasing industrial efficiency; but both German and European statesmen are none the less very conscious of the fact that the German Empire is the European Power which has most to gain in Europe from a successful war. Some Frenchmen still cherish plans of revenge for 1870; but candid French opinion is beginning to admit that the constantly increasing resources of Germany in men and money make any deliberate policy of that kind almost suicidal. France would lose much more by a defeat than she could gain from a victory, and the fruits of victory could not be permanently held. Italy, also, has no unsatisfied ambition which a war could gratify, except the addition of a few thousand Austrian-Italians to her population. Russia still looks longingly toward Constantinople; but until she has done something to solve her domestic problem and reorganize her finances, she needs peace rather than war. But the past successes of Germany and her new and increasing expansive power tempt her to cherish ambitions which constitute the chief menace to the international stability of Europe. She would have much to lose, but she would also have something to gain from the possible disintegration of Austria-Hungary. She has possibly still more to gain from the incorporation of Holland within the Empire. Her increasing commerce has possessed her with the idea of eventually disputing the supremacy of the sea with Great Britain. And she unquestionably expects to profit in Asia Minor from the possible break-up of the Ottoman Empire. How seriously such ambitions are entertained, it is difficult to say; and it is wholly improbable that more than a small part of this enormous programme of national aggrandizement will ever be realized. But when Germany has the chance of gaining and holding such advantages as these from a successful war, it is no wonder that she remains the chief possible disturber of the European peace. In her case certainly the fruits of victory look more seductive than the penalties of defeat look dangerous; and the resolute opposition to the partial disarmament, which she has always offered at the Hague Conference, is the best evidence of the unsatisfied nature of her ambitions.

Germany's standing in the European system is, then, very far from being as well-defined as are those of the older nations, like France and Great Britain. The gradual growth of a better understanding between France, Great Britain, and Russia is largely due to an instinctive coalition of those powers who would be most injured by an increase of the German influence and dominion; and the sense that Europe is becoming united against them makes German statesmen more than ever on their guard and more than ever impatient of an embarrassing domestic opposition. Thus Germany's aggressive foreign policy has so far tended to increase the distance between her responsible leaders and the popular party; and there are only two ways in which this schism can be healed. If German foreign policy should continue to be as brilliantly successful as it was in the days of Bismarck, the authorities will have no difficulty in retaining the support of a sufficient majority of the German people—just as the victory over Austria brought King William and Bismarck forgiveness from their parliamentary opponents. On the other hand, any severe setback to Germany in the realization of its aggressive plans would strengthen the domestic opposition and might lead to a severe internal crisis. It all depends upon whether German national policy has or has not overstepped the limits of practical and permanent achievement.

VI

MILITARISM AND NATIONALITY

The foregoing considerations in respect to the existing international situation of Germany bring me to another and final aspect of the relation in Europe between nationality and democracy. One of the most difficult and (be it admitted) one of the most dubious problems raised by any attempt to establish a constructive relationship between those two principles hangs on the fact that hitherto national development has not apparently made for international peace. The nations of Europe are to all appearances as belligerent as were the former European dynastic states. Europe has become a vast camp, and its governments are spending probably a larger proportion of the resources of their countries for military and naval purposes than did those of the eighteenth century. How can these warlike preparations, in which all the European nations share, and the warlike spirit which they have occasionally displayed, be reconciled with the existence of any constructive relationship between the national and the democratic ideas?

The question can best be answered by briefly reviewing the claims already advanced on behalf of the national principle. I have asserted from the start that the national principle was wholly different in origin and somewhat different in meaning from the principle of democracy. What has been claimed for nationality is, not that it can be identified with democracy, but that as a political principle it remained unsatisfied without an infusion of democracy. But the extent to which this infusion can go and the forms which it takes are determined by a logic and a necessity very different from that of an absolute democratic theory. National politics have from the start aimed primarily at efficiency—that is, at the successful use of the force resident in the state to accomplish the purposes desired by the Sovereign authority. Among the group of states inhabited by Christian peoples it has gradually been discovered that the efficient use of force is contingent in a number of respects upon its responsible use; and that its responsible use means a limited policy of external aggrandizement and a partial distribution of political power and responsibilities. A national polity, however, always remains an organization based upon force. In internal affairs it depends at bottom for its success not merely upon public opinion, but, if necessary, upon the strong arm. It is a matter of government and coercion as well as a matter of influence and persuasion. So in its external relations its standing and success have depended, and still depend, upon the efficient use of force, just in so far as force is demanded by its own situation and the attitudes of its neighbors and rivals. The democrats who disparage efficient national organization are at bottom merely seeking to exorcise the power of physical force in human affairs by the use of pious incantations and heavenly words. That they will never do. The Christian warrior must accompany the evangelist; and Christians are not by any means angels. It is none the less true that the modern nations control the expenditure of more force in a more responsible manner than have any preceding political organizations; and it is none the less true that a further development of the national principle will mean in the end the attachment of still stricter responsibilities to the use of force both in the internal and external policies of modern nations.

War may be and has been a useful and justifiable engine of national policy. It is justifiable, moreover, not merely in such a case as our Civil War, in which a people fought for their own national integrity. It was, I believe, justifiable, in the case of the two wars which preceded the formation of the modern German Empire. These wars may, indeed, be considered as decisive instances. Prussia did not drift into them, as we drifted into the Civil War. They were deliberately provoked by Bismarck at a favorable moment, because they were necessary to the unification of the German people under Prussian leadership; and I do not hesitate to say that he can be justified in the assumption of this enormous responsibility. The German national organization means increased security, happiness, and opportunity of development for the whole German people; and inasmuch as the selfish interests of Austria and France blocked the path, Bismarck had his sufficient warrant for a deliberately planned attack. No doubt such an attack and its results injured France and the French people just as it has benefited Germany; but France had to suffer that injury as a penalty for the part she had as a matter of policy played in German affairs. For centuries a united France had helped to maintain for her own purposes a divided Germany; and when Germany herself became united, it was inevitable, as Bismarck foresaw in 1848, that French opposition must be forcibly removed, and some of the fruits of French aggression be reclaimed. That the restitution demanded went further than was necessary, I fully believe; but the partial abuse of victory does not diminish the legitimacy of the German aggression. A war waged for an excellent purpose contributes more to human amelioration than a merely artificial peace,—such as that established by the Holy Alliance. The unification of Germany and Italy has not only helped to liberate the energies of both the German and the Italian people, but it has made the political divisions of Europe conform much more nearly to the lines within which the people of Europe can loyally and fruitfully associate one with another. In fact, the whole national movement, if it has increased the preparations for war, has diminished in number of probable causes thereof; and it is only by diminishing the number of causes whereby a nation has more to gain from victory than it has to lose by defeat that war among the civilized powers can be gradually extinguished.

At the present time it is, as we have seen, the international situation and the national ambitions of Russia and Germany which constitute the chief threat to European peace. Germany's existing position in Europe depends upon its alliance with Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg Empire is an incoherent and unstable state which is held together only by dynastic ties and external pressure. The German, the Austrian, and the Hungarian interests all demand the perpetuation of the Habsburg dominion; but it is doubtful whether in the long run its large Slavic population will not combine with its blood neighbors to break the bond. But whether the German, Austrian, and Hungarian interest does or does not prevail, the fundamental national interests, which are compromised by the precarious stability of Austria-Hungary, are alone sufficient to make disarmament impossible. Disarmament means the preservation of Europe in its existing condition; and such a policy, enforced by means of international guarantees, would be almost as inimical to the foundation of a permanent and satisfactory international system now as it was in 1820. The fact has to be recognized that the ultimate object of a peaceable and stable European international situation cannot in all probability be reached without many additional wars; and the essential point is that these wars, when they come, should, like the wars between Austria or France and Prussia, or like our Civil War, be fought to accomplish a desirable purpose and should be decisive in result.

Modern conflicts between efficiently organized nations tend to obtain just this character. They are fought for a defensible purpose, and they accomplish a definite result. The penalties of defeat are so disastrous that warfare is no longer wantonly incurred; and it will not be provoked at all by nations, such as Italy or France, who have less to gain from victory than they have to lose from defeat. Moreover, the cost of existing armaments is so crushing that an ever increasing motive exists in favor of their ultimate reduction. This motive will not operate as long as the leading Powers continue to have unsatisfied ambitions which look practicable; but eventually it will necessarily have its effect. Each war, as it occurs, even if it does not finally settle some conflicting claims, will most assuredly help to teach the warring nations just how far they can go, and will help, consequently, to restrict its subsequent policy within practicable and probably inoffensive limits. It is by no means an accident that England and France, the two oldest European nations, are the two whose foreign policies are best defined and, so far as Europe is concerned, least offensive. For centuries these Powers fought and fought, because one of them had aggressive designs which apparently or really affected the welfare of the other; but the result of this prolonged rivalry has been a constantly clearer understanding of their respective national interests. Clear-headed and moderate statesmen like Talleyrand recognized immediately after the Revolution that the substantial interests of a liberalized France in Europe were closely akin to those of Great Britain, and again and again in the nineteenth century this prophecy was justified. Again and again the two Powers were brought together by their interests only to be again divided by a tradition of antagonism and misunderstanding. At present, however, they are probably on better terms than ever before in the history of their relations; and this result is due to the definite and necessarily unaggressive character of their European interests. They have finally learned the limits of their possible achievement and could transgress them only by some act of folly.

In the course of another fifty years the limits of possible aggression by Germany and Russia in Europe will probably be very much better defined than they are to-day. These two Powers will seek at the favorable moment to accomplish certain aggressive purposes which they secretly or openly entertain, and they will succeed or fail. Each success or failure will probably be decisive in certain respects, and will remove one or more existing conflicts of interest or ambiguities of position. Whether this progressive specification of the practicable foreign policies of the several Powers will soon or will ever go so far as to make some general international understanding possible, is a question which no man can answer; but as long as the national principle retains its vitality, there is no other way of reaching a permanent and fruitful international settlement. That any one nation, or any small group of nations, can impose its dominion upon Europe is contrary to every lesson of European history. Such a purpose would be immeasurably beyond the power even of 90,000,000 Germans or 150,000,000 Russians, or even beyond the power of 90,000,000 Germans allied with 150,000,000 Russians. Europe is capable of combining more effectually than ever before to resist any possible revival of imperialism; and the time will come when Europe, threatened by the aggression of any one domineering Power, can call other continents to her assistance. The limits to the possible expansion of any one nation are established by certain fundamental and venerable political conditions. The penalties of persistent transgression would be not merely a sentence of piracy similar to that passed on Napoleon I, but a constantly diminishing national vitality on the part of the aggressor. As long as the national principle endures, political power cannot be exercised irresponsibly without becoming inefficient and sterile.

Inimical as the national principle is to the carrying out either of a visionary or a predatory foreign policy in Europe, it does not imply any similar hostility to a certain measure of colonial expansion. In this, as in many other important respects, the constructive national democrat must necessarily differ from the old school of democratic "liberals." A nationalized democracy is not based on abstract individual rights, no matter whether the individual lives in Colorado, Paris, or Calcutta. Its consistency is chiefly a matter of actual historical association in the midst of a general Christian community of nations. A people that lack the power of basing their political association on an accumulated national tradition and purpose is not capable either of nationality or democracy; and that is the condition of the majority of Asiatic and African peoples. A European nation can undertake the responsibility of governing these politically disorganized societies without any necessary danger to its own national life. Such a task need not be beyond its physical power, because disorganized peoples have a comparatively small power of resistance, and a few thousand resolute Europeans can hold in submission many million Asiatics. Neither does it conflict with the moral basis of a national political organization, because at least for a while the Asiatic population may well be benefited by more orderly and progressive government. Submission to such a government is necessary as a condition of subsequent political development. The majority of Asiatic and African communities can only got a fair start politically by some such preliminary process of tutelage; and the assumption by a European nation of such a responsibility in a desirable phase of national discipline and a frequent source of genuine national advance.

Neither does an aggressive colonial policy make for unnecessary or meaningless wars. It is true, of course, that colonial expansion increases the number of possible occasions for dispute among the expanding nations; but these disputes have the advantage of rarely turning on questions really vital to the future prosperity of a European nation. They are just the sort of international differences of interest which ought to be settled by arbitration or conciliation, because both of the disputants have so much more to lose by hostilities than they have to gain by military success. A dispute turning upon a piece of African territory would, if it waxed into war, involve the most awful and dangerous consequences in Europe. The danger of European wars, except for national purposes of prime importance, carries its consequence into Africa and Asia. France, for instance, was very much irritated by the continued English occupation of Egypt in spite of certain solemn promises of evacuation; and the expedition of Marchand, which ended in the Fashoda incident, indirectly questioned the validity of the British occupation of Egypt by making that occupation strategically insecure. In spite, however, of the deliberate manner in which France raised this question and of the highly irritated condition of French public opinion, she could not, when the choice had to be made, afford the consequences of a Franco-English war. In the end she was obliged to seek compensation elsewhere in Africa and abandon her occupation of Fashoda. This incident is typical; and it points directly to the conclusion that wars will very rarely occur among European nations over disputes as to colonies, unless the political situation in Europe is one which itself makes war desirable or inevitable. A Bismarck could handle a Fashoda incident so as to provoke hostilities, but in that case Fashoda, like the Hohenzollern candidacy in Spain, would be a pretext, not a cause. The one contemporary instance in which a difference of colonial interests has caused a great war is the recent conflict between Russia and Japan; and in this instance the issues raised by the dispute were essentially different from the issues raised by a dispute over a colonial question between two European nations. The conflict of interests turned upon matter essential to the future prosperity of Japan, while at the same time the war did not necessarily involve dangerous European complications.

The truth is that colonial expansion by modern national states is to be regarded, not as a cause of war, but as a safety-valve against war. It affords an arena in which the restless and adventurous members of a national body can have their fling without dangerous consequences, while at the same time it satisfies the desire of a people for some evidence of and opportunity for national expansion. The nations which, one after another, have recognized the limits of their expansion in Europe have been those which have adopted a more or less explicit policy of colonial acquisition. Spain was, indeed, a great colonial power at a time when her policy in Europe continued to be aggressive; but her European aggressions soon undermined her national vitality, and her decadence in Europe brought her colonial expansion to a standstill. Portugal and Holland were too small to cherish visions of European aggrandizement, and they naturally sought an outlet in Asia and Africa for their energies. After Great Britain had passed through her revolutionary period, she made rapid advances as a colonial power, because she realized that her insular situation rendered a merely defensive European policy obligatory. France made a failure of her American and Asiatic colonies as long as she cherished schemes of European aggrandizement. Her period of colonial expansion, Algeria apart, did not come until after the Franco-Prussian War and the death of her ambition for a Rhine frontier. Bismarck was opposed to colonial development because he believed that Germany should husband her strength for the preservation and the improvement of her standing in Europe; but Germany's power of expansion demanded some outlet during a period of European rest. Throughout the reign of the present Emperor she has been picking up colonies wherever she could in Asia and Africa; and she cherishes certain plans for the extension of German influence in Asia Minor. It is characteristic of the ambiguous international position of Germany that she alone among the European Powers (except the peculiar case of Russia) is expectant of an increase of power both in Europe and other continents.

In the long run Germany will, like France, discover that under existing conditions an aggressive colonial and aggressive European policy are incompatible. The more important her colonies become and the larger her oceanic commerce, the more Germany lays herself open to injury from a strong maritime power, and the more hostages she is giving for good behavior in Europe. Unless a nation controls the sea, colonies are from a military point of view a source of weakness. The colonizing nation is in the position of a merchant who increases his business by means of a considerable increase of his debts. His use of the borrowed capital may be profitable, but none the less he makes his standing at the time of an emergency much more precarious. In the same way colonies add to the responsibilities of a nation and scatter its military resources; and a nation placed in such a situation is much less likely to break the peace.

The economic and political development of Asia and Africa by the European Powers is in its infancy; and no certain predictions can be made as to its final effects upon the political relations among civilized nations. Many important questions in respect thereto remain ambiguous. What, for instance, are the limits of a practicable policy of colonial expansion? In view of her peculiar economic condition and her threatened decrease in population have those limits been transgressed by France? Have they been transgressed by Great Britain? Considering the enormous increase in British responsibilities imposed by the maritime expansion of Germany, will not Great Britain be obliged to adopt a policy of concentration rather than expansion? Is not her partial retirement from American waters the first step in such a policy? Is not the Japanese alliance a dubious device for the partial shifting of burdens too heavy to bear? How long can Great Britain afford to maintain her existing control of the sea? Is there any way of ending such a control save either by the absolute exhaustion of Great Britain or by the establishment of a stable international system under adequate guarantees? Will the economic development of Asia lead to the awakening of other Asiatic states like Japan, and the re-arrangement of international relations for the purpose of giving them their appropriate places? A multitude of such questions are raised by the transformation which is taking place from a European international system into a political system composed chiefly of European nations, but embracing the whole world; and these questions will prove to be sufficiently difficult of solution. But in spite of the certainty that colonial expansion will in the end merely transfer to a larger area the conflicts of idea and interest whose effects have hitherto chiefly been confined to Europe—in spite of this certainty the process of colonial expansion is a wholly legitimate aspect of national development, and is not necessarily inimical to the advance of democracy. It will not make immediately for a permanent international settlement; but it is accomplishing a work without which a permanent international settlement is impossible; and it indubitably places every colonizing nation in a situation which makes the risk of hostilities dangerous compared to the possible advantages of military success.

The chief object of this long digression, has, I hope, now been achieved. My purpose has been to exhibit the European nations as a group of historic individuals with purposes, opportunities, and limitations analogous to those of actual individuals. An individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed. A national state is capable of development only in relation to the society of more or less nationalized states in the midst of which its history has been unfolded. The growing and maturing individual is he who comes to take a more definite and serviceable position in his surrounding society,—he who performs excellently a special work adapted to his abilities. The maturing nation is in the same way the nation which is capable of limiting itself to the performance of a practicable and useful national work,—a work which in some specific respect accelerates the march of Christian civilization. There is no way in which a higher type of national life can be obtained without a corresponding individual improvement on the part of its constituent members. There is similarly no way in which a permanently satisfactory system of international relations can be secured, save by the increasing historical experience and effective self-control of related nations. Any country which declares that it is too good (or too democratic) to associate with other nations and share the responsibilities and opportunities resulting from such association is comparable to the individual who declares himself to be too saintly for association with his fellow-countrymen. Whatever a man or a nation gains by isolation, he or it necessarily loses in the discipline of experience with its possible fruits of wisdom and self-control. Association is a condition of individuality. International relations are a condition of nationality. A universal nation is as much a contradiction in terms as a universal individual. A nation seeking to destroy other nations is analogous to a man who seeks to destroy the society in which he was born. Little by little European history has been teaching this lesson; and in the course of time the correlation of national development with the improvement and definition of international relations will probably be embodied in some set of international institutions.

In the meantime the existing rivalries and enmities among European states must not be under-estimated either in their significance or their strength. In a way those rivalries have become more intense than ever before; and it is only too apparent that the many-headed rulers of modern nations are as capable of cherishing personal and national dislikes as were the sovereign kings of other centuries. These rivalries and enmities will not be dissolved by kind words and noble sentiments. The federation of Europe, like the unification of Germany, will never be brought about by congresses and amicable resolutions. It can be effected only by the same old means of blood and iron. The nations will never agree upon a permanent settlement until they have more to gain from peace than from military victory. But such a time will be postponed all the longer unless the nations, like France, Italy, England and the United States, which are at present sincerely desirous of peace, keep as well armed as their more belligerent neighbors. When the tug comes, the issue will depend upon the effective force which such nations, when loyally combined, can exert. It would be fatal, consequently, for the pacific Powers to seek to establish peace by a partial diminution of their military efficiency. Such an action would merely encourage the belligerent Powers to push their aggressive plans to the limit. The former must, on the contrary, keep as well armed as their resources and policy demand. Nationality is impaired and the national principle is violated just as soon as a nation neglects any sort of efficiency which is required either by its international position or by its national purposes.


CHAPTER IX

I

THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS NATIONAL PRINCIPLE

The foregoing review of the relation which has come to subsist in Europe between nationality and democracy should help us to understand the peculiar bond which unites the American democratic and national principles. The net result of that review was encouraging but not decisive. As a consequence of their development as nations, the European peoples have been unable to get along without a certain infusion of democracy; but it was for the most part essential to their national interest that such an infusion should be strictly limited. In Europe the two ideals have never been allowed a frank and unconstrained relation one to the other other. They have been unable to live apart; but their marriage has usually been one of convenience, which was very far from implying complete mutual dependence and confidence. No doubt the collective interests of the German or British people suffer because such a lack of dependence and confidence exists; but their collective interests would suffer more from a sudden or violent attempt to destroy the barriers. The nature and the history of the different democratic and national movements in the several European countries at once tie them together and keep them apart.

The peoples of Europe can only escape gradually from the large infusion of arbitrary and irrational material in their national composition. Monarchical and aristocratic traditions and a certain measure of political and social privilege have remained an essential part of their national lives; and no less essential was an element of defiance in their attitude toward their European neighbors. Hence, when the principle of national Sovereignty was proclaimed as a substitute for the principal of royal Sovereignty, that principle really did not mean the sudden bestowal upon the people of unlimited Sovereign power. "The true people," said Bismarck, in 1847, then a country squire, "is an invisible multitude of spirits. It is the living nation—the nation organized for its historical mission—the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow." A nation, that is, is a people in so far as they are united by traditions and purposes; and national Sovereignty implies an attachment to national history and traditions which permits only the very gradual alteration of these traditions in the direction of increasing democracy. The mistake which France made at the time of the French Revolution was precisely that of interpreting the phrase "souvreneté nationale" as equivalent to immediate, complete, and (in respect to the past) irresponsible popular sovereignty.

The European nations are, consequently, not in a position to make their national ideals frankly and loyally democratic. Their national integrity depends upon fidelity to traditional ideas and forms quite as much as it does upon the gradual modification of those ideas and forms in a democratic direction. The orderly unfolding of their national lives calls for a series of compromises which carry the fundamental democratic implication of the national principle as far as it can under the circumstances be safely carried; and in no other way does a people exhibit its political common sense so clearly as in its ability to be contemporary and progressive without breaking away from its historical anchorage. A comparatively definite national mission and purpose clearly emerge at some particular phase of the indefinite process of internal and external readjustment; but such a mission and such purposes necessarily possess a limited significance and a special character. Restricted as they are by the facts of national history, they lack the ultimate moral significance of the democratic ideal, which permits the transformation of patriotic fidelity into devotion to the highest and most comprehensive interests of humanity and civilization.

That an analogous condition exists in our own country, it would be vain to deny. The American people possessed a collective character even before they possessed a national organization; and both before and after the foundation of a national government, these common traditions were by no means wholly democratic. Furthermore, as we have frequently had occasion to observe, the American democracy in its traditional form has more often than not been anti-national in instinct and idea. Our own country has, consequently, a problem to solve, similar in certain respects to that of the European nations. Its national cohesion is a matter of historical association, and the facts of its historical association have resulted in a partial division and a misunderstanding between its two fundamental principles—the principles of nationality and democracy.

In the case of the United States there is, however, to be observed an essential difference. A nation, and particularly a European nation, cannot afford to become too complete a democracy all at once, because it would thereby be uprooting traditions upon which its national cohesion depends. But there is no reason why a democracy cannot trust its interests absolutely to the care of the national interest, and there is in particular every reason why the American democracy should become in sentiment and conviction frankly, unscrupulously, and loyally nationalist. This, of course, is a heresy from the point of view of the American democratic tradition; but it is much less of a heresy from the point of view of American political practice, and, whether heretical or not, it indicates the road whereby alone the American people can obtain political salvation.

The American democracy can trust its interest to the national interest, because American national cohesion is dependent, not only upon certain forms of historical association, but upon fidelity to a democratic principle. A nation is a very complex political, social, and economic product—so complex that political thinkers in emphasizing one aspect of it are apt to forget other and equally essential aspects. Its habits and traditions of historical association constitute an indispensable bond; but they do not constitute the only bond. A specific national character is more than a group of traditions and institutions. It tends to be a formative idea, which defines the situation of a country in reference to its neighbors, and which is constantly seeking a better articulation and understanding among the various parts of its domestic life. The English national idea is chiefly a matter of freedom, but the principle of freedom is associated with a certain in measure of responsibility. The German national idea is more difficult of precise description, but it turns upon the principle of efficient and expert official leadership toward what is as yet a hazy goal of national greatness. The French national idea is democratic, but its democracy is rendered difficult by French national insecurity, and its value is limited by its equalitarian bias. The French, like the American, democracy needs above all to be thoroughly nationalized; and a condition of such a result is the loyal adoption of democracy as the national idea. Both French and American national cohesion depend upon the fidelity of the national organization to the democratic idea, and the gradual but intentional transformation of the substance of the national life in obedience to a democratic interest.

Let us seek for this complicated formula a specific application. How can it be translated into terms of contemporary American conditions? Well, in the first place, Americans are tied together by certain political, social, and economic habits, institutions, and traditions. From the political point of view these forms of association are at once constitutional, Federal, and democratic. They are accustomed to some measure of political centralization, to a larger measure of local governmental responsibility, to a still larger measure of individual economic freedom. This group of political institutions and habits has been gradually pieced together under the influence of varying political ideas and conditions. It contains many contradictory ingredients, and not a few that are positively dangerous to the public health. Such as it is, however, the American people are attached to this national tradition; and no part of it could be suddenly or violently transformed or mutilated without wounding large and important classes among the American people, both in their interests and feelings. They have been accustomed to associate under certain conditions and on certain terms; and to alter in any important way those conditions and terms of association without fair notice, full discussion, a demonstrable need and a sufficient consent of public opinion, would be to drive a wedge into the substance of American national cohesion. The American nation, no matter how much (or how little) it may be devoted to democratic political and social ideas, cannot uproot any essential element in its national tradition without severe penalties—as the American people discovered when they decided to cut negro slavery out of their national composition.

On the other hand, their national health and consistency were in the long run very much benefited by the surgical operation of the Civil War; and it was benefited because the War eradicated the most flagrant existing contradiction among the various parts of the American national tradition. This instance sufficiently showed, consequently, that although nationality has its traditional basis, it is far from being merely a conservative principle. At any one time the current of national public opinion embodies a temporary accommodation among the different traditional ideas, interests, conditions, and institutions. This balance of varying and perhaps conflicting elements is constantly being destroyed by new conditions,—such, for instance, as the gradual increase before the Civil War of the North as compared to the South in wealth, population, and industrial efficiency. The effect of this destruction of the traditional balance was to bring out the contradiction between the institution of negro slavery and the American democratic purpose—thereby necessitating an active conflict, and the triumph of one of these principles over the other. The unionist democracy conquered, and as the result of that conquest a new balance was reached between the various ingredients of American national life. During the past generation, the increased efficiency of organization in business and politics, the enormous growth of an irresponsible individual money-power, the much more definite division of the American people into possibly antagonistic classes, and the pressing practical need for expert, responsible, and authoritative leadership,—these new conditions and demands have been by way of upsetting once more the traditional national balance and of driving new wedges into American national cohesion. New contradictions have been developed between various aspects of the American national composition; and if the American people wish to escape the necessity of regaining their health by means of another surgical operation, they must consider carefully how much of a reorganization of traditional institutions, policy, and ideas are necessary for the achievement of a new and more stable national balance.

In the case of our own country, however, a balance is not to be struck merely by the process of compromise in the interest of harmony. Our forbears tried that method in dealing with the slavery problem from 1820 to 1850, and we all know with what results. American national cohesion is a matter of national integrity; and national integrity is a matter of loyalty to the requirements of a democratic ideal. For better or worse the American people have proclaimed themselves to be a democracy, and they have proclaimed that democracy means popular economic, social, and moral emancipation. The only way to regain their national balance is to remove those obstacles which the economic development of the country has placed in the path of a better democratic fulfillment. The economic and social changes of the past generation have brought out a serious and a glaring contradiction between the demands of a constructive democratic ideal and the machinery of methods and institutions, which have been considered sufficient for its realization. This is the fundamental discrepancy which must be at least partially eradicated before American national integrity can be triumphantly re-affirmed. The cohesion, which is a condition of effective nationality, is endangered by such a contradiction, and as long as it exists the different elements composing American society will be pulling apart rather than together. The national principle becomes a principle of reform and reconstruction, precisely because national consistency is constantly demanding the solution of contradictory economic and political tendencies, brought out by alterations in the conditions of economic and political efficiency. Its function is not only to preserve a balance among these diverse tendencies, but to make that balance more than ever expressive of a consistent and constructive democratic ideal. Any disloyalty to democracy on the part of American national policy would in the end prove fatal to American national unity.

The American democracy can, consequently, safely trust its genuine interests to the keeping of those who represent the national interest. It both can do so, and it must do so. Only by faith in an efficient national organization and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good. If the American local commonwealths had not been wrought by the Federalists into the form of a nation, they would never have continued to be democracies; and the people collectively have become more of a democracy in proportion as they have become more of a nation. Their democracy is to be realized by means of an intensification of their national life, just as the ultimate moral purpose of an individual is to be realized by the affirmation and intensification of its own better individuality. Consequently the organization of the American democracy into a nation is not to be regarded in the way that so many Americans have regarded it,—as a necessary but hazardous surrender of certain liberties in order that other liberties might be better preserved,—as a mere compromise between the democratic ideal and the necessary conditions of political cohesion and efficiency. Its nationalized political organization constitutes the proper structure and veritable life of the American democracy. No doubt the existing organization is far from being a wholly adequate expression of the demands of the democratic ideal, but it falls equally short of being an adequate expression of the demands of the national ideal. The less confidence the American people have in a national organization, the less they are willing to surrender themselves to the national spirit, the worse democrats they will be. The most stubborn impediments which block the American national advance issue from the imperfections in our democracy. The American people are not prepared for a higher form of democracy, because they are not prepared for a more coherent and intense national life. When they are prepared to be consistent, constructive, and aspiring democrats, their preparation will necessarily take the form of becoming consistent, constructive, and aspiring nationalists.

The difficulty raised by European political and economic development hangs chiefly on a necessary loyalty to a national tradition and organization which blocks the advance of democracy. Americans cannot entirely escape this difficulty; but in our country by far the greater obstacle to social amelioration is constituted by a democratic theory and tradition, which blocks the process of national development. We Americans are confronted by two divergent theories of democracy. According to one of these theories, the interest of American democracy can be advanced only by an increasing nationalization of the American people in ideas, in institutions, and in spirit. According to the other of these theories, the most effective way of injuring the interest of democracy is by an increase in national authority and a spread of the national leaven. Thus Americans, unlike Englishmen, have to choose, not between a specific and efficient national tradition and a vague and perilous democratic ideal—they have to choose between two democratic ideals, and they have to make this choice chiefly on logical and moral grounds. An Englishman or a German, no matter how clear his intelligence or fervid his patriotism, cannot find any immediately and entirely satisfactory method of reconciling the national traditions and forms of organization with the demands of an uncompromising democracy. An American, on the other hand, has it quite within his power to accept a conception of democracy which provides for the substantial integrity of his country, not only as a nation with an exclusively democratic mission, but as a democracy with an essentially national career.

II

NATIONALITY AND CENTRALIZATION

The Federal political organization has always tended to confuse to the American mind the relation between democracy and nationality. The nation as a legal body was, of course, created by the Constitution, which granted to the central government certain specific powers and responsibilities, and which almost to the same extent diminished the powers and the responsibilities of the separate states. Consequently, to the great majority of Americans, the process of increasing nationalization has a tendency to mean merely an increase in the functions of the central government. For the same reason the affirmation of a constructive relation between the national and the democratic principles is likely to be interpreted merely as an attempt on the grounds of an abstract theory to limit state government and to disparage states rights. Such an interpretation, however, would be essentially erroneous. It would be based upon the very idea against which I have been continually protesting—the idea that the American nation, instead of embodying a living formative political principle, is merely the political system created by the Federal Constitution; and it would end in the absurd conclusion that the only way in which the Promise of American democracy can be fulfilled would be by the abolition of American local political institutions.

The nationalizing of American political, economic, and social life means something more than Federal centralization and something very different therefrom. To nationalize a people has never meant merely to centralize their government. Little by little a thoroughly national political organization has come to mean in Europe an organization which combined effective authority with certain responsibilities to the people; but the national interest has been just as likely to demand de-centralization as it has to demand centralization. The Prussia of Frederick the Great, for instance, was over-centralized; and the restoration of the national vitality, at which the Prussian government aimed after the disasters of 1806, necessarily took the form of reinvigorating the local members of the national body. In this and many similar instances the national interest and welfare was the end, and a greater or smaller amount of centralized government merely the necessary machinery. The process of centralization is not, like the process of nationalization, an essentially formative and enlightening political transformation. When a people are being nationalized, their political, economic, and social organization or policy is being coördinated with their actual needs and their moral and political ideals. Governmental centralization is to be regarded as one of the many means which may or may not be taken in order to effect this purpose. Like every other special aspect of the national organization, it must be justified by its fruits. There is no presumption in its favor. Neither is there any general presumption against it. Whether a given function should or should not be exercised by the central government in a Federal system is from the point of view of political logic a matter of expediency—with the burden of proof resting on those who propose to alter any existing Constitutional arrangement.

It may be affirmed, consequently, without paradox, that among those branches of the American national organization which are greatly in need of nationalizing is the central government. Almost every member of the American political body has been at one time or another or in one way or another perverted to the service of special interests. The state governments and the municipal administrations have sinned more in this respect than the central government; but the central government itself has been a grave sinner. The Federal authorities are responsible for the prevailing policy in respect to military pensions, which is one of the most flagrant crimes ever perpetrated against the national interest. The Federal authorities, again, are responsible for the existing tariff schedules, which benefit a group of special interests at the expense of the national welfare. The Federal authorities, finally, are responsible for the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, whose existence on the statute books is a fatal bar to the treatment of the problem of corporate aggrandizement from the standpoint of genuinely national policy. Those instances might be multiplied, but they suffice to show that the ideal of a constructive relation between the American national and democratic principles does not imply that any particular piece of legislation or policy is national because it is Federal. The Federal no less than the state governments has been the victim of special interests; and when a group of state or city officials effectively assert the public interest against the private interests, either of the machine or of the local corporations, they are noting just as palpably, if not just as comprehensively, for the national welfare, as if their work benefited the whole American people. The process of nationalization in its application to American political organization means that political power shall be distributed among the central, state, and municipal officials in such a manner that it can be efficiently and responsibly exerted in the interest of those affected by its action.

Be it added, however, in the same breath, that under existing conditions and simply as a matter of expediency, the national advance of the American democracy does demand an increasing amount of centralized action and responsibility. In what respect and for what purposes an increased Federal power and responsibility is desirable will be considered in a subsequent chapter. In this connection it is sufficient to insist that a more scrupulous attention to existing Federal responsibilities, and the increase of their number and scope, is the natural consequence of the increasing concentration of American industrial, political, and social life. American government demands more rather than less centralization merely and precisely because of the growing centralization of American activity. The state governments, either individually or by any practicable methods of coöperation, are not competent to deal effectively in the national interest and spirit with the grave problems created by the aggrandizement of corporate and individual wealth and the increasing classification of the American people. They have, no doubt, an essential part to play in the attempted solution of these problems; and there are certain aspects of the whole situation which the American nation, because of its Federal organization, can deal with much more effectually than can a rigidly centralized democracy like France. But the amount of responsibility in respect to fundamental national problems, which, in law almost as much as in practice, is left to the states, exceeds the responsibility which the state governments are capable of efficiently redeeming. They are attempting (or neglecting) a task which they cannot be expected to perform with any efficiency.

The fact that the states fail properly to perform certain essential functions such as maintaining order or administering justice, is no sufficient reason for depriving them thereof. Functions which should be bestowed upon the central government are not those which the states happen to perform badly. They are those which the states, even with the best will in the world, cannot be expected to perform satisfactorily; and among these functions the regulation of commerce, the organization of labor, and the increasing control over property in the public interest are assuredly to be included. The best friends of local government in this country are those who seek to have its activity confined with the limits of possible efficiency, because only in case its activity is so confined can the states continue to remain an essential part of a really efficient and well-coördinated national organization.

Proposals to increase the powers of the central government are, however, rarely treated on their merits. They are opposed by the majority of American politicians and newspapers as an unqualified evil. Any attempt to prove that the existing distribution of responsibility is necessarily fruitful of economic and political abuses, and that an increase of centralized power offers the only chance of eradicating these abuses is treated as irrelevant. It is not a question of the expediency of a specific proposal, because from the traditional point of view any change in the direction of increased centralization would be a violation of American democracy. Centralization is merely a necessary evil which has been carried as far as it should, and which cannot be carried any further without undermining the foundations of the American system. Thus the familiar theory of many excellent American democrats is rather that of a contradictory than a constructive relation between the democratic and the national ideals. The process of nationalization is perverted by them into a matter merely of centralization, but the question of the fundamental relation between nationality and democracy is raised by their attitude, because the reasons they advance against increasingly centralized authority would, if they should continue to prevail, definitely and absolutely forbid a gradually improving coördination between American political organization and American national economic needs or moral and intellectual ideals. The conception of democracy out of which the supposed contradiction between the democratic and national ideals issues is the great enemy of the American national advance, and is for that reason the great enemy of the real interests of democracy.

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat. An American national democracy must always prove its right to a further advance, not only by the development of a policy and method adequate for the particular occasion, but by its ability to overcome the inevitable opposition of selfish interests and erroneous ideas. The logic of its position makes it the aggressor, just as the logic of its opponents' position ties them to a negative and protesting or merely insubordinate part. If the latter should prevail, their victory would become tantamount to national dissolution, either by putrefaction, by revolution, or by both.

Under the influence of certain practical demands, an increase has already taken place in the activity of the Federal government. The increase has not gone as far as governmental efficiency demands, but it has gone far enough to provoke outbursts of protest and anguish from the "old-fashioned Democrats." They profess to see the approaching extinction of the American democracy in what they call the drift towards centralization. Such calamitous predictions are natural, but they are none the less absurd. The drift of American politics—its instinctive and unguided movement—is almost wholly along the habitual road; and any effective increase of Federal centralization can be imposed only by most strenuous efforts, by one of the biggest sticks which has ever been flourished in American politics. The advance made in this direction is small compared to the actual needs of an efficient national organization, and considering the mass of interest and prejudice which it must continue to overcome, it can hardly continue to progress at more than a snail's pace. The great obstacle to American national fulfillment must always be the danger that the American people will merely succumb to the demands of their local and private interests and will permit their political craft to drift into a compromising situation—from which the penalties of rescue may be almost as distressing as the penalties of submission.

The tradition of an individualist and provincial democracy, which is the mainstay of an anti-national policy, does not include ideals which have to be realized by aggressive action. Their ideals are the ones embodied in our existing system, and their continued vitality demands merely a policy of inaction enveloped in a cloud of sacred phrases. The advocates and the beneficiaries of the prevailing ideas and conditions are little by little being forced into the inevitable attitude of the traditional Bourbon—the attitude of maintaining customary or legal rights merely because they are customary or legal, and predicting the most awful consequences from any attempt to impair them. Men, or associations of men, who possess legal or customary rights inimical to the public welfare, always defend those rights as the essential part of a political system, which, if it is overthrown, will prove destructive to public prosperity and security. On no other ground can they find a plausible public excuse for their opposition. The French royal authority and aristocratic privileges were defended on these grounds in 1780, and as the event proved, with some show of reason. In the same way the partial legislative control of nationalized corporations now exercised by the state government, is defended, not on the ground that it has been well exercised, not even plausibly on the ground that it can be well exercised. It is defended almost exclusively on the ground that any increase in the authority of the Federal government is dangerous to the American people. But the Federal government belongs to the American people even more completely than do the state governments, because a general current of public opinion can act much more effectively on the single Federal authority than it can upon the many separate state authorities. Popular interests have nothing to fear from a measure of Federal centralization, which bestows on the Federal government powers necessary to the fulfillment of its legitimate responsibilities; and the American people cannot in the long run be deceived by pleas which bear the evidence of such a selfish origin and have such dubious historical associations. The rights and the powers both of states and individuals must be competent to serve their purposes efficiently in an economical and coherent national organization, or else they must be superseded. A prejudice against centralization is as pernicious, provided centralization is necessary, as a prejudice in its favor. All rights under the law are functions in a democratic political organism and must be justified by their actual or presumable functional adequacy.

The ideal of a constructive relation between American nationality and American democracy is in truth equivalent to a new Declaration of Independence. It affirms that the American people are free to organize their political, economic, and social life in the service of a comprehensive, a lofty, and far-reaching democratic purpose. At the present time there is a strong, almost a dominant tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest detail; and it is this superstitious fear of changing the most trivial parts of the fundamental legal fabric which brings to pass the great bondage of the American spirit. If such an abject worship of legal precedent for its own sake should continue, the American idea will have to be fitted to the rigid and narrow lines of a few legal formulas; and the ruler of the American spirit, like the ruler of the Jewish spirit of old, will become the lawyer. But it will not continue, in case Americans can be brought to understand and believe that the American national political organization should be constructively related to their democratic purpose. Such an ideal reveals at once the real opportunity and the real responsibility of the American democracy. It declares that the democracy has a machinery in a nationalized organization, and a practical guide in the national interest, which are adequate to the realization of the democratic ideal; and it declares also that in the long run just in so far as Americans timidly or superstitiously refuse to accept their national opportunity and responsibility, they will not deserve the names either of freemen or of loyal democrats. There comes a time in the history of every nation, when its independence of spirit vanishes, unless it emancipates itself in some measure from its traditional illusions; and that time is fast approaching for the American people. They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely the monotonous measures of its own past.

III

THE PEOPLE AND THE NATION

At the beginning of this discussion popular Sovereignty was declared to be the essential condition of democracy; and a general account of the nature of a constructive democratic ideal can best be brought to a close by a definition of the meaning of the phrase, popular Sovereignty, consistent with a nationalist interpretation of democracy. The people are Sovereign; but who and what are the people? and how can a many-headed Sovereignty be made to work? Are we to answer, like Bismarck, that the "true people is an invisible multitude of spirits—the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow"? Such an answer seems scarcely fair to living people of to-day. On the other hand, can we reply that the Sovereign people is constituted by any chance majority which happens to obtain control of the government, and that the decisions and actions of the majority are inevitably and unexceptionally democratic? Such an assertion of the doctrine of popular Sovereignty would bestow absolute Sovereign authority on merely a part of the people. Majority rule, under certain prescribed conditions, is a necessary constituent of any practicable democratic organization; but the actions or decisions of a majority need not have any binding moral and national authority. Majority rule is merely one means to an extremely difficult, remote and complicated end; and it is a piece of machinery which is peculiarly liable to get out of order. Its arbitrary and dangerous tendencies can, as a matter of fact, be checked in many effectual and legitimate ways, of which the most effectual is the cherishing of a tradition, partly expressed in some body of fundamental law, that the true people are, as Bismarck declared, in some measure an invisible multitude of spirits—the nation of yesterday and to-morrow, organized for its national historical mission.

The phrase popular Sovereignty is, consequently, for us Americans equivalent to the phrase "national Sovereignty." The people are not Sovereign as individuals. They are not Sovereign in reason and morals even when united into a majority. They become Sovereign only in so far as they succeed in reaching and expressing a collective purpose. But there is no royal and unimpeachable road to the attainment of such a collective will; and the best means a democratic people can take in order to assert its Sovereign authority with full moral effect is to seek fullness and consistency of national life. They are Sovereign in so far as they are united in spirit and in purpose; and they are united in so far as they are loyal one to another, to their joint past, and to the Promise of their future. The Promise of their future may sometimes demand the partial renunciation of their past and the partial sacrifice of certain present interests; but the inevitable friction of all such sacrifices can be mitigated by mutual loyalty and good faith. Sacrifices of tradition and interest can only be demanded in case they contribute to the national purpose—to the gradual creation of a higher type of individual and associated life. Hence it is that an effective increase in national coherence looks in the direction of the democratic consummation—of the morally and intellectually authoritative expression of the Sovereign popular will. Both the forging and the functioning of such a will are constructively related to the gradual achievement of the work of individual and social amelioration.

Undesirable and inadequate forms of democracy always seek to dispense in one way or another with this tedious process of achieving a morally authoritative Sovereign will. We Americans have identified democracy with certain existing political and civil rights, and we have, consequently, tended to believe that the democratic consummation was merely a matter of exercising and preserving those rights. The grossest form of this error was perpetrated when Stephen A. Douglas confused authoritative popular Sovereignty with the majority vote of a few hundred "squatters" in a frontier state, and asserted that on democratic principles such expressions of the popular will should be accepted as final. But an analogous mistake lurks in all static forms of democracy. The bestowal and the exercise of political and civil rights are merely a method of organization, which if used in proper subordination to the ultimate democratic purpose, may achieve in action something of the authority of a popular Sovereign will. But to cleave to the details of such an organization as the very essence of democracy is utterly to pervert the principle of national democratic Sovereignty. From this point of view, the Bourbon who wishes the existing system with its mal-adaptations and contradictions preserved in all its lack of integrity, commits an error analogous to that of the radical, who wishes by virtue of a majority vote immediately to destroy some essential part of the fabric. Both of them conceive that the whole moral and national authority of the democratic principle can be invoked in favor of institutions already in existence or of purposes capable of immediate achievement.

On the other hand, there are democrats who would seek a consummate democracy without the use of any political machinery. The idea that a higher type of associated life can be immediately realized by a supreme act of faith must always be tempting to men who unite social aspirations with deep religious faith. It is a more worthy and profound conception of democracy than the conventional American one of a system of legally constituted and equally exercised rights, fatally resulting in material prosperity. Before any great stride can be made towards a condition of better democracy, the constructive democratic movement must obtain more effective support both from scientific discipline and religious faith. Nevertheless, the triumph of Tolstoyan democracy at the present moment would be more pernicious in its results than the triumph of Jeffersonian Democracy. Tolstoy has merely given a fresh and exalted version of the old doctrine of non-resistance, which, as it was proclaimed by Jesus, referred in the most literal way to another world. In this world faith cannot dispense with power and organization. The sudden and immediate conversion of unregenerate men from a condition of violence, selfishness, and sin into a condition of beatitude and brotherly love can obtain even comparative permanence only by virtue of exclusiveness. The religious experience of our race has sufficiently testified to the permanence of the law. One man can be evangelized for a lifetime. A group of men can be evangelized for many years. Multitudes of men can be evangelized only for a few hours. No faith can achieve comparatively stable social conquests without being established by habit, defined by thought, and consolidated by organization. Usually the faith itself subsequently sickens of the bad air it breathes in its own house. Indeed, it is certain to lose initiative and vigor, unless it can appeal intermittently to some correlative source of enthusiasm and devotion. But with the help of efficient organization it may possibly survive, whereas in the absence of such a worldly body, it must in a worldly sense inevitably perish. Democracy as a living movement in the direction of human brotherhood has required, like other faiths, an efficient organization and a root in ordinary human nature; and it obtains such an organization by virtue of the process of national development—on condition, of course, that the nation is free to become a genuine and thorough-going democracy.

A democracy organized into a nation, and imbued with the national spirit, will seek by means of experimentation and discipline to reach the object which Tolstoy would reach by an immediate and a miraculous act of faith. The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not? A nation cannot merely discharge its unregenerate citizens; and the best men in a nation or in any political society cannot evade the responsibility which the fact of human unregeneracy places upon the whole group. After men had reached a certain stage of civilization, they frequently began to fear that the rough conditions of political association excluded the highest and most fruitful forms of social life; and they sought various ways of improving the quality of the association by narrowing its basis. They tried to found small communities of saints who were connected exclusively by moral and religious bonds, and who in this way freed themselves from the hazards, the distraction, and the violence inseparable from political association. Such communities have made at different times great successes; but their success has not been permanent. The political aspect of associated life is not to be evaded. In proportion as political organization gained in prosperity, efficiency, and dignity, special religious associations lost their independence and power. Even the most powerful religious association in the world, the Catholic Church, has been fighting a losing battle with political authority, and it is likely in the course of time to occupy in relation to the political powers a position analogous to that of the Greek or the English church. The ultimate power to command must rest with that authority which, if necessary, can force people to obey; and any plan of association which seeks to ignore the part which physical force plays in life is necessarily incomplete. Just as formerly the irresponsible and meaningless use of political power created the need of special religious associations, independent of the state, so now the responsible, the purposeful, and the efficient use of physical force, characteristic of modern nations, has in its turn made such independence less necessary, and tends to attach a different function to the church. A basis of association narrower than the whole complex of human powers and interests will not serve. National organization provides such a basis. The perversity of human nature may cause its ultimate failure; but it will not fail because it omits any essential constituent in the composition of a permanent and fruitful human association. So far as it fulfills its responsibilities, it guarantees protection against predatory powers at home and abroad. It provides in appropriate measure for individual freedom, for physical, moral, and intellectual discipline, and for social consistency. It has prizes to offer as well as coercion to exercise; and with its foundations planted firmly in the past, its windows and portals look out towards a better future. The tendency of its normal action is continually, if very slowly, to diminish the distance between the ideal of human brotherhood, and the political, economic, and social conditions, under which at any one time men manage to live together.

That is the truth to which the patriotic Americans should firmly cleave. The modern nation, particularly in so far as it is constructively democratic, constitutes the best machinery as yet developed for raising the level of human association. It really teaches men how they must feel, what they must think, and what they must do, in order that they may live together amicably and profitably. The value of this school for its present purposes is increased by its very imperfections, because its imperfections issue inevitably from the imperfections of human nature. Men being as unregenerate as they are, all worthy human endeavor involves consequences of battle and risk. The heroes of the struggle must maintain their achievements and at times even promote their objects by compulsion. The policeman and the soldier will continue for an indefinite period to be guardians of the national schools, and the nations have no reason to be ashamed of this fact. It is merely symbolic of the very comprehensiveness of their responsibilities—that they have to deal with the problem of human inadequacy and unregeneracy in all its forms,—that they cannot evade this problem by allowing only the good boys to attend school—that they cannot even mitigate it by drawing too sharp a distinction between the good boys and the bad. Such indiscriminate attendance in these national schools, if it is to be edifying, involves one practical consequence of dominant importance. Everybody within the school-house—masters, teachers, pupils and janitors, old pupils and young, good pupils and bad, must feel one to another an indestructible loyalty. Such loyalty is merely the subjective aspect of their inevitable mutual association; it is merely the recognition that as a worldly body they must all live or die and conquer or fail together. The existence of an invincible loyalty is a condition of the perpetuity of the school. The man who believes himself wise is always tempted to ignore or undervalue the foolish brethren. The man who believes himself good is always tempted actively to dislike the perverse brethren. The man who insists at any cost upon having his own way is always twisting the brethren into his friends or his enemies. But the teaching of the national school constantly tends to diminish these causes of disloyalty. Its tendency is to convert traditional patriotism into a patient devotion to the national ideal, and into a patient loyalty towards one's fellow-countrymen as the visible and inevitable substance through which that ideal is to be expressed.

In the foregoing characteristic of a democratic nation, we reach the decisive difference between a nation which is seeking to be wholly democratic and a nation which is content to be semi-democratic. In the semi-democratic nation devotion to the national ideal does not to the same extent sanctify the citizen's relation in feeling and in idea to his fellow-countrymen. The loyalty demanded by the national ideal of such a country may imply a partly disloyal and suspicious attitude towards large numbers of political associates. The popular and the national interests must necessarily in some measure diverge. In a nationalized democracy or a democratic nation the corresponding dilemma is mitigated. The popular interest can only be efficiently expressed in a national policy and organization. The national interest is merely a more coherent and ameliorating expression of the popular interest. Its consistency, so far as it is consistent, is the reflection of a more humanized condition of human nature. It increases with the increasing power of its citizens to deal fairly and to feel loyally towards their fellow-countrymen; and it cannot increase except through the overthrow of the obstacles to fair dealing and loyal feeling.

The responsibility and loyalty which the citizens of a democratic nation must feel one towards another is comprehensive and unmitigable; but the actual behavior which at any one time the national welfare demands must, of course, be specially and carefully discriminated. National policies and acts will be welcome to some citizens and obnoxious to others, according to their special interests and opinions; and the citizens whose interests and ideas are prejudiced thereby have every right and should be permitted every opportunity to protest in the most vigorous and persistent manner. The nation may, however, on its part demand that these protests, in order to be heeded and respected, must conform to certain conditions. They must not be carried to the point of refusing obedience to the law. When private interests are injured by the national policy, the protestants must be able to show either that such injuries are unnecessary, or else they involve harm to an essential public interest. All such protest must find an ultimate sanction in a group of constructive democratic ideas. Finally, the protest must never be made the excuse for personal injustice or national disloyalty. Even if the national policy should betray indifference to the fundamental interests of a democratic nation, as did that of the United States from 1820 to 1860, the obligation of patient good faith on the part of the protestants is not diminished. Their protests may be as vivacious and as persistent as the error demands. The supporters of the erroneous policy may be made the object of most drastic criticism and the uncompromising exposure. No effort should be spared to secure the adoption of a more genuinely national policy. But beyond all this there remains a still deeper responsibility—that of dealing towards one's fellow-countrymen in good faith, so that differences of interest, of conviction, and of moral purpose can be made the agency of a better understanding and a firmer loyalty.

If a national policy offends the integrity of the national idea, as for a while that of the American nation did, its mistake is sure to involve certain disastrous consequences; and those consequences constitute, usually, the vehicle of necessary national discipline. The national school is, of course, the national life. So far as the school is properly conducted, the methods of instruction are, if you please, pedagogic; but if the masters are blind or negligent, or if the scholars are unruly, there remains as a resource the more painful and costly methods of nature's instruction. A serious error will be followed by its inevitable penalty, proportioned to the blindness and the perversity in which it originated; and thereafter the prosperity of the country's future will hang partly on the ability of the national intelligence to trace the penalty to its cause and to fix the responsibility. No matter how loyal the different members of a national body may be one to another, their mutual good faith will bleed to death, unless some among them have the intelligence to trace their national ills to their appropriate causes, and the candid courage to advocate the necessary remedial measures. At some point in the process, disinterested patriotism and good faith must be reënforced by intellectual insight. A people are saved many costly perversions, in case the official school-masters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate; but if the lessons are foolishly phrased, or the pupils refuse to learn, the school will never regain its proper disciplinary value until new teachers have arisen, who understand both the error and its consequences, and who can exercise an effective authority over their pupils.

The mutual loyalty and responsibility, consequently, embodied and inculcated in a national school, depends for its efficient expression upon the amount of insight and intelligence which it involves. The process of national education means, not only a discipline of the popular will, but training in ability to draw inferences from the national experience, so that the national consciousness will gradually acquire an edifying state of mind towards its present and its future problems. Those problems are always closely allied to the problems which have been more or less completely solved during the national history; and the body of practical lessons which can be inferred from that history is the best possible preparation for present and future emergencies. Such history requires close and exact reading. The national experience is always strangely mixed. Even the successes of our own past, such as the Federal organization, contain much dubious matter, demanding the most scrupulous disentanglement. Even the worst enemies of our national integrity, such as the Southern planters, offer in some respects an edifying political example to a disinterested democracy. Nations do not have to make serious mistakes in order to learn valuable lessons. Every national action, no matter how trivial, which is scrutinized with candor, may contribute to the stock of national intellectual discipline—the result of which should be to form a constantly more coherent whole out of the several elements in the national composition—out of the social and economic conditions, the stock of national opinions, and the essential national ideal. And it is this essential national ideal which makes it undesirable for the national consciousness to dwell too much on the past or to depend too much upon the lessons of experience alone. The great experience given to a democratic nation must be just an incorrigible but patient attempt to realize its democratic ideal—an attempt which must mold history as well as hang upon its lessons. The function of the patriotic political intelligence in relation to the fulfillment of the national Promise must be to devise means for its redemption—means which have their relations to the past, their suitability to the occasion, and their contribution towards a step in advance. The work in both critical, experienced, and purposeful. Mistakes will be made, and their effects either corrected or turned to good account. Successes will be achieved, and their effects must be coolly appraised and carefully discriminated. The task will never be entirely achieved, but the tedious and laborious advance will for every generation be a triumphant affirmation of the nationalized democratic ideal as the one really adequate political and social principle.