of the Army restored. In the rest camp, too, the shirker among the men raises again his diminished head, and comes out strong as a grumbler and, until his mates become unpleasantly reminiscent, a boaster.

On the whole, though, actual experience of war brings the best man to the fore, and the best qualities of the average man. Officers and men are welded into a closer comradeship by dangers and discomforts shared. They learn to trust each other, and to look for the essential qualities rather than for the accidental graces. One learns to love men for their great hearts, their pluck, their indomitable spirits, their irresponsible humor, their readiness to shoulder a weaker brother's burden in addition to their own. One sees men as God sees them, apart from externals such as manner and intonation. A night in a bombing party shows you Jim Smith as a man of splendid courage. shortness of rations reveals his wonderful unselfishness. One danger and discomfort after another you share in common till you love him as a brother. Out there, if any one dared to remind you that Jim was only a fireman while you were a bank clerk, you would give him one in the eye to go on with. You have learned to know a man when you see one, and to value him.

A

When the war is over, and the men of the citizen Army return to their homes and their civil occupations, will they, I wonder, remember the things that they have learned? If so, there will be a new and better England for the children. One would like to prophesy great things. In those days great talkers and boasters shall be of no account, for men shall remember that in the hour of danger they were wanting. In those days there shall be no more petty strife between class and class, for all shall have learned that they are one nation, and that they must seek the nation's good before their own. In those days men shall no longer pride themselves on their riches, or on the material possessions which distinguish them from their brethren, for they shall have learned that it is the qualities of the heart which are of real value. Men shall be prized for their courage, their honesty, their charity, their practical ability. In those days there shall be no false pride, for all have lived hardly, all have done dirty and menial work, all have wielded pick and spade, and have counted it no dishonor but rather glory to do so. In those days charity and brotherly love shall prevail mightily, for all shall have

learned mutual understanding and respect. Would that it might be so! But perhaps it is more likely that the lessons will be forgotten, and that men will slip back into the old grooves. Much depends on the women of England. If they carefully guard the ancient ruts against our return, and if their gentle fingers press us back into them, we shall acquiesce; but if at this hour of crisis they too have seen a wider vision of national unity, and learned a more catholic charity, the future is indeed radiant with hope.

THE ORGANIZATION OF DEMOCRACY

EDWIN A. ALDERMAN

[From an Address at Raleigh, N. C.,
November 9, 1915]

Let us prepare for our colossal moral and practical responsibilities in the world life, therefore, not alone by preparing common sense establishments of force on land and sea, until such time as human reason shall deem them not needed, but by the greater preparedness of self-restraint, self-analysis, and self-discipline. Let us not surrender our age-long dream of good, just selfgovernment to any mechanical ideal of quickly obtaining material results erected into a crude dogma of efficiency. Democracy must know how to get material results economically and quickly. Democracy must and can be organized to that end, and this organization will undoubtedly involve certain surrenders, cert..in social and political self-abnegations in the interests of collectivism. But I hold the faith that all this can be done, yet retaining in the family of freedom that shining jewel of individual liberty which has glowed in our life since the beginning. The great democratic nations-America, England, France, Switzerland-have before them, therefore, the problem of retaining their standards of individual liberty, and yet contriving juster and finer administrative organs. Certainly the people that have built this Union can learn how to coördinate the activities of its people and obtain results as definite as those obtained under systems of mere authority.

Since my college days I have been hearing about and admiring the German genius for research, for adaptation of scientific truth, and for organization. Now the whole world stands half astonished and half envious of their creed of efficiency. In so far as this

creed is opposed to slipshodness and waste, it is altogether good, but the question arises, Is the ability to get things done well deadly to liberty, or is it consistent with personal liberty? In examining German progress, I do not find as many examples of supreme individual efficiency or independent spirit as I find in the democratic nations. The steam engine, the factory system, telegraph, telephone, wireless, electric light, the gasoline engine, aeroplane, machine gun, the submarine, uses of rubber, dreadnought, the mighty names of Lister and Pasteur, come out for the democratic nations. The distinctive German genius is for administration and adaptation, rather than for independent creation. His civil service is the finest in the world. He knows what he wants. He decides what training is necessary to get that result. He universalizes that training. He enforces obedience to its discipline. A man must have skill; he must obey; he must work; he must coöperate. The freer nations desire the same results, but neglect to enforce their realization. Their theory of government forces them to plead for its attainment. Certain classes and individuals heed this persuasion, and in an atmosphere of precious freedom great personalities spring into being. In the conflict between achievement based on subjection and splendid obedience, and that based on political freedom, my belief is that the system of political and social freedom will triumphantly endure. In essence, it is the conflict betweeen the efficiency of adaptation and organization and the efficiency of invention and creation. What autocracy needs is the thrill and push of individual liberty; and the continental peasant will get it as the result of this war, for the guns of autocracy are celebrating the downfall of autocracy, even in its most ancient fastness-Russia. These autocracies will realize their real greatness when they substitute humility for pride, freedom for accomplishment, as compelling national motives. What democracy needs is the discipline of patient labor, of trained skill, of thoroughness in work, and a more socialized conception of public duty. . . .

In order to organize an autocracy, the rulers ordain that it shall get in order and provide the means to bring about that end. To organize a democracy, we must organize its soul, and give it power to create its own ideals. It is primarily a peace organization,

d that is proof that it is the forward

movement of the human soul and not the movement of scientific reaction. It is through a severe mental training in our schools and a return to the conception of public duty which guided the sword and uplifted the heart of the founder of the Republic that we shall find strength to organize the democracy of the future, revolutionized by science and urban life. The right to vote implies the duty to vote right; the right to legislate, the duty to legislate right; the right to judge about foreign policy, the duty to fight if necessary; the right to come to college, the duty to carry one's self handsomely at college. Our youth must be taught to use their senses, to reason simply and correctly from exact knowledge thus brought to them, to attain to sincerity in thought and judgment through work and patience. In our home and civic life we need some moral equivalent for the training which somehow issues out of war-the glory of self-sacrifice, obedience to just authority, contempt of ease, and a realization that through thoughtful, collective effort great results will be obtained. A great spiritual glory will come to these European nations through their sorrow and striving, which will express itself in great poems and great literature. They are preparing new shrines at which mankind will worship. Let us take care that prosperity is not our sole national endowment. War asks of men denials and self-sacrifice for ideals. Peace must somehow do the same. Autocracy orders men to forget self for an over-self called the State. Democracy must inspire men to forget self for a higher thing called Humanity.

NATURAL ARISTOCRACY

PAUL ELMER MORE

[From Aristocracy and Justice, 1915]

Leaders there will be, as there always have been. Leaders there are now, of each class, and we know their names. We still call the baser sort a demagogue, and his definition is still what it was among those who invented the term: "a flatterer of the people.” . . . But the most notable example of demagoguery today is not a man, though he be clothed with thunder, but an institution. There are newspapers and magazines, reaching millions of readers, which have reduced the art to a perfect system. Their method is as simple as it is effective: always appeal

to the emotion of the hour, and present it in terms which will justify its excess. . . .

These are the agencies that, in varying forms, have been at work in many ages. Only now we have formulated them into a noble maxim, which you will hear daily resounding in the pulpit and the press and in the street: "The cure of democracy is more democracy." It is a lie, and we know it is a lie. We know that this cry of the demagogue has invariably in the past led to anarchy and to despotism; and we know that today, were these forces unopposed,, as happily they are not unopposed, the same result would occur

Our liberty reversed and charters gone,
And we made servants to Opinion.

The remedy for the evils of license is not in the elimination of popular restraint, but precisely in bringing the people to respect and follow their right leaders. The cure for democracy is not more democracy but better democracy.

Nor is such a cure dependent on the appearance in a community of men capable of the light; for these the world always has, and these we too have in abundance; it depends rather on so relating these select natures to the community that they shall be also men of leading. The danger is, lest, in a State which bestows influence and honors on its demagogues, the citizens of more refined intelligence, those true philosophers who have discourse of reason, and have won the difficult citadel of their own souls, should withdraw from public affairs and retire into that citadel-as it were, into an ivory tower. The harm wrought by such a condition is twofold: it deprives the better minds of the larger sustenance of popular sympathy, producing among them a kind of intellectual précosité and a languid interest in art as a refuge from life instead of an integral part of life; and, on the other hand, it tends to leave the mass of society a prey to the brutalized emotions of indiscriminate pleasureseeking. In such a State distinction becomes the sorry badge of isolation. The need is to provide for a natural aristocracy.

Now, it must be clearly understood that in advocating such a measure, at least under the conditions that actually prevail today, there is involved no futile intention of abrogating democracy, in so far as democracy means government by and of the people. A natural aristocracy does not demand the res

toration of inherited privilege or a relapse into the crude dominion of money; it is not synonymous with oligarchy or plutocracy. It calls rather for some machine or some social consciousness which shall ensure both the selection from among the community at large of the "best" and the bestowal on them of "power"; it is the true consummation of democracy. And, again, it must be said emphatically that it is not an academic question dealing with unreal distinctions. No one supposes that the "best" are a sharply defined class moving about among their fellows with a visible halo above them and a smile of beatific superiority on their faces. Society is not made of such classifications, and governments have always been of a more or less mixed character. A natural aristocracy signifies rather a tendency than a conclusion, and in such a sense, it was taken, no doubt, by my sociological friend of radical ideas who pronounced it the great practical problem of today.

The first requisite for solving this problem is that those who are designed by nature, so to speak, to form an aristocracy, should come to an understanding of their own belief. There is a question to be faced boldly: What is the true aim of society? Does justice consist primarily in leveling the distribution of powers and benefits, or in proportioning them to the scale of character and intelligence? Is the main purpose of the machinery of government to raise the material welfare of the masses, or to create advantages for the upward striving of the exceptional? Is the state of humanity to be estimated by numbers, or is it a true saying of the old stoic poet: humanum paucis vivit genus? Shall our interest in mankind begin at the bottom and progress upward, or begin at the top and progress downard? To those who feel that the time has come for a reversion from certain present tendencies, the answer to this question cannot be doubtful. Before anything else is done we must purge our minds of the current cant of humanitarianism. This does not mean that we are to deny the individual appeals of pity and introduce a wolfish egotism into human relations. On the contrary, it is just the preaching of false humanitarian doctrines that results practically in weakening the response to rightful obligations and, by "turning men's duties into doubts," throws the prizes of life to the hard grasping materialist and the coarse talker. In the end the happiness

of the people also, in the wider sense, depends on the common recognition of the law of just subordination. But, whatever the ultimate effect of this sort may be, the need now is to counterbalance the excess of emotional humanitarianism with an injection of the truth-even the contemptuous truth. Let us, in the name of a long-suffering God, put some bounds to the flood of talk about the wages of the bricklayer and the trainman, and talk a little more about the income of the artist and teacher and public censor who have taste and strength of character to remain in opposition to the tide. Let us have less cant about the great educative value of the theater for the people and less humbug about the virtues of the nauseous problem play, and more consideration of what is clean and nourishing food for the larger minds. Let us forget for a while our absorbing desire to fit the schools to train boys for the shop and the counting-room, and concern ourselves more effectively with the dwindling of those disciplinary studies which lift men out of the crowd. Let us, in fine, not number ourselves among the traitors to their class who invidiæ metu non audeant dicere. . . .

It is a sound theorem of President Lowell's that popular government "may be said to consist of the control of political affairs by public opinion." Now there is today a vast organization for manipulating public opinion in favor of the workingman and for deluding it in the interest of those who grow fat by pandering, in the name of emancipation, to the baser emotions of mankind; but of organization among those who suffer from the vulgarizing trend of democracy there is little or none. As a consequence, we see the conditions of life growing harder year by year-harder for those whose labor is not concerned immediately with the direction of material forces or with the supply of sensational pleasure; they are ground, so to speak, between the upper and the nether millstone. Perhaps organization is not the word to describe accurately what is desired among those who are fast becoming the silent members of society, for it implies a sharper discrimination into grades of taste and character than exists in nature; but there is nothing chimerical in looking for a certain conscious solidarity at the core of the aristocratical class (using "aristocratical" always in the Platonic sense), with looser cohesion at the edges. Let that class become frankly convinced that the true aim

of the State is, as in the magnificent theory of Aristotle, to make possible the high friendship of those who have raised themselves to a vision of the supreme good, let them adopt means to confirm one another in that faith, and their influence will spread outward through society and leaven the whole range of public opinion.

The instrument by which this control of public opinion is effected is primarily the imagination; and here we meet with a real difficulty. It was the advantage of such a union of aristocracy and inherited oligarchy as Burke advocated that it gave something visible and definite for the imagination to work upon, whereas the democratic aristocracy of character must always be comparatively vague. But we are not left wholly without the means of giving to the imagination a certain sureness of range while remaining within the forms of popular gov. ernment. The opportunity is in the hands of our higher institutions of learning, and it is towards recalling these to their duty that the first efforts of reform should be directed. It is not my intention here to enter into the precise nature of this reform, for the subject is so large as to demand a separate essay. In brief, the need is to restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely æsthetic function, though this aspect of it also has been sadly neglected, ut the imagination in its power to grasp in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history and of distinguishing therein what is essential from what is ephemeral. The enormous preponderance of studies that deal with the immediate questions of economics and government inevitably results in isolating the student from the great inheritance of the past; the frequent habit of dragging him through the slums of sociology, instead of making him at home in the society of the noble dead, debauches his mind with a flabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism. He comes out of college, if he has learnt anything, a nouveau intellectuel, bearing the same relation to the men of general education as the nouveau riche to the man of inherited manners; he is narrow and unbalanced, a prey to the prevailing passions of the hour, with no feeling for the majestic claims of that within us which is unchanged from the beginning. In place of this excessive contemporaneity we shall give a larger share of time and honor to the

hoarded lessons of antiquity. There is truth in the Hobbian maxim that "imagination and memory are but one thing"; by their union in education alone shall a man acquire the uninvidious character of those broadening influences which come to the oligarch through prescription-he is molded indeed into the true aristocrat. And with the assertion of what may be called a spiritual prescription he will find among those over whom he is set as leader and guide a meas

ure of respect which springs from something in the human breast more stable and honorable and more conformable to reason than the mere stolidity of unreflecting prejudice. For, when everything is said, there could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts, beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the clear call from above.

THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS [From a speech made by Lieutenant-General The Rt. Hon. J. C. Smuts, commanding the British forces in East Africa, at a banquet given in his honor by the members of the two Houses of

Parliament, May 15, 1917]

One of the by-products of this war has been that the whole world outside of Europe has been cleared of the enemy. Germany has been swept from the seas, and from all continents except Central Europe. Whilst Germany has been gaining ground in Central Europe, from the rest of the world she has been swept clean; and, therefore, you are now in a position-almost providentially brought to this position-that once more you can consider the problem of your future as a whole. When peace comes to be made you have all these parts in your hand, and you can go carefully into the question of what is necessary for your future security and your future safety as an Empire, and you can say, so far as it is possible under war circumstances, what you are going to keep and what you are going to give away.

That is a very important precedent. I hope when the time comes-I am speaking for myself, and expressing nobody's opinion but my own-I feel when the time comes for peace, we should not bear only Central Europe in mind, but the whole British Empire. As far as we are concerned, we do not wish this war to have been fought in vain. We have not fought for material gain, or for territory; we have fought for security in the future. If we attach any value to this group of nations which compose the British Empire, then we, in settling peace, will have to look carefully at our future safety and security, and I hope that will be dore, and

that no arrangement will be made which will jeopardize the very valuable and lasting results which have been attained.

That is the geographical question. There remains the other question-a very difficult question of the future constitutional relations and readjustments in the British Empire. At a luncheon recently given by the Empire Parliamentary Association I said, rather cryptically, that I did not think this was a matter in which we should follow precedents, and I hope you will bear with me if I say a few words on that theme, and develop more fully what I meant. I think we are inclined to make mistakes in thinking about this group of nations to which we belong, because too often we think of it merely as one state. The British Empire is much more than a state. I think the very expression "Empire" is misleading, because it makes people think as if we were one single entity, one unity, to which that term "Empire" can be applied. We are not an Empire. Germany is an Empire, so was Rome, and so is India; but we are a system of nations, a community of states and of nations far greater than any empire which has ever existed; and by using this ancient term we really obscure the real fact that we are larger and that our whole position is different, and that we are not one nation, or state, or empire, but are a whole world by ourselves, consisting of many nations and states, and all sorts of communities under one flag. We are a system of states, not only a static system, a stationary system, but a dynamic system, growing, evolving all the time towards new destinies.

Here you have a kingdom with a number of Crown colonies; besides, you have large protectorates like Egypt, which is an empire in itself-which was one of the greatest