Democracy and Social Ethics | Page 3

which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. They
fail to be content with the fulfilment of their family and personal
obligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demand
involving a social obligation; they have become conscious of another
requirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code of
social ethics. The conception of life which they hold has not yet
expressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but rather in a
mental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence between
their consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearer
definition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and a
part in its fulfilment, both a creed and a practice of social morality. In
the perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing is becoming
clear: if the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of a social morality,
it is inevitable that those who desire it must be brought in contact with
the moral experiences of the many in order to procure an adequate
social motive.
These men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact in
their eagerness for a wider acquaintance with and participation in the
life about them. They believe that experience gives the easy and
trustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in the
narrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast
our experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the
larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not
because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously,
because of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the
obligation naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to
prepare ourselves for the larger social duties." Such a demand is
reasonable, for by our daily experience we have discovered that we
cannot mechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare
moments of exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even
as the ideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength
to attain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn

that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may
come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as
from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of
Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of
all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and
equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as
a test of faith.
We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by
travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and
common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see
the size of one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality
results perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit,
for it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy
which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.
There are many indications that this conception of Democracy is
growing among us. We have come to have an enormous interest in
human life as such, accompanied by confidence in its essential
soundness. We do not believe that genuine experience can lead us
astray any more than scientific data can.
We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come
only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest
corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning
efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a
consciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider and
more thorough human experience which explains in no small degree
that new curiosity regarding human life which has more of a moral
basis than an intellectual one.
The newspapers, in a frank reflection of popular demand, exhibit an
omniverous curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial and the
important. They are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of that
desire to know, that "What is this?" and "Why do you do that?" of the
child. The first dawn of the social consciousness takes this form, as the
dawning intelligence of the child takes the form of constant question
and insatiate curiosity.

Literature, too, portrays an equally absorbing though better adjusted
desire to know all kinds of life. The popular books are the novels,
dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read
not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a
measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see