The Soul of Democracy

The Soul of Democracy

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of Democracy, by Edward
Howard Griggs This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give
it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Soul of Democracy The Philosophy Of The World War In
Relation To Human Liberty
Author: Edward Howard Griggs
Release Date: January 26, 2004 [EBook #10837]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL
OF DEMOCRACY ***

Produced by Al Haines

THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD WAR IN RELATION TO
HUMAN LIBERTY
BY
EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS

Man for the State means autocracy and imperialism; MAN FOR
MANKIND is the soul of democracy.

1918

CONTENTS
I THE WORLD TRAGEDY II THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE
WAR III THE IDEAS FOR WHICH THE ALLIED NATIONS FIGHT
IV MORAL STANDARDS AND THE MORAL ORDER V THE
PRESENT STATE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS VI THE
ETHICS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP VII AMERICA'S
DUTY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS VIII THE GOSPEL
AND THE SUPERSTITION OF NON-RESISTANCE IX
PREPAREDNESS FOR SELF-DEFENSE X RECONSTRUCTION
FROM THE WAR XI THE WAR AND EDUCATION XII
SOCIALISM AND THE WAR XIII THE WAR AND FEMINISM
XIV THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY XV
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION XVI MENACES OF
DEMOCRACY XVII THE DILEMMA OF DEMOCRACY XVIII
PATERNALISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY XIX THE SOLUTION
FOR DEMOCRACY XX TRAINING FOR MORAL LEADERSHIP
XXI DEMOCRACY AND SACRIFICE XXII THE HOUR OF
SACRIFICE

THE SOUL OF DEMOCRACY
I
THE WORLD TRAGEDY
We are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the
history of mankind. Not even the overthrow of the old Roman empire
was so colossal a disaster as this. Inevitably we are bewildered by it.
Utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed
mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it
overwhelms our vision. Man had been going forward steadily,
inventing and discovering, until in the last hundred years his whole
world had been transformed. Suddenly the entire range of invention is
turned against Man. The machinery of comfort and progress becomes
the enginery of devastation. Under such a shock, we ask, "Has
civilization over-reached itself? Has the machine run away with its
maker?" The imagination is staggered. We are too much in the storm to
see across the storm.
When the War began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. It was the

last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to
which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of
something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as
we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days
have passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably
we become benumbed to the long continued disaster. It is impossible to
think deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand
in the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become
calloused to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have
not yet felt the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex,
drawing ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing
sense of it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living
are the most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable
that the future will look back upon them as the years determining the
destiny of mankind for ages to come.
How this terrible fact of War falls across all philosophies! Complacent
optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The
pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn
to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face with
brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the ground.
Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened, while
the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one
certainty is that an entirely new world is being born--what it will be, no
one knows.
Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our
thinking will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will
be impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely
hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live to
something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to abandon
the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with them.
We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution
Christianity