The Soul of Democracy | Page 2

and the gospel of brute force. One or the other must be
rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. The effect on the thought
life of the world will be even greater--vastly greater--than that of the
French Revolution. The twentieth century will differ from the
nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. The effect on the
relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so

far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the
nineteenth century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as
the Athenian tribal system or mediaeval feudalism.
Thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. We
Americans are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to
political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise. All
across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion --if
anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. Thus we are
suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly
trusting to it to solve all problems. Legislation is no solution for moral
evils. It is possible, to some extent, to suppress vice by legislation, but
not to create virtue. Virtue can be developed only by conduct and
education. You cannot drive men into the kingdom of heaven with the
whip of legislation; and if you could, you would so change the
atmosphere of the place that one would prefer to take the other road.
If our democracy is to survive, we must think it through; carrying it
down, from these superficial political devices, into our industry and
commerce, still so largely dominated by feudal ideas of the middle age,
into our science and art, far more completely into our education, into
our social relationship, and beyond all else, into our fundamental
attitude of mind. Democracy is, at bottom, not a series of political
forms, but a way of life.
Thus the War will be the supreme test of democracy. The question it
will settle is this: can free men, by voluntary cooperation, develop an
efficiency and an endurance which will make it possible for them to
stand and protect their liberties against the machinery and aggressive
ambitions of autocratic empires where everything is done paternally
from the top? If they can, then democracy will survive and grow as the
highest form of society for ages to come; if not, then democracy will
pass and be succeeded by some other social order.
That is why this War has been our war from the beginning, though we
have entered it so late. As we look back upon the struggle of Athens
and the other free Greek cities with the overwhelming hordes of Asia,
at Marathon and Salamis, as the conflict that saved democracy for
Europe and made possible the civilization of the Occident, so it is
probable that the world will look back upon this colossal War as the
same struggle, multiplied a thousand times in the men and munitions

employed, the struggle determining the future of democracy and
civilization for generations, perhaps for all time.

II
THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE WAR
The world has been confused as to the issue in this War, because of the
multitude of its causes and of the antagonisms it involves; yet under all
the national and racial hatreds, the economic jealousies, certain great
ideas are being tested out.
Apologists for Germany have told us, even with pride, that in Germany
the supreme conception is the dedication of Man to the State. This was
not true of old Germany. Before the formation of the Prussian empire,
her spirit was intensely individualistic. She stood preeminently for
freedom of thought and action. It was this that gave her noble spiritual
heritage. Goethe is the most individualistic of world masters. Froebel
developed, in the Kindergarten, one of the purest of democracies.
Luther and German protestantism represented the affirmation of
individual conscience as against hierarchical control. It was this spirit
that gave Germany her golden age of literature, her unmatched group of
spiritual philosophers, her religious teachers, her pre-eminence in
music.
Nevertheless, the Prussian state, autocratic from its inception, received
philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating in Hegel,
who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the state, incarnate
in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. He justified war,
regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically made might, right,
in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by its more fruitful idea
in annexing the weaker, while the conquered, in being conquered, is
judged of God. Here is the philosophic justification of that Prussian
arrogance which in Nietzsche is carried into glittering rhetoric. Thus
the Prussian state from afar back was opposed to the general spirit of
old Germany.
Since 1870, it must be admitted, that spirit is gone. With