An essay on the American contribution and the democratic idea eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 60 pages of information about An essay on the American contribution and the democratic idea.

An essay on the American contribution and the democratic idea eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 60 pages of information about An essay on the American contribution and the democratic idea.
will have been fought in vain.  More revolutions, wastage and bloodshed will follow, the world will be reduced to absolute chaos unless, in the more advanced democracies, an intelligent social order tending to remove the causes of injustice and discontent can be devised and ready for inauguration.  This new social order depends, in turn, upon a world order of mutually helpful, free peoples, a league of Nations.—­If the world is to be made safe for democracy, this democratic plan must be ready for the day when the German Junker is beaten and peace is declared.

The real issue of our time is industrial democracy we must face that fact.  And those in America and the Entente nations who continue to oppose it will do so at their peril.  Fortunately, as will be shown, that element of our population which may be designated as domestic Junkers is capable of being influenced by contemporary currents of thought, is awakening to the realization of social conditions deplorable and dangerous.  Prosperity and power had made them blind and arrogant.  Their enthusiasm for the war was, however, genuine; the sacrifices they are making are changing and softening them; but as yet they can scarcely be expected, as a class, to rejoice over the revelation—­just beginning to dawn upon their minds—­that victory for the Allies spells the end of privilege.  Their conception of democracy remains archaic, while wealth is inherently conservative.  Those who possess it in America have as a rule received an education in terms of an obsolete economics, of the thought of an age gone by.  It is only within the past few years that our colleges and universities have begun to teach modern economics, social science and psychology—­and this in the face of opposition from trustees.  Successful business men, as a rule, have had neither the time nor the inclination to read books which they regard as visionary, as subversive to an order by which they have profited.  And that some Americans are fools, and have been dazzled in Europe by the glamour of a privilege not attainable at home, is a deplorable yet indubitable fact.  These have little sympathy with democracy; they have even been heard to declare that we have no right to dictate to another nation, even an enemy nation, what form of government it shall assume.  We have no right to demand, when peace comes, that the negotiations must be with the representatives of the German people.  These are they who deplore the absence among us of a tradition of monarchy, since the American people “should have something to look up to.”  But this state of mind, which needs no comment, is comparatively rare, and represents an extreme.  We are not lacking, however, in the type of conservative who, innocent of a knowledge of psychology, insists that “human nature cannot be changed,” and that the “survival of the fittest” is the law of life, yet these would deny Darwin if he were a contemporary.  They reject the idea that society can be organized by intelligence, and

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An essay on the American contribution and the democratic idea from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.