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Page 43
As the poet bathes the outer world for us in the hues of human feeling,
so the workman needs some one to bathe his surroundings with a human
significance--some one who shall teach him to find that which will give
a potency to his life. His education, however simple, should tend to
make him widely at home in the world, and to give him a sense of
simplicity and peace in the midst of the triviality and noise to which
he is constantly subjected. He, like other men, can learn to be content
to see but a part, although it must be a part of something.
It is because of a lack of democracy that we do not really incorporate
him in the hopes and advantages of society, and give him the place which
is his by simple right. We have learned to say that the good must be
extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one
person or any one class; but we have not yet learned to add to that
statement, that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we
cannot even be sure that it is worth having. In spite of many attempts
we do not really act upon either statement.
CHAPTER VII
POLITICAL REFORM
Throughout this volume we have assumed that much of our ethical
maladjustment in social affairs arises from the fact that we are acting
upon a code of ethics adapted to individual relationships, but not to
the larger social relationships to which it is bunglingly applied. In
addition, however, to the consequent strain and difficulty, there is
often an honest lack of perception as to what the situation demands.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our political life as it manifests
itself in certain quarters of every great city. It is most difficult to
hold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a social
expression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take pains
to keep on common ground in our human experiences. Otherwise there is
in various parts of the community an inevitable difference of ethical
standards which becomes responsible for much misunderstanding.
It is difficult both to interpret sympathetically the motives and ideals
of those who have acquired rules of conduct in experience widely
different from our own, and also to take enough care in guarding the
gains already made, and in valuing highly enough the imperfect good so
painfully acquired and, at the best, so mixed with evil. This wide
difference in daily experience exhibits itself in two distinct attitudes
toward politics. The well-to-do men of the community think of politics
as something off by itself; they may conscientiously recognize political
duty as part of good citizenship, but political effort is not the
expression of their moral or social life. As a result of this
detachment, "reform movements," started by business men and the better
element, are almost wholly occupied in the correction of political
machinery and with a concern for the better method of administration,
rather than with the ultimate purpose of securing the welfare of the
people. They fix their attention so exclusively on methods that they
fail to consider the final aims of city government. This accounts for
the growing tendency to put more and more responsibility upon executive
officers and appointed commissions at the expense of curtailing the
power of the direct representatives of the voters. Reform movements tend
to become negative and to lose their educational value for the mass of
the people. The reformers take the r�le of the opposition. They give
themselves largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, to
writing and talking of what the future must be and of certain results
which should be obtained. In trying to better matters, however, they
have in mind only political achievements which they detach in a curious
way from the rest of life, and they speak and write of the purification
of politics as of a thing set apart from daily life.
On the other hand, the real leaders of the people are part of the entire
life of the community which they control, and so far as they are
representative at all, are giving a social expression to democracy. They
are often politically corrupt, but in spite of this they are proceeding
upon a sounder theory. Although they would be totally unable to give it
abstract expression, they are really acting upon a formulation made by a
shrewd English observer; namely, that, "after the enfranchisement of the
masses, social ideals enter into political programmes, and they enter
not as something which at best can be indirectly promoted by government,
but as something which it is the chief business of government to advance
directly."
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