successful application to problems as they arise. The social conscience in this sense provides the moral ballast of the community. The average man is the great conserver of values. But this body of sentiment, to be socially effective, must be hospitable to new ideas; it must from time to time undergo reorganization. A self-conscious democracy is a progressive democracy. The severest test of a social order is the reconciliation of these two phases. The one is authoritative, conservative, backward-looking; the other is critical, iconoclastic, forward-looking. We have here the recurrence in democratic form of the problem that is as old as civilization itself, namely, the problem of reconciling liberty and law, authority and freedom.

§ 6. THE PARADOX OF DEMOCRACY

This analysis of the characteristics of the average man brings us face to face with a paradox which has puzzled more than one student of democracy. In the light of the prejudices and intellectual limitations of the average citizen which we have just sketched, the question may well be asked how are we to justify the appeal democracy is constantly making to his judgment for the settlement of fundamental issues? Macaulay, Lecky, and Peel have asserted that since the masses are confessedly ignorant of statecraft and of moral philosophy their rule must necessarily be one of ignorance and incompetency. The apotheosis of the average man is, as Faguet contends, merely the cult of incompetence.

On the other hand, Bryce states that "Where the humbler classes have differed in opinion from the higher, they have often been proved by the event to have been right and their so-called betters wrong". Indeed it has been asserted that There has never been a period in our history, since the American nation was independent, when it would not have been a calamity to have it controlled by its highly educated men alone". It would be unfair perhaps to infer from this that learning or culture per se unfits a man for pronouncing upon moral issues. But it is doubtless true that the specialization

of work and the concentration of energies in the case of the markedly successful business man, lawyer, physician, or scientist, inevitably induce a narrowing of interests. The price paid for success in a chosen profession is too often an institutionalizing of thought and of feeling. Every social reformer must know from experience the truth of Mr. Lloyd's statement in his Man the Social Creator, "Seldom does the new conscience when it seeks a teacher to declare to men what is wrong, find him in the dignitaries of the church, the state, the culture that is. The higher the rank, the closer the tie that binds those to what is but what ought not to be." The unsophisticated sanity of the average man, therefore, gives to his utterances upon moral questions a validity not possessed by the opinion of the scholar or the pronunciamentos of the successful business man hopelessly committed to group interests.

For this reason we have made the average man the keeper of the conscience of the community. Moral valuations are not merely a matter of the intellectual appreciation of the situation. The old Socratic dictum that insight will always bring right action has long since been discarded as an ethical principle. At best, insight merely puts one in the position to do the right thing. We must have in addition the driving power of . the affections. The springs of moral action are ever in intimate association with the homely but sane and powerful sentiments that find expression in the marriage tie, love of offspring, normal and healthful occupations, and community interests. The secret of moral sanity is found, therefore, in living a well- . balanced and thoroughly human existence through which these fundamental interests may best find expression. Our tense industrial centers with their selfish profitism, their ruthless exploitation of man and nature, doubtless militate against the healthful functioning of the basal human impulses. In the mad pursuit of economic gains, social preferment, or the tawdry pleasures of our highly artificial city life, the sober, persistent human values are often utterly lost from view. Doubtless this explains why we find the unbiased moral judgment of our village and agricultural communities most trust

worthy on great moral issues. If there the current of life is more monotonous it is also more normal. It is hard not to see some connection between the freedom, the vigor, and the sanity of western democracy and the healthful environment of its citizenship. No individual or group of individuals whose broad human sympathies have been warped or vitiated through abnormal social or economic conditions can be trusted to decide aright great moral issues.

For good or ill we have committed our destinies to the keeping of the average man. Often we grow restless at his blunders; we despair over his stupidity. It is easy to criticize him, for his faults are writ large in the chronicles of passing events; he has nothing to conceal. At best, however, he is more deserving of sympathy than of censure. For he lives in an age unlike any other in its desperate need of an understanding of the real meaning of life. The increment of human experience has far outrun our ability to give it rational interpretation and evaluation. We are overmastered, bewildered, even appalled at life's increasing complexity, its tragic revelations of the ape and the tiger. We need as never before a philosophy of values, not a philosophy that moons over the eternal puzzles of metaphysics, that tries to catch the drift of the cosmic weather, but a philosophy that will give us a helpful evaluation of the immediate and insistent facts of experience. Perhaps we may adapt to the average man and his problems Bernard Shaw's somewhat irreverent remark as to the Deity and say, "Don't pity him. Help him."

BIBLIOGRAPHY V

1. Books: ADDAMS, J.: Democracy and Social Ethics, 1902; ALLEN, W. H.: Efficient Democracy, 1907; CROLY, H. C.: Progressive Democracy, 1914; TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE: Democracy in America, 1835; FAguet, EMILE: The Cult of Incompetence, 1912; FOLLETT, M. P.: The New State, 1918; GIDDINGS, F. H.: Democracy and Empire, 1900; GODKIn, E. L.: Problems of Modern Democracy, 1896; Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy, 1898; HOBHOUSE, L. T.: Democracy and Reaction, 1904; LEE, G. E.: Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy, 1913; LOWELL, A. L.: Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913; MALLOCK, W. H.: Limits of Pure Democracy, 1918; RODRIGUES, G.: The People

of Action: An Essay on American Idealism, 1918; SLOANE, W. M.: The Powers and Aims of Western Democracy, 1919; TUFTS, J. H.: Our Democracy, 1918; WEYL, W. E.: The New Democracy, 1912.

2. Articles: LLOYD, A.: "The Duplicity of Democracy." American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 21, pp. 1 ff.; MECKLIN, J. M.: "The Tyranny of the Average Man." International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 28, pp. 240 ff. Free use has been made of this article in the foregoing chapter.

CHAPTER II

THE RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND: CALVINISM

We have seen that in a democracy the court of last appeal on great moral issues is vested in the enlightened sentiments of the common man. But this authoritative body of moral ideals which the common man shares with his fellows is a slow growth. It presupposes prolonged social habituation. It becomes authoritative only after it has been worked into the texture of the individual's thought and life. And this in turn presupposes the disciplinary effect of stable institutions that persist relatively unchanged through long periods of years. Hence we have the somewhat paradoxical situation that the measures of moral values applied by the common man to the problems of to-day are for the most part the products of the organizations of moral sentiments that took place in the past. We must approach the problem of the social conscience, therefore, in the light of the historic perspective. We have to ask, then, what are the antecedents of the moral ideals prevalent to-day in American life?

§ 1. THE PREDOMINANT RELIGIOUS INTEREST

The earliest traces of what might be called a social conscience in America were intimately associated with religion. This was due to the fact that American colonization at first took on, for the most part, the form of religious communities. The Puritan commonwealth of New England, the Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania and the South, the Baptists of Rhode Island, the Quakers of Philadelphia, not to mention less important groups, were the nuclei from which social and national consciousness slowly developed. Religious loyalties, which now serve merely to create denominational associations scattered