Democracy; Fröbel, Friedrich, 1782-1852; United States -- Politics and government; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
which he privately knows and has always known and always denied.
This goes on hourly. Those people who do not see it, look for it in
the wrong places. You cannot expect it to show itself in the public
offices. They are the strongholds of the enemy. You cannot expect it to
appear very often in the children of captivity, the upper bourgeoisie.
These men are easily put to sleep and will take the promise of a
politician any day as an excuse for non-activity. They give consent.
What we want is assertion, and it is coming like a murmur from the
poorer classes who desire the right and who need only leadership to
make them honest.
It is the recurrent tragedy in reform movements that the merchants put
forward something that the laboring man instantly nails for a lie. It
is not the loss of the election which does the harm, but this insult to
the souls of men.
Let no one expect the millennium, but let us play fair. We can see that
our standards, particularly among the well-to-do, are so low that mere
inspection of them causes indignant protest. But we must also know that
when we accepted democracy as our form of government we ranked the
political education of the individual as more important than the expert
administration of government. This last can come only as a result, not
as a precurser of the other.
The example of a whole people, mad with one passion, living under a
system which implies the abnegation of that passion, has laid bare
the heart of a community, has shown the interrelations between the
organs and functions of a society, in a way never before visible in
the history of the world. Everything is disturbed, but everything is
visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, yet betraying all things;
Architecture, still submerged in commerce but showing every year some
vital change; Social Life, the mere creature of abuses, like a child
covered with scars, but growing healthy; the Drama, a drudge to thrift
every way and yet palpably alive. By the light of these things and
their relation to each other we may view history.
The American is a typical being. He is a creature of a single passion.
In so far as Tyre was commercial she was American. You can reconstruct
much of Venetian politics from a town caucus. In so far as London is
commercial it is American. You can trace the thing in the shape of a
handbill in Moscow. Or to take the matter up from the other side: you
can, by taking up these correlated ganglia of American society, which
do nevertheless simply represent the heart of man, and are always
present in every society--by imagining the enlargement of one function,
and the disuse of the next, you can reconstruct the Greek period and
re-imagine Athens.
No wonder the sociologists study America. It seems as if the key and
cause of human progress might be clutched from her entrails.
GOVERNMENT
V
GOVERNMENT
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