Social sciences; United States -- Politics and government -- 1909-1913
The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent
cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man
who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with
the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and
at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism, nor
unrestricted individualism, nor any other ism, will bring about the
millennium. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on
its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system
must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual,
and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn
partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to
develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who
make up the nation. No individual man could be kept healthy by living
in accordance with a plan which took cognizance only of one set of
muscles or set of organs; his health must depend upon his general
bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care which affects hundreds of
different organs according to their hundreds of needs. Society is, of
course, infinitely more complex than the human body. The influences
that tell upon it are countless; they are closely interwoven,
interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others. It is
pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe that some
one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with infinite
difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and haltings,
we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress something
can be done by continually striving to improve the social system, now
here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute effort
for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come to each
individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the attainment
of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must represent the
struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown not merely in
the dealings of each of us within the realm of the State, but even
more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate realm of the
family; for the life of the State rests and must ever rest upon the
life of the family and the neighborhood.
The Japanese Question
There are certain elementary principles all of which should be kept
steadily in view if a nation wishes to act justly both by itself and by
others. It must insist upon what is necessary for its own healthy life,
and this even at the cost of a possible clash; but this insistence on
what is due to itself should always be accompanied by all possible
courtesy to and fair dealing with others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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