that men and women alike may serve the generations in family devotion
to the sort of work fathers and mothers have to do and yet cherish
some personal and ideal vocational effort which may sweeten and enrich
their lives.
=Vital Changes in All the Basic Institutions of Society.=--There are
five basic institutions in modern social organization. They may be
named the family, the school, the church, the industrial order, and
the state. They have all come to us as parts of our social inheritance
from time too remote to reckon. They have mingled and intermingled
their tendencies of control and influence in varieties of social
functioning too numerous to mention. They are now emerging to
distinctness only to be engaged in new forms of interaction that make
the highest ideals of each and all seem fundamentally akin.
The main tendency of development in all these institutions is,
however, identical and one clearly perceived. It is the tendency from
status to contract, from fixed order to flexible adjustment, from
static to dynamic condition, already noted in regard to the family.
In the school we have moved and are now moving from an aristocracy of
command, by which ancient life was reproduced, to a democracy of
comradeship in which it is aimed to make each generation improve upon
its predecessor. In the church, as it has moved from the family ritual
at the domestic fireside to the self-chosen altar of each worshipper
in the world's cathedrals, the reactionaries have held on to "the
faith once delivered to the saints" and the progressive minds have
moved to some new prophecy of the truth and right; until to-day, as
Professor Coe well says, "the aim of the modern church is to give
education in the art of brotherhood," and to evoke "faith in a
fatherly God and in a human destiny that outreaches all the accidents
of our frailty." In the industrial order, still in the trial stage of
conflict between the fixed status of the "hand" and the "master" and
the contract of equal partners in a cooeperative enterprise, the
movement is steadily toward the social requirement of equality,
justice, and good-will. In the state we have achieved mechanical
expression of complete democracy. We still lack, and in our own
country woefully lack, the "spirit within the wheels" that can move
with power toward an actual government by the people, for the people,
and truly of the people. Yet by fire and sword and through blood and
suffering the handwriting of equality, justice, and fraternity has
been set in our Constitutions and Bills of Right. What remains to be
done is the socializing of the political mechanisms. That means simply
that we shall learn to live our democracy and be no longer content to
merely write it in law. The difficulty now is not so much to get a
good statement of democratic right as to make it work effectively in
common action. This fact makes it of doubtful wisdom that men and
women so often concentrate effort on the eighteenth-century
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