Democracy, as a working system, as we have said in previous articles,
is peculiar to a few nations of the white race. As such it is perhaps
the greatest social and spiritual adventure in the history of humanity.
Democracy can thrive only where it sinks its roots deep into the
personality of the individual soul. In a successful democracy the
citizen must be free, honest, intelligent, informed, sportsmanlike, and
willing to be always active in the performance of his political duties.
These qualities can not be brought forth by the hocus-pocus of wishing
them upon anybody. They are the result of a long evolution. They
have grown, thus far, only in particular environments and only among
peculiar peoples whose whole history furnishes the essential background.
It is often pointed out as an evidence of the success which follows
the mixing of our various nationalities, that we original Americans
have resulted from the greatest of all mixtures. We began, in Colonial
times, as English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish; as French, Dutch, German
and Swedish elements. The results of this mixture, we conclude, have
been entirely satisfactory. But right here we are apt to come to error.
True, the original American people were formed by the mixture of
these various nationalities. Yet the success of out great experiment
was due to the fact of a much greater social unity than at first
appears on the surface. Our American people were drawn, mostly, from
a single European class. This was the class of small property-holders
and skilled workers. They came from the progressive countries to the
north and west of Europe. What members of the British country gentry
who came to Virginia and South Carolina were quickly unified with
those among whom they settled. Indeed, ever since Magna Charta, the
English country gentry were thrown together, especially in the House of
Commons, with the representatives of the small farmers and the towns
people. To ignore this fact of essential unity is to leave Hamlet out
of the play. The dominant group, the great majority in every colony,
was this mixture of gentry, independent small farmers, shopkeepers and
skilled mechanics. This was then the rising class of Europe, struggling
to find itself; hungering to give expression of its peculiar form of
civilization; ardent in its desire for larger freedom. These facts can
not be over-emphasized.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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