AN EXCERPT FROM "JUSTICE AND LIBERTY” By G. LOWES DICKINSON A Banker and a Professor are Conversing The Banker: No reasonable man imagines that there may not be changes in human nature whereby things may become possible that are not possible now. Only, we say, first change your human nature before you begin meddling with institutions. The Professor: That again sounds so reasonable, yet really, in practice, is so obstructive. For if it be true that institutions depend on human nature, it is also true that human nature depends on them, and on our ideas about them. And if you treat institutions as something sacrosanct, if you rule out all criticism of them, and all experimenting with them, you are hindering precisely the change in human nature which you say you want, by suppressing that insurrection of the spirit which alone can bring it about. What really stirs men is a demonstration that the order under which they live is neither reasonable nor just. They may then come to find it so intolerable that they can no longer rest in it. And then, and then only, you have the condition of your change in human nature. ... The first condition of acquiring knowledge is to desire it. NOTE Or the following contents, The Playhouse and the Play and The Drama of Democracy (the latter published in The Columbia University Quarterly, June, 1908) are addresses delivered by the author, in 1907–1908, at the universities of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Michigan, and California, The Twentieth Century Club and The Book and Play Club, Chicago, The MacDowell Association and The League for Political Education, New York, and elsewhere; The Dramatist as Citizen is an address delivered in February, 1909, before Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown Universities, The League for Political Education, New York, and elsewhere; SelfExpression and the American Drama is reprinted, by permission, from The North American Review for September, 1908; Art and Democracy is an address given before The Society for Ethical Culture, New York, on Lincoln's Birthday, 1908. |