pation, and inspiration, full of a breath of life as sweet and wholesome as the airs that filled the sails of the caravels of Columbus and gave the promise and boast of magnificent Opportunity in which America dare not fail.

A PLEA FOR THE AMERICAN TRADITION1

WINSTON CHURCHILL

[Winston Churchill (1871) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1894, but resigned from the Navy in order to devote himself to writing. He has produced some ten novels of distinction, several of them dealing with problems of American life and politics. He has himself taken an active part in politics in New Hampshire, the state in which he is now living.]

It has been the complacent custom of the average man to despise systems of philosophy, to think of them as harmless speculations made for arm-chairs and leisure. Every once in a while the world undergoes a rude awakening from this fallacy, as when it is shaken by a French Revolution. The unrest of the masses in the eighteenth century, becoming conscious in the philosophy of the rights of man, lighted a conflagration that took a quarter of a century to quench and left a transformed world behind it. And recently we have had once more a terrifying proof that philosophies, that cultures, may be dynamic.

Those who had seen and studied the German Empire before the war beheld the spectacle of a nation which, though not without internal dissensions and party strife, had achieved a remarkable degree of efficiency and individual contentment; a nation in which waste had been largely eliminated, in which poverty was less prevalent than in the Anglo-Saxon democracies. Prosperity was more widely diffused. The industrial problem, hanging menacingly over England and America like an evil genie above the smoke, in Germany was apparently far on its way toward solution. The transformation from a loosely knit,

1From Harper's Monthly Magazine, vol. cxxxii, p. 299 (January, 1916). Reprinted by permission.

over-populated group of states in which there was much misery and poverty into a rich, self-confident, and aggressive empire had taken place within a comparatively few years.

It was not until the war broke out that we of the AngloSaxon democracies began to inquire why and how, only to find to our amazement that this growth was due to a principle at work among the German people, a philosophy, a Kultur, a leaven with which they had become saturated. It is not necessary here to enter into an analysis of this Kultur, or to attempt to pass judgment upon it; apparently it is a development from an odd combination of the systems of many thinkers; it has been shaped by the needs and environment of a people and is in harmony with the temperament of that people. Nor is it needful to inquire to what extent this national philosophy or culture was intellectually conscious. In the early days of our republic the American was imbued with a racial tradition whose origin goes back to the Magna Charta; a tradition laying emphasis on individual initiative and individual freedom. It was in our blood, and it made the British Colonies and the United States of America. The average Scotch-Irish settler, the western farmer, did not know any more of Locke or Adam Smith than the German peasant of today knows of Fichte and Hegel, Nietzsche, von Treitschke, or Bernhardi. But this American tradition, because of the change from a simple agricultural and a complex industrial society, has gradually become obscured.

It is difference in ideas, in views of life, that arouses suspicions and antagonisms, that leads to conflict between individuals as well as nations. The emotions, the longings, and aspirations of a people are expressed by their thinkers in ideas, and ideas lead to action. Whatever may be the merits or demerits of the German culture, the revelation of its existence and nature has sharply aroused thinking Americans to the realization that it is not for us. Both our traditions and temperament are opposed to it. We are beginning to grasp the fact that democracy is at stake-whatever democracy has come to mean.

The opening of the present war found the Anglo-Saxon democracies in a state of muddle and chaos. Our houses were

not in order. And that we might have to defend our institutions, such as they were, never seems to have occurred to us. We had evolved no system of defense in harmony with the nature of our government, with our traditions-we had no system of defense worthy of the name. And England, save for her navy, was in the same plight. Prosperity had made many of us smug and selfish, ready to reap profits out of other people's misfortunes; we had mistaken the pursuit of wealth for the pursuit of happiness; we were wasteful, and riddled with political corruption. The rise of modern industry with its introduction of the machine had changed the face of our civilization, largely swept away the democracy we had, created a class of economic dependents; established, indeed, an economic slavery-a slavery no less real than that in which the master was individualized. And that equality of opportunity, so prevalent when land and resources were plentiful, had dwindled amazingly. Serious writers agree that it is growing increasingly difficult for men to rise from the ranks of the workers, partly because of increasing class solidarity, partly because of the great denial necessary to acquire sufficient funds a denial that reacts on the family. Those who do rise become recruits of a hostile camp-the camp of the employer; and those who do rise seem to be possessed more markedly than ever of those characteristics-so hostile to democratic ideals— hinted at by the author of the "Spoon River Anthology:"

"Beware of the man who rises to power

From one suspender."

We are in the throes of industrial strife, class strife, the very condition our forefathers who founded this nation hoped to obviate. We have a large element of our population burning with a sense of injustice and dependence-feelings that partially die down only to flare up again; an element for the most part uneducated in any real sense of the word; an element imbued with crude and non-American ideas as to how this injustice is to be righted. Their solution is one of class solidarity and revolution, and they cannot be blamed for advocating it. We must make up our minds that we shall not have peace or order until equality

of opportunity tends to become restored and dependence eliminated.

We shall have to find and put in practice, if democracy is to endure, a democratic solution of the industrial problem.

It is curious, but true, that it does not seem to have occurred to us to examine the traditions of our race to see whether these might not be developed and made as applicable to the problem of industrial democracy as they had been to that of political democracy. Our statesmen, in their despair, attempted to solve the problem by a tendency to adopt a collectivism borrowed from Central Europe. Indeed, many of the measures passed in England and America during the past dozen years are in principle alien to the American tradition and temperament. Pensions, for instance, are not compatible with Anglo-Saxon independence and respect; nor do we take kindly to laws, however benevolent, that hamper the freedom and development of the individual. Coercion is repugnant to us.

It has been said that the United States of America is no longer Anglo-Saxon. But I believe that I am in accord with experience and modern opinion when I say that environment is stronger than heredity, and that our immigrants become imbued with our racial individualism—at present largely instructive and materialistic in quality. Whether our immigration problem is at present being handled with wisdom and efficiency is quite another matter.

Professor Dewey quotes a sentence from Heine declaring that nations have an instinctive presentiment of what is required to fulfil their missions, and it is quite true that we in America have such a presentiment, although we have not translated it into a conscious creed or culture; with us it is little more than a presentiment, but the war has served to make us realize, that, if our democracy is to be preserved, its survival must be justified, it must be efficient. The first essential to such efficiency is that our philosophy, our spirit and ideals, should be defined, and secondly that our citizens from the early years of childhood should be saturated and animated with these principles and ideals. In short, we must have a culture of American democracy,

and that culture must be in harmony with the character and temperament and traditions of the nation.

For this reason it becomes essential to examine our character and traditions, for nations as well as men must first arrive at a thorough comprehension of their characters before a scheme of life can be made to fit them. The "presentiment of destiny" lies hidden in character. The leopard cannot change his spots: men and nations cannot change their inherent characteristics, but they can develop and transform these, direct them from material toward spiritual ends.

Only a little reflection is required to convince any one that the Anglo-Saxon, and particularly the American, is an individualist. It is said with much truth that we are lawless by nature, and we have, indeed, very little respect for laws. We are jealous of control; we are not and never have been a submissive people, and we could not live under a benevolent government that would teach us what is good for us. Our forefathers came over here to live unto themselves, to exercise their own opinions and work out their own destinies. However unattractive such individualism may appear, we have to make the best of it, to make virtue out of necessity. All good people-contrary to Sunday-school traditions are not alike. And if we are going to become good, we must become good in our own way.

When certain American colonists, impatient with British interference, rebelled against England, they wrote down in the Declaration of Independence a creed, a philosophy, that was quite in keeping with Anglo-Saxon temperament, with AngloSaxon ideals as far back as the Magna Charta. Every man is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A government was necessary, but they were determined to have as little government as possible, to give the individual the greatest amount of liberty consistent with any government at all; they laid stress on individual initiative and development, on selfrealization.

Our forefathers were neither saints nor dreamers. They also were not averse to the accumulation of wealth, and undoubtedly they had an eye to the main chance. But there is one truth