Visit https://ebookluna.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

(eBook PDF) Questioning Gender: A Sociological

Exploration 3rd Edition

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-questioning-
gender-a-sociological-exploration-3rd-edition/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookluna.com

Here are some recommended products that might interest you.
You can download now and explore!

(eBook PDF) Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender

in Sociological Perspective 4th Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-social-stratification-class-
race-and-gender-in-sociological-perspective-4th-edition/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Psychology: An Exploration 3rd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-psychology-an-exploration-3rd-
edition/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Being Sociological 3rd ed. 2021 Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-being-sociological-3rd-
ed-2021-edition/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Exploring Inequality: A Sociological Approach

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-exploring-inequality-a-
sociological-approach/

ebookluna.com
(eBook PDF) Criminology: A Sociological Understanding 7th
Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-criminology-a-sociological-
understanding-7th-edition/

ebookluna.com

Planetary Exploration Horizon 2061: A Long-Term

Perspective for Planetary Exploration 1st Edition- eBook
PDF
https://ebookluna.com/download/planetary-exploration-
horizon-2061-a-long-term-perspective-for-planetary-exploration-ebook-
pdf/
ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Crises in Canadian Work: A Critical

Sociological Perspective

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-crises-in-canadian-work-a-
critical-sociological-perspective/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory:

Visualizing Social Worlds 3rd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-contemporary-social-and-
sociological-theory-visualizing-social-worlds-3rd-edition-2/

ebookluna.com

(eBook PDF) Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory:

Visualizing Social Worlds 3rd Edition

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-contemporary-social-and-
sociological-theory-visualizing-social-worlds-3rd-edition/

ebookluna.com
 Liberal Feminism
Radical Feminism
Men and Feminism
Sociological Theories of Gender
Gender and the Sociological Imagination
Sex Roles
Interactionist Theories
Sex Categorization
Status Characteristics Theory
Doing Gender
Undoing or Redoing Gender?
Institutional or Structural Approaches
Gendered Organizations
Homophily: A Social Network Approach to Gender
Intersectional Feminist Theory
Putting It All Together: Integrative Theories
Hegemonic Masculinity
Conclusion
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
3 How Do Disciplines Outside Sociology Study Gender? Some Additional
Theoretical Approaches
Psychological Approaches to Gender
Freud
Sex Difference Research
To Research or Not to Research?
The Bottom Line on Sex Difference Research
Queer Theory
Origins in the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement
Enter Postmodernism/Poststructuralism
Three Key Features of Queer Theory
Gender Theories in Global Perspective
The Colonial Period
The Development Project
What About Women?
Gender and Development
Ecofeminism and the Environment
 How Do We Use Theory?
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
PART II. How Are Our Lives Filled With Gender? This section uses an
interactional, micro-level approach to focus on everyday aspects of gender. In this
part of the book, students will begin to see the ways in which gender matters in
their day-to-day lives and how that impact is socially constructed both historically
and globally.
4 How Do We Learn Gender? Gender and Socialization
Sorting It All Out: Gender Socialization and Intersex Children
Genital Tubercles and Ambiguous Genitalia
What Can We Learn From the Stories of Intersex People?
“Normal” Gender Socialization
Some Theories of Gender Socialization
Social Learning Theory
Cognitive-Development Theory
Stages of Gender Socialization
Gender Schema Theory
Psychoanalytic Theory
The Early Years: Primary Socialization Into Gender
Primary Socialization
The One-Child Policy and Gender in China
Doctors Teaching Gender: Intersex Socialization
Doctors and Gender Socialization
Coming Out as Intersex
The Importance of Peer Groups
Peer Groups and Gender Socialization
Varieties of Peer Culture
Learning Gender Never Ends: Secondary Socialization
Learning to Be American: Socialization Through Immigration
What Happens to Gender as We Age?
The Gender of Caregiving and Alzheimer’s
Summing Up
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
 Suggested Readings
Works Cited
5 How Does Gender Matter for Whom We Want and Desire? The Gender of
Sexuality
Let’s Talk About Sex
Does Sexuality Have a Gender?
Heteronormativity and Compulsive Heterosexuality
A Brief History of Heterosexuality
Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Measuring Sexuality: What Is Sexual Identity?
Men as Sexual Subjects
Women as Sexual Objects
Playing the Part? Sexual Scripts
Grinding and Sexual Scripts on the College Dance Floor
Sexuality in Islamic Perspectives
Stabane and Sexuality in South Africa
Violating the Scripts
Men and Abstinence
Women at Female Strip Clubs
Bisexuality: Somewhere in Between
Asexuality
Sexuality and Power: Hetero-privilege in Schools
Nationalism and Heteronormativity
Red = Top; Black = Bottom
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
6 How Does Gender Impact the People You Spend Your Time With? The
Gender of Friendship and Dating
Love, Inside and Outside the Family
Defining Friendship
My Friend Jane Versus My Friend Joe: Who’s Better at Being Friends?
Friendship in Historical Perspective
Gender Differences in Friendship
Child Rearing, Social Networks, and Friendship
Gender Similarities in Friendship: Are Women and Men Really All
That Different?
 Friendship in Global Perspective
Choosing Your Friends
Families of Choice
The Rules of Attraction
Courtship to Dating: A Brief History
Hookups and Friends With Benefits
Romantic Love in Cross-Cultural Perspective
The Gender of Love
Summing Up
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
7 How Does Gender Matter for How We Think About Our Bodies? The
Gender of Bodies and Health
A Brief History of Bodies
The Beauty Myth
Beauty and Gender Inequality
Exporting the Beauty Myth
The Problem With Bodies
Eyelids and Empowerment: Cosmetic Surgery
Race and the Beauty Myth
Is Beauty Power?
Men and Body Image
The Importance of Being Tall
Masculinity, Puberty, and Embodiment
Gender and Health: Risky Masculinity and the Superman
Is Masculinity Bad for Your Health?
Women, Doctors, Midwives, and Hormones
Eugenics, Sterilization, and Population Control
Throwing Like a Girl
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
PART III. How Is Gender an Important Part of the Way Our Society Works?
This portion of the text focuses on how gender permeates various institutions in
society. Working at the institutional, macro level, these chapters are concerned
with how gender operates as a system of power and reinforces inequality.
8 How Does Gender Impact the People We Live Our Lives With? The
Gender of Marriage and Families
Something Old, Something New
A Brief History of Marriage
Antony and Cleopatra: The Real Story
So What Is Marriage, Then?
The Demographics of Marriage
All the Single Ladies
The Marriage Squeeze
Race and the Marriage Squeeze
Transnational Marriage
Who Does What? The Gendered Division of Labor
The Sexual Division of Labor and Gender Inequality
The Doctrine of Separate Spheres
Modern Marriage
Gender and the Doctrine of Separate Spheres
Separate Spheres in Global Perspective
Transnational Motherhood
Transnational Fatherhood
The Division of Household Labor
The Second Shift
Gay and Lesbian Households
Power and the Household Division of Labor
Families in Transition
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
9 How Does Gender Affect the Type of Work We Do and the Rewards We
Receive for Our Work? The Gender of Work
What Is Work?
Measuring the World’s Work
A Man’s Job: Masculinity and Work
When Men Can’t Work
Men in Predominantly Female Occupations
 The Glass Ceiling and the Glass Escalator
Sex Segregation in the Workplace
Gender and Dangerous Work: Protective Labor Laws
The Anatomy of Sex Segregation
Gender and Precarious Work
The Wage Gap: Why Sex Segregation Matters
Making Connections: Sex Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap
Explaining Sex Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap
Socialization as an Explanation for Sex Segregation
Human Capital Theory
Gendered Organizations
Transmen at Work
Comparable Worth
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
10 How Does Gender Affect What You Watch, What You Read, and What
You Play? The Gender of Media and Popular Culture
The Media: An Interesting Institution
Behind the Scenes: The Gender of Media Organizations
Gender, Advertising, and the Commodification of Gender
Media Power Theory: We’re All Sheep
Audience Power Theory: Power to the People
Transgender in the Media
Gender, Sexuality, and Slash Fiction
Super Girl Fan Fiction in China
The Struggle Over Images
Harems and Terrorists: Depictions of Arabs in the Media
Beware of Black Men: Race, Gender, and the Local News
Homer and Ralph: White, Working-Class Men on TV
Sexuality in the Media
Sexuality and Subculture
Soap Operas, Telenovelas, and Feminism
Are You a Feminist If You Watch Soap Operas?
Feminists as “Poisonous Serpents”
Masculinity and Video Games: Learning the Three Rs
The Battle of the Sexes and the Battle for the Remote Contro1
 The Gender of Leisure
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
11 How Does Gender Help Determine Who Has Power and Who Doesn’t?
The Gender of Politics and Power
A Brief Warning
Power: Good and Bad
Masculinity and Power
Who Really Has the Power? Hegemonic Masculinity
Coercive Power
The Geography of Fear
Rape-Prone and Rape-Free Cultures
Sexual Assault on Campus
Violent Intersections: The Gender of Human Trafficking
Gender Rights and Human Rights?
Hijab and Ethnocentrism
Institutional Power: Nations and Gender
My Missile’s Bigger Than Yours
Gender and Political Institutions
Men and Women in Office
The Smoke-Filled Room: Descriptive Representation
Strangers in the Halls of Power: Substantive Representation
Summing Up
Big Questions
Gender Exercises
What Can You Do? Resources for Social Change
Terms
Suggested Readings
Works Cited
Glossary
Index
About the Author
Specific Areas of Interest
Feminist Theory
Chapter 2

Pp. 20–30: “Feminist Theories and Their Influence on Sociological Thinking

About Gender” to “Sociological Theories of Gender”

Chapter 3

Pp. 94–98: “Ecofeminism and the Environment” to “How Do We Use Theory?”

Chapter 7

Pp. 259–261: “The Beauty Myth” to “Beauty and Gender Inequality”

Chapter 8

Pp. 325–338: “The Sexual Division of Labor and Gender Inequality” to “The
Doctrine of Separate Spheres”

Chapter 9

Pp. 405–407: “Comparable Worth” to “Big Questions”

Chapter 10

Pp. 446–455: “Are You a Feminist If You Watch Soap Operas?” to

“Masculinity and Video Games: Learning the Three Rs”

Chapter 11

Pp. 480–486: “Coercive Power” to “The Geography of Fear”

 Visit https://ebookluna.com
now to explore a diverse
collection of ebooks available
in formats like PDF, EPUB, and
MOBI, compatible with all
devices. Don’t miss the chance
to enjoy exciting offers and
quickly download high-quality
materials in just a few simple
steps!
Intersexuality and Transgender
Chapter 4

Pp. 110–129: “Sorting It All Out: Gender Socialization and Intersex Children”
to “Some Theories of Gender Socialization”
P. 117: “Cultural Artifact 4.2: Transgender Kids”
Pp. 135–143: “Doctors Teaching Gender: Intersex Socialization” to “The
Importance of Peer Groups”

Chapter 6

P. 231: Cultural Artifact 6.2: Swiping Right: Tinder, Online Dating, and Gender
Fluidity

Chapter 9

Pp. 401–406: “Transmen at Work” to “Comparable Worth”

Chapter 10

Pp. 431–436: “Transgender in the Media” to “Gender, Sexuality, and Slash

Fiction”

Chapter 11

Pp. 517–518: “Summing Up” to “Big Questions”

The Individual Approach
Chapter 2

Pp. 30–42: “Sex Roles” to “Interactionist Theories”

Chapter 3

Pp. 69–88: “Psychological Approaches to Gender” to “Queer Theory”

Chapter 4

Pp. 119–146: “Social Learning Theory” to “The Early Years: Primary

Socialization Into Gender”

Chapter 9

Pp. 393–401: “Socialization as an Explanation for Sex Segregation” to

“Gendered Organizations”
The Interactionist Approach
Chapter 2

Pp. 32–49: “Interactionist Theories” to “Institutional or Structural Approaches”

Chapter 4

Pp. 140–149: “The Importance of Peer Groups” to “Learning Gender Never

Ends: Secondary Socialization”
The Institutional Approach
Chapter 2

Pp. 42–53: “Institutional or Structural Approaches” to “Intersectional Feminist

Theory”

Chapter 9

Pp. 399–405: “Gendered Organizations” to “Transmen at Work”

Chapter 10

Pp. 419–431: “Behind the Scenes: The Gender of Media Organizations” to

“Media Power Theory: We’re All Sheep”

Chapter 11

Pp. 500–506: “Institutional Power: Nations and Gender” to “Men and Women
in Office”
Intersectionalality
Chapter 2

Pp. 49–56: “Intersectional Feminist Theory” to “Putting It All Together:

Integrative Theories”

Chapter 4

Pp. 147–151: “Learning to Be American: Socialization Through Immigration”

to “What Happens to Gender as We Age?”

Chapter 6

Pp. 223–229: “The Intersectionality of Friendship and Gender” to “Friendship

in Global Perspective”

Chapter 7

Pp. 265–270: “Eyelids and Empowerment: Cosmetic Surgery” to “Is Beauty

Power?”
Pp. 281–294: “Masculinity, Health, and Race” to “Women, Doctors, Midwives,
and Hormones”
Pp. 294–298: “Eugenics, Sterilization, and Population Control” to “Throwing
Like a Girl”

Chapter 8

Pp. 318–322: “Race and the Marriage Squeeze” to “Transnational Marriage”

Pp. 343–348: “Gay and Lesbian Households” to “Power and the Household
Division of Labor”

Chapter 9

Pp. 371–375: “When Men Can’t Work” to “Men in Predominantly Female

Occupations”

Chapter 10

Pp. 437–444: “Harems and Terrorists: Depictions of Arabs in the Media” to

“Sexuality in the Media”
Masculinity
Chapter 5

Pp. 175–180: “Men as Sexual Subjects” to “Women as Sexual Objects”

Pp. 185–189: “Men and Abstinence” to “Women at Female Strip Clubs”

Chapter 7

Pp. 271–294: “Men and Body Image” to “Women, Doctors, Midwives, and
Hormones”

Chapter 8

Pp. 337–343: “Transnational Fatherhood” to “The Second Shift”

Chapter 9

Pp. 367–376: “A Man’s Job: Masculinity and Work” to “The Glass Ceiling and
the Glass Escalator”

Chapter 10

Pp. 438–444: “Beware of Black Men: Race, Gender, and the Local News” to
“Sexuality in the Media”
Pp. 451–459: “Masculinity and Video Games: Learning the Three Rs” to “The
Battle of the Sexes and the Battle for the Remote Control”

Chapter 11

Pp. 475–496: “Masculinity and Power” to “Coercive Power”

Pp. 500–504: “My Missile’s Bigger Than Yours” to “Gender and Political
Institutions”
Global Perspective
Chapter 3

Pp. 88–95: “Gender Theories in Global Perspective” to “Ecofeminism and the

Environment”

Chapter 4

Pp. 131–136: “The One-Child Policy and Gender in China” to “Doctors

Teaching Gender: Intersex Socialization”

Chapter 5

Pp. 170–180: “Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective” to “Measuring

Sexuality: What Is Sexual Identity?”
Pp. 181–193: “Sexuality in Islamic Perspectives” to “Violating the Scripts”
Pp. 195–200: “Nationalism and Heteronormativity” to “Red = Top; Black =
Bottom”

Chapter 6

Pp. 225–229: “Friendship in Global Perspective” to “Families of Choice”

Pp. 229–237: “The Rules of Attraction” to “Courtship to Dating: A Brief
History”
Pp. 241–247: “Romantic Love in Cross-Cultural Perspective” to “The Gender
of Love”

Chapter 7

Pp. 262–265: “Exporting the Beauty Myth” to “The Problem With Bodies”
Pp. 280–284: “Dangerous Masculinity in Palestine” to “Masculinity, Health, and
Race”
Pp. 290–297: “Menopause in Cross-Cultural Perspective” to “Eugenics,
Sterilization, and Population Control”

Chapter 8

Pp. 319–327: “Transnational Marriage” to “Who Does What? The Gendered

Division of Labor”
 Pp. 333–348: “Separate Spheres in Global Perspective” to “The Division of
Household Labor”

Chapter 9

Pp. 362–375: “What Is Work?” to “A Man’s Job: Masculinity and Work”

Chapter 10

Pp. 445–456: “Soap Operas, Telenovelas, and Feminism” to “Masculinity and

Video Games: Learning the Three Rs”

Chapter 11

Pp. 493–500: “Violent Intersections: The Gender of Human Trafficking” to

“Gender Rights and Human Rights?”
Pp. 497–517: “Hijab and Ethnocentrism” to “Institutional Power: Nations and
Gender”
Preface to the Third Edition
Other documents randomly have
different content
 III

EDUCATION: FROEBEL

I have two boys, aged seven and four. They required a governess and
I got one. After a couple of months during which the usual
experiences in the training of young children were gone through, I
discovered that it was I who was being educated. My mind was
being swayed and drawn to a point of view. I was in contact with a
method so profound that it seemed as if I were dealing with, or
rather being dealt with by the forces of nature. I was in the presence
of great genius. What was it? The text book on Froebel by Hughes in
the International Series on Education made the matter clear.
Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of
the German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he
was studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He
lived in an age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and
before they had received their conclusive proof by being applied to
morphology.
This application has for a time killed philosophy, for it has
identified the new ideas with the physical sciences, and led men to
study the human mind in psychology and from without. Whereas the
mind and its laws can, in the nature of things, be studied only
through introspection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of the very
first calibre; he had the conception of flux, of change, of evolution to
start with; and he took up introspectively the study of the laws of
the human mind, choosing that province of the universe where they
are most visibly and typically exposed,—the mind of the growing
child.
The “laws” which he states are little more than a description of the
phenomena that he observed. They are statements of the results of
his experiments, and the language he employs can be translated to
suit the education of almost any one. His attention was so
concentrated upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. It can
be translated into the language of metaphysics, of Christian
theology, or of modern science, and it remains incorruptibly
coherent.
His method of study was the only method which can obtain results
in philosophy, self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the
child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison
with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young
children intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and
formulate his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out
that he made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a
philosophy more universal, than any other of which we have any
record.
But this is not the most important thing he did. He devised a
method based upon his experiments and set agoing the kindergarten
upon its course in conquest of the world. If it had not been for this,
he might never have been heard of, for the world has small use for
systems of philosophy, however profound, expressed in terms which
have been superseded and are become inexpressive. But Froebel
started a practice. He showed the way. He put in the hands of
persons to whom his philosophy must ever remain a mystery, the
means of working out those practical ends for which that philosophy
was designed.
The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential.
What sort of an animal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is
beginning to reach this point in his studies, and before he has asked
it, Froebel has answered him.
‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained
strength.’
It may be said at once that the substance of everything Froebel
says was known before. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius,
Emerson, and all of us have known it. Otherwise Froebel would be
unimportant. It is his correlation and his formulation of the main
facts about human life that make him important. It is as a summary
of wisdom, as a focus of idea, as a lens through which the rest of
the ideas in the world can be viewed, that he is great.

The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is

a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative
activity. It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in
proportion as it is unselfishly employed.
Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they
are the most important truths about the child; and let us see how
they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion,
conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to
be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any
discoverable time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature,
as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history,
been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the
discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of
science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient
dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further
pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a
book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of
Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of
the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find
you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you
picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by
your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your
analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you
yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as
the only conceivable point of view.
“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have
come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in
metaphysical language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it
independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous,
that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life
completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider
it.
Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual
existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort,
occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you,
merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource,
individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else
will.
The connection between this thought and the previous one is
apparent. It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a
unit gets into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you
have occupied only a fraction of him. If you set him to making
something, the minute he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy
nilly he is trying to make something significant, he is endeavoring to
express himself, the forces and powers within him begin coming to
his succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole
being is in operation. The result is a statement of some sort, and in
the process of making it the creature has developed. But when you
say “significant” you have already implied the existence of other
organisms. He is not expressing himself only, he is expressing them
all, and here comes Froebel with his third great discovery, that it is
by constant personal intercourse with others that the power to
express is gained. And on top of this comes the last law, so closely
related to the third as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered
by experiment, tested by practice, announced empirically and as a
fact, that the child is unselfish and only really happy when at work
creatively and for the use and behoof of others.
This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the
argument, and we are compelled to see, what we have already
known, that unselfishness and intellectual development are one and
the same thing, that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be
expressed in terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be
expressed as intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the
same point by another route.
 The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means
a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes,
and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the
other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and
the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent in
ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of
fulfilment returns upon itself.
It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with
in applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of
logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex
situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the
hands of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they
justify instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for
doing consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so
far as it has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of
or cares to imitate.
Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop
according to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of
their conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do
in the world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of
Emerson.
The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having
applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not
content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the
opinions, the conduct and the art of a character.
Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was
not more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi
Beta Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he
relapsed into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own
horizon? He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into
fragmentary inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he
knew before he retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life
would have made him blossom annually and last like Gladstone.
Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his
violation of two of Froebel’s laws of psychology. He fixed his
attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified.
Every moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with
people, meanwhile, became more and more formal as he grew older,
and his work more and more inexpressive.
Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What
has happened to that radical that he seems to have become so
moderate and reasonable? You find that for six months he has been
clerk to the Civil Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of
this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his
daily bread? His employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly
regions. He is dead here too.
There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence
and reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by
conduct. If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola’s manual,
you will come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can
resist the operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that
he has struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has
shirked. Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for
good during a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It
means that the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience
has drawn him forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in
him. He is not an absolute fighter.
Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist
untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement
he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of
evil. He was bred a banker.
Here is a village schoolma’am who from a rag of information in a
county paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated
controversy at Washington which you happen to know all about. She
has been reforming a poorhouse.
A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence
and persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club
loafer knows it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by
action.
 B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy
which gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: “It is a
coarseness of natural fibre.” It is no such thing. There is in every
man a natural fibre as fine as a poet’s. His coarseness is the
residuum of an act.
You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer,
and whom you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a
chop house he gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he
interprets in a novel way. The brains of the man surprise you. This
man, though he looks sordid, positively must have been sending a
younger brother to college during many years. There is no other
explanation of him.
The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural
law, not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth,
modestly formulated by a great naturalist.
Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the
universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can
only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our
character, and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or
despair. It is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law
and of all other spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all
things. What we see is only our own lives.
We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a
pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes
to see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the
heart and progress of Greek art.
But the worst is to come—the horror that makes intellect a
plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once
take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to
justify it. Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for.
Thraldom enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The
eternal struggle is for vision.
How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the
inexperienced. Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet
immodest, and he had read all the literatures of Europe. If you want
to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If
you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be
Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of
all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any
way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly
close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and
afterwards—next year—you will understand.
Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history,
which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in
courage, it comes out power.
This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff
that we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are
obliged to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many
different kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to
remind some one else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist
is unconscious to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his
command over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his
arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is
completely unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of
an organism which is functioning freely.
But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a
different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree, self-
comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in this
philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the
Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can
do so without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and
unconscious in their popular sense at other times.
The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own
powers was to be obtained only through creative activity. The
suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every school
of violin playing in Europe. For we have here the major canon of a
rational criticism. We find that in the old vocabulary such words as
genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., have always been
fumblingly used to denote different degrees in which some man’s
brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness. A
deliverance of this kind has always been designated as ‘creative,’ no
matter in what field it was found.
Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the
man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience
which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which
does not represent an original unitary vibration.
Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of
German song in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the
character. It has only been through that part of Goethe’s mind with
which he read Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the
peasant of the early scenes has lavished upon her all the various
reminiscences of the pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving,
but it is inorganic. It is not true.
For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do
anything true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him
does is right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns
in tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and
by, when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No
one will attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect
of any kind.
If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find
the reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men
upon whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.
The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There
is the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them
thinks to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation.
Their books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did
better because their method was truer.
Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has
been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English
scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment
they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more
blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend
of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of
them can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s
demonstration. They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a
New Universe like Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great
Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the kernel of life with the shell.
This was inevitable. A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this
last fusillade of the Dogma of Science—the old guard dogma that
dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole
matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human
nature on the other.
Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but
his knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development
so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.
This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art
ages, times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or
compose. The art which is lost is really the art of courageous action.
Neither war nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can
no more be lost than force, and the power to express it depends
upon an interest in life. The past has enriched us with conventions,
and whenever a man or a group of men arises who uses them and is
not subdued to them, we have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it
is a mere knack of the attention.
We had almost thought that art was finished, and we find we are
standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula
which fits every human activity.
Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of human development,
and what will it be?
The sum of all possible human knowledge is, as we have seen, an
expansion of our understanding of human nature, and this is got by
intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting them to do something.
In order to make them do it, in order to govern, you must
understand, and the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the species.
They summarize society. Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln,
Bismarck, these men knew their world.
But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human
fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which
the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the
power which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book
or a statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is
valuable forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a
thing till it looks right to him. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he
looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment
unconscious again, that the forces which produced it may be
satisfied. As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we
completely develop this power we become completely happy and
completely useful, for our acts, our statements, our notes, our
books, our statues become universally significant.
Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your
identity, to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all
men. It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found
and expressed. It was this toward which we tended, this that we
cared for—action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one
thing?
The complete development of every individual is necessary to our
complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has
ever been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives
proof that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor
paint, nor reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The
reasons for this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no
matter which side of it is turned toward us.
This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it
meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything. For
Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds
are universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are
the projection of a completely developed and completely
unconscious human intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to
the study of them that Hegel’s view of life is due. The great
educational forces in the world are proportioned in power to the
development of the individual man in the epochs they date from.
Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a personal influence which
directs thought for a thousand years and qualifies time forever.
 The division of the old ethics into egoism and altruism receives the
sanction of science. The turning of the attention upon selfish ends,
no matter how remote nor how momentary, hurts the organism,
contracts the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as
unhappiness. The turning of the attention toward public aims
benefits the organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt as
happiness. There is no complexity possible, for any mixed motive is a
selfish motive.
All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-
mastery, by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and
the force cooped in and controlled until it is released in the
functioning of the whole man.
In any sincere struggle for right, then, no matter how petty, we
are fighting for mankind, and this is just what everybody has always
known, always believed.
It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that somebody must pay the
bills; that if you live upon charity and can succeed in getting yourself
crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift and selfishness
somewhere. But the paradox is the same if put the other way, for
selfishness would never support you.
The question is purely one of fact, what thing comes first, what
thing satisfies the heart of man. He may support himself merely as a
means to help others. A man may start a pauper and die a
millionaire, and yet never think a thought or do an act which does
not add to the welfare of man. It is a question of ultimate controlling
intention.
Man the microcosm is a kingdom where reigns continual war. Now
he is a furnace of love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We
know very little about the mechanism by which these microcosms
communicate with one another. It seems likely that every iota of
feeling must be either transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm of
selfishness be conveyed, or some part of it, even by a glimpse of the
eye, it must leave a record of injury and start on a career of injury,
just so much loss to the world. On the other hand it may be
transformed into the other kind of force and expended later in good.
 The thing is governed by some simple law, although man has not
yet been able to reduce it to algebra. What is most curious is this,
that the tendency of any man to believe in the reaction as a law, is
not dependent upon his scientific training, but upon his moral
experience. The best heads in physics will still betray a belief that a
man must be able to afford to be unselfish, that selfishness often
does good, that it is a muddled up affair, and a thing outside of
science which they will get round to later. Everybody sees a few
degrees in the arc of this law. Read the index on the quadrant and
you will have his character. Now and then some saint swears he sees
a circle.
Let us press the inquest. It is not likely that life itself is duplex or
consists of two kinds of force, one egoistic, one altruistic. The
likelihood is the other way. There is only one force which vibrates
through these organisms. It is absolutely beneficent only when it
completely controls one of them, so that the whole thing sings
together.
This music is the highest, but the notes that go to make it up are
everywhere. Altruism does not arise, is not imposed from without, at
any period or by any crisis, by progress or by society. The spiral
unwinds with the unwinding life upon the globe. It is the form of
illusion under which all life proceeds. It is the law of mind. The eye
treats space and color as entities. It cannot see on any other terms.
The stomach digests food, but not its own lining. We are obliged to
think in terms of the objective universe. We are not wholesome
unless we are self-forgetting. There is no cranny in all the million
manifestations of nature where you can interfere between the
organism and its object without representing disease.
And man is more than a mere altruistic animal. At least the
religions of Humanity have never expressed him. At those times
when he is entirely unselfish and therefore entirely himself, when he
feels himself to be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love,
all reverence, all service to something not himself, yet something
personal, he has faith. The theologies are attempts to formulate this
state of mind in order that it may be preserved. It is clear enough
that every mind must speak in its own symbols, and that the
symbols of one must always appear to another as illusions. Yet each
man for himself knows he faces a reality. This is a psychological
necessity. Destroy the belief, and on the instant he changes. Show
him that he is the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, a half man.
A man whose mind is divided, as, for instance, by the consciousness
of a personal motive, cannot believe. He stands like the wicked king
in the play of Hamlet; unable to pray. It is a psychological
impossibility.
The concern of mankind for their forms of doctrine is gratuitous.
Faith re-appears under new names. You cannot convince a lover that
he is bent on self-development, nor any decent man that he does
not believe in, is not controlled by something higher than himself.
The question is not one of words.
We may trace this reverent attitude of mind upward through the
acts and activities of the spirit, and it makes no difference whether
we regard religion as the source and origin of them all or as the
summary of them all.
In Shakespeare’s plays we see a cycle of human beings, the most
living that we have ever met with, and the absence of mystical or
emotional religion from many of the plays is one of the wonders of
nature. There is no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; we are
not offended. The reason may be that the element has been
employed in the act of creation. Religion has been consumed in the
development of character. It is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to
the characters. It is here seen as artistic perfection. The same is true
of the Greek statues and of the Sistine Sibyls, and of other work left
by those two periods, the only other periods in which the individual
attained completion.
Observe that in all this philosophy there is no dogma anywhere,
no term whose definition you have to learn, no term which makes
the lying claim that it can be used twice with the same connotation.
Froebel had the instinct of a poet and knew his language was
figurative. It was this that freed him from the Middle Ages and gave
him to the future. He took theology as lightly as he took
metaphysics. He did not impose them, he evoked them. He lived and
thought in the spirit.
If you turn from Froebel’s analysis of human nature to Goethe’s,
there seem to be a thousand years between them. The one is
scientific, the other is mediæval. The one has freed himself from the
influences of the revival of learning, the other has not. The one is
open, the other is closed. The one is free, the other is self-conscious.
But Froebel has not yet set free the rest of the race, and of course
the literature and practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas.
The terms of Froebel are a snare to those whose interest in
childhood came later than their interest in education and whose
attention is fixed upon the terms rather than upon the child. He is
easy reading to the other sort.
But more important than Froebel’s formulation of these great
truths was his formulation of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his
labored systems, but his practical suggestions born of experience as
to how to help another person to develop. It was these methods,
this attitude of the teacher towards the child, of the individual
towards his fellow, that came at me in my own house unexpectedly,
emanating from some unknown mind, which seemed so great as
practically to include Christianity.
“Do not imagine,” he says at every moment, “that you can do
anything for this creature except by getting it to move
spontaneously. You have not begun till you have done this, and
remember that anything else you do is just so much harm.”
He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The
following passage gives in a few words the answer to the most
important practical question in life: how we ought to approach
another human being. The thing is said so simply, it seems almost
commonplace, yet it comes from one greater than Kant.
“Between educator and pupil, between request and obedience,
there should invisibly rule a third something to which educator and
pupil are equally subject. This third something is the right, the best,
necessarily conditioned and expressed without arbitrariness in the
circumstances. The calm recognition, the clear knowledge, and the
serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of this third something, is the
particular feature that should be constantly and clearly manifest in
the bearing and the conduct of the educator and teacher, and often
firmly and sternly emphasized by him.”
Beneath this statement there lies a law of reaction. The human
organism responds in kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and
he sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to convince him that
you are right, concede that from his point of view he is right, then
move the point and he follows. If you keep your temper in teaching
a child, you teach him to keep his temper, and this is more important
than his lesson.
The difficulty we find is to resist the reaction in ourselves to some
one else’s initiative. The affair is outside the province of reason, and
results from a transfer of force by means which we do not
understand. The command to “turn the other cheek” is a picturesque
figure for the attitude which will enable you to prevail the quickest
and by the highest means, and which Froebel enables us to see in its
scientific aspect.
But it is unnecessary to illustrate further what any one who comes
in contact with a kindergarten will, through all the mists of dogma
and ignorance which overspread the place, discover for himself. We
have a science founded upon human nature, applied to education.
Mr. Hughes in his closing paragraph uses the language of theology,
but he makes no overstatement:—
“When Froebel’s ethical teaching has wrought its perfect work in
the homes, the schools, and the churches, then his complete ideal,
which is the gospel ideal in practice, will be the greatest controlling
and uplifting force in the world.”
One word more about the relation between Froebel’s thought and
current science.
The view of man as an active animal, a struggler, alive and happy
only in activity, falls in naturally with what we know of the animal
kingdom. The philosophers are at war over science and religion, over
the origin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By an external
consideration of the animal hierarchy they have come to certain
conclusions which they strive to apply to the highest animal, man.
There is great boggling over him; because these non-self-regarding
instincts, which are not very apparent from the outside, seem to
conflict with certain generalizations relative to the conservation of
species. The scientists look into a drop of water and see animals
eating each other up. What they have not seen is that all this
ferocity goes forward, subject to customs as rigid as a military code,
and that it is this code which conserves the species. The “struggle
for existence” as it is commonly conceived would exterminate in
short order any species that indulged in it.
Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other end of the scale and
studying life from the inside, has established certain facts, certain
laws, which have as great a weight, and deserve as much to be
carried downward in the scale, as the generalizations of the
naturalists (very likely imperfect) have to be carried upward.
The animal man is unselfish. It is impossible to make his organism
vibrate as a unity except by some emotion which can be shown to be
non-self-regarding. At what point in the scale of nature does this
quality begin to manifest itself? Is the dog happy when he is selfish;
do the laws of psychology outlined by Froebel apply, and to what
extent do they apply, to the horse or the monkey? These things
must be patiently studied, and the corrections must be made. In the
mean time, in dealing with man himself, we are obliged to rely upon
the latest scientific report of him, however imperfect, and until
Froebel’s laws are destroyed, we need not attempt to adjust our
ideas of man to the dogmas developed by the study of the lower
animals.
DEMOCRACY
 IV

DEMOCRACY

The system of choosing public officials by popular vote is properly

enough called Democracy. The terms of tenure and nomenclature,
etc., are matters of detail. If we are to seek any test as to what
constitutes a Democracy, we may as well take as a test the formal
setting up at a particular time of some scheme of government by the
popular will. England has been a democracy since the Act of
Settlement, and if it be said that universal suffrage was not then
known, the answer is that it is not known now, and never can be
known. The exclusions of women and non-naturalized residents or
even of criminals and lunatics are matters of convenience. It is a
question of degree.
Again, it is impossible that all the officials should be elected, and
the assignment to the elected officials of the power to appoint the
others is a matter of convenience. The very simple expedients
adopted by the framers of the United States Constitution were the
result of English experience and French theory. The intellect of
France had, during the eighteenth century, put into portable form
the ideas that had been at work in England’s institutions. The
theoretical part of it, the division of government into three
departments, had been worked out from European experience going
back to Greek times. The written constitution was a mere expansion
of the Bill of Rights. Our Framers were men who had had personal
experience in governing under the English system in force in the
colonies, where the power of practical self-government had been
developed by isolation. They received from the French a scientific
view of that system. They had learned by experience that a
confederacy was not a government, and they proceeded to bind the
country together by the grant of that power which defines
government, the power to tax. The extension to a large territory of a
system which was in practical operation in all its parts, was in one
sense a miracle of intelligence, in another sense it was the only
conceivable solution of the problem of unity. Philosophers speak of
Democracy as if it were the outcome of choice. It has been the
outcome of events. No other system would have endured, and every
formula of government that did not embody an old usage would
have been transformed in ten years by the popular will into
something that did.
The reason the Constitution of the United States is the most
remarkable document in existence is that it contained so little of
novelty. The election of some officers and the appointment of the
rest, that was what the people were used to. That is democracy.
There is of course no such thing as a pure democracy, or a pure
monarchy. Every government is in practice the outcome of forces of
which a very small fraction are expressed in its constitution and
laws.
A constitution is a profession of faith, a summary written on a
bulletin board, and so far good. The United States had this
advantage in starting upon her career, that the bulletin was a very
accurate summary of existing customs, and was in itself an inspiring
proof of the virtue of the people. We are driven into admiring the
Colonists as among the most enlightened of their kind. It is true that
the revolution was conducted, and the Constitution adopted by the
activity of a small minority. But this is true of all revolutions. The
point is that the leaders represented sense and virtue. The people
followed.
The moment the scheme was launched it became the sport of the
elements. In the North a trading bourgeoisie grew up under it. In
the South a slave-holding oligarchy, a society so fantastically out of
touch with the modern world that it seems like something left over
from the times before Christ, found no difficulty in making use of the
forms of Democracy. During the half century that followed, these
two societies became so hostile to each other that conflict was
inevitable, and there ensued a death-grapple in four years of war, a
war to extinction. At the end of the war no trace of the oligarchy
remained upon the face of the earth. And yet these forms of
government survived and began to operate immediately, under new
auspices of course, deflected by new passions, showing new shapes
of distortion, yet ideally the same. The only common element
between the north and the south was the reverence for these forms
of government.
Meanwhile civilization had been creeping westward in a margin of
frontier life, conducted under these forms. Behind this moved a belt
of farming and village life, at war with the backwoods ideals, but
using the same forms of government. Then arose the railroad era
and tore millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities,
obliterated State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything,
ruled everybody—still under these forms.
Let us examine them.
The problem of government is to protect the individuals in a
community against each other, and to protect them all against the
rest of the world. The power to interfere and the power to represent
must be lodged somewhere, and the question is how to arrange it so
that this power shall not be turned against the people. Democracy
solves it by election. Let the people choose their rulers. Instantly
every man is turned into a custodian, a part of him is dedicated to
the public. He is prevented by fundamental theory of law from being
absolutely selfish. Corrupt him how you will, deflect him, play upon
him, degrade, deceive him, you cannot shut him off from this
influence. The framework of government makes continuous appeal
to the highest within him. It draws him as the moon draws the sea.
This appeal is one to which the organic nature of man responds, as
we have seen. For man is an unselfish animal. The law of his nature
is expressed in the framework of government. The arrangement
shows a wisdom so profound that all historical philosophy grows
cheap before it.
If you jump from the study of psychology straight into the theory
of democracy, you see why it was that the allegiance to the ideas of
the United States Constitution endured through slavery, through the
carpetbag era, through the Tweed ring. It was not the letter, but the
spirit which was inextinguishable.
It has taken a century of pamphlets to break down the distinctions
between men based upon orders of nobility, property, creed, etc.
Fifteen minutes of psychology would have levelled men and set them
upon the same footing as that upon which they walk into a hospital.
The creature man is by this system dealt with so simply as he had
not been dealt with since the birth of Christ. It must be conceded
that the thing could not even have been tried, except with a people
familiar with the distinctions between legislative, executive, and
judicial power, criminal and civil law, etc. Altruistic impulse would not
have sufficed to execute itself. But the divisions and forms of
thought expressive of that altruism already existed, and were in
operation, as we have seen.
It is thought that the peculiar merit of Democracy lies in this: that
it gives to every man a chance to pursue his own ends. The reverse
is true. The merit lies in the assumption imposed upon every man
that he shall serve his fellow men. This is by the law of his being his
only chance for happiness. You cannot find a man who does not
know this. If you examine the consciousness of any typical minion of
success, you will find that his source of inward content lies in a belief
that his success has benefited somebody—his kindred, his townsfolk
—mankind.
The concentration of every man on his own interests has been the
danger and not the safety of Democracy; for Democracy
contemplates that every man shall think first of the State and next of
himself. This is its only justification. In so far as it is operated by
men who are thinking first of their own interests and then of the
State, its operation is distorted.
Democracy assumes perfection in human nature. In so far as an
official or a voter is corrupt, you will have bad government. Or to put
the same thing in another way, all corruption is shown up as a loss
of the power of self-government. The framework of government lies
there exposed in all its parts like a vast and complex dial, recording
with the nicety of a scientific instrument every departure from virtue
of the human beings whose lives, whose standards, whose very
thoughts are registered against it. When selfishness reaches a
certain point, the machine stops. Government by force comes in. We
have had railroad riots and iron foundry riots. In Denver not many
months ago thirty thousand people, or about one-fifth of the
population, engaged in a carnival of destruction and raided a picnic
given by the Cattle Association. These ebullitions, which look like
mania, are nothing but an acute form of blind selfishness, due to the
education of a period in which everything has been settled by an
appeal to the self-interest of the individual. The Bryanism, with
which we must all sympathize, is nothing but a revolt on the part of
the poorer classes against the exploitation of the country by the
capitalist, due to pension laws, tariffs, trusts, etc. “Something must
now be done for me,” says the laboring man, and the mine owner
says “Silver.” The appeal is by a little manipulation worked up into a
craze, with the result that property is unsafe. The craze is a craze of
mistaken selfishness. One of the weapons with which the richer
classes fought it was corruption. They fed the element which was
devouring them. There is talk of bayonets, and it is true that either
bayonets or public spirit must in such cases be the issue. We cannot
have property at the mercy of a mob, and if any single state like
Colorado were separated from the rest, and the spirit of unreason
should possess it utterly, government by force would ensue.
Elections would be superseded, and property would improvise some
mode of practical government which every intelligent man would
back. The danger of an episode of this sort is that it interrupts the
course of things. It is revolution. It is the breakdown of democracy,
and tends to perpetuate the conditions of incompetence out of which
the crisis arises. Fortunately the country is so large that one State
holds up the next. No community would tolerate a state of siege for
more than six months, and the State would return to educational
methods, weaker but alive.
A military imposition of order is then the extreme case. But the
Boss system is the halfway house in the breakdown of free
government. In the Boss system we have seen a lack of virtue in the
people show itself in the shape of a government, in fact autocratic,
but in form republican. Here again the loss in the power of self-
government is apparent.
But there is no departure from civic virtue which can get by
unnoticed. Take the case of a voter who submits to having his street
kept dirty because he fears that a protest would make him
disagreeably conspicuous. Here also the loss of power of self-
government is traceably recorded. So much selfishness—so much
filth.
If we now recur for a moment to the state of things described in
the essay on politics, we see that our government in all its branches
has reflected the occupation and spiritual state of the people very
perfectly. But outside of the recurrent and regular political activity of
the country, there has grown up during the past few years a sort of
guerilla warfare of reform. This represents the conservative morality
of the community, the instinct of right government which resents the
treason to our institutions seen in their operation for private gain.
The reformers’ methods of work are necessarily democratic, and it is
here that the most delicate tests of self-seeking are to be found.
These reformers desire to increase the unselfishness in the world,
yet the moment they attempt a practical reform they are told that
any appeal to an unselfish motive in politics means sure failure. They
accordingly make every variety of endeavor to use the selfishness of
some one as a lever to increase the unselfishness of somebody else.
The thing is worked out in daylight time after time, year after year,
and the results are recorded in millegrams. No obscurity is possible
because every man stands on the same footing. Our minds are not
obscured by thinking that A must be sincere because he is a bishop,
or need not be sincere because he is a lord.
There is no landlord class with prejudices, no socialist class with
theories. There are no interests except money interests, and against
money the fight is made. If a man is a traitor it is because he has
been bought. The results, stated in terms of ethical theory, are
simply startling.
 A reform movement employs a paid secretary. In so far as he gets
the place because of his reform principles he represents an appeal to
selfishness. This is instantly reflected in his associates, it colors the
movement. He himself is attracted partly by the pay. By an operation
as impossible to avoid as the law of gravity he enlists others who are
also partially self-seeking.
A Good Government Club is formed by X, and every member is
called upon for dues and work. It thrives. Another is founded by Y
and supported by him because of his belief that reform cannot
support itself but must be subsidized. Inside of three weeks the
existence of X’s Club is threatened, because its members hear that
Y’s Club is charitably supported and they themselves wish relief.
They are turned from workers into strikers by the mere report that
there is money somewhere. Spend $100 on the Club, and Tammany
will be able to buy it when the need arises. So frightfully accurate is
the record of an appeal to self-interest made in the course of reform,
that no one who watches such an attempt can ever thereafter hope
to do evil that good may come.
The system lays bare the operation of forces hitherto merely
suspected. Democracy makes the bold cut across every man and
divides him into a public man and a private man. It is a man-ometer.
You could by means of it stand up in line every man in New York,
grading them according to the ratio of principle and self-interest in
each.
In England a man takes office as the pay for services to the
government. In America he does the same. It is part of their system,
part of our corruption. This may seem a small point, but it will work
out large. An absolute standard is imposed. That our most
pronounced reformers are far from understanding their duties gives
proof of the degradation of the times, but it exalts the plan of
government. These men will lead a reform for four weeks, as a great
favor, a great sacrifice, under protest, apologizing to business. They
say public duties come first only in war time. They give, out of
conscience and with the left hand, what remains after a feast for
themselves. And these are the saints. Tell one of them that he has
not set an honorable standard of living for his contemporaries
unless, having his wants supplied, he makes public activity his first
aim in life, and he will reply he wishes he could do so. He hopes
later to devote himself to such things. He will give you a
subscription. This man lives in a Democracy but he denies its claims.
He too is recorded.
The English, who gave us all we know of freedom, have been the
first to understand its meaning. They too have suffered during the
last century from the ravages of plutocracy, from the disease of
commerce. But they had behind them the intellectual heritage of the
world. They had bulwarks of education, philanthropy, thought,
training, ambition, enthusiasm, the ideals of man. It was these
things, this reservoir of spiritual power, that turned the tide of
commercialism in England, and not as we so cheaply imagine her
“leisure class.” The men and women who in the last ten years have
taken hold of the Municipality of London, and now work like beavers
in its reform, are not rich. Some of them may be rich, but the force
that makes them toil comes neither out of riches nor out of poverty,
but out of a discovery as to the use of life. These Englishmen have
outlived the illusions of business. As towards them we are like
children. If it were a matter of mere riches we have wealth enough
to make their “leisure class” ridiculous. If there must be some term
in the heaping of money before the energies of our better burghers
are to be diverted toward public ends, we may wait till doomsday.
But the reaction is of another sort, and is very simple. Let us be just
to the conscience-givers. They dare not give more. The American is
ashamed to lose a dollar. He does not want the dollar half the time,
but he will lose caste if he foregoes it. Our merchant princes go on
special commissions for rapid transit, and receive $5000 apiece.
They must be paid. Out of custom they must receive pay because
“their time is valuable,” and thus the virtue and meaning of their
office receives a soil: they do not work. All this is, even at the
present moment, against the private instincts of many of them. It is
apparent that they stand without, shame-faced. It needs only
example to give them courage. A few more reform movements in
which they see each other as citizens, will knock the shackles from
their imagination and make men of them. And then we shall have
reform in earnest. For with this enfranchisement will come their
great awakening to the fact that not they only but all men are really
unselfish. It is the obscure disbelief in this salvation which has made
reform so hard where it might be so easy. As soon as the reformers
shall have reformed themselves, they will avoid making any appeal
to self-interest as so much lost time, so much corruption, and will
walk boldly upon the waves of idealism which will hold them up.
If commerce has been our ruin, our form of government is our
salvation. Imagine a hereditary aristocracy, a State church, a limited
monarchy to have existed here during the last thirty years. By this
time it would have been owned hand and foot, tied up and anchored
in every abuse, engaged day and night in devising new yokes for the
people. The interests now dominant know the ropes and do their
best, but they cannot corrupt the sea. They cannot stop the
continual ferment of popular election and reform candidate. The
whole apparatus of government is a great educational machine
which no one can stop. The power of light is enlisted on the side of
order. A property qualification would have been an anchor to
windward for the unrighteous. At the bottom of the peculiarly
hopeless condition of Philadelphia lie the small house and lot of the
laboring man. They can be taxed. They can be cajoled and conjured
with. Corruption is entrenched.

We find then in democracy a frame of government by which

private selfishness, the bane and terror of all government, is thrust
brutally to the front and kept there, staring in hideous openness.
Nothing except such an era as that which we have just come
through, during which we have grown used to absolute self-seeking
as the normal state of man, could so have glazed the eyes of men
that they could not see thrift even in a public official as a crime, or
self-sacrifice even in a public official except as a folly. And yet so
sound is the heart of man that in spite of this corruption and
debauchery, the American people, the masses of them, are the most
promising people extant. We have a special disease. It is our minds
which have been injured. We are cross-eyed with business
selfishness and open to the heavens on all other sides. For this
openness we must thank Democracy. Here are no warped beings,
but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary spell. The
American citizen, by escaping the superstitions studded over Europe
since the days of the Roman empire, has a directer view of life
(when he shall open his eyes) than any people since the
Elizabethans. He will have no prejudices. He will be empirical. But he
must forswear thrift, and the calculating of interest in his sleep. No
religious revival will help us. We are religious enough already. It is
our relaxation. Only the painful unwinding of that intellectual knot
into which our minds are tied,—that state of intense selfishness
during which we see business advancement as our first duty, taught
us at the cradle, enforced by example, inculcated like a religion,—
can make us begin to operate our institutions upon the lines on
which they alone can run freely, and we ourselves develop normally.
This unwinding will come through a simple inspection of our
condition. Let no one worry about the forms and particular measures
of betterment. They will flow naturally from the public
acknowledgment by the individual of facts which he privately knows
and has always known and always denied.
This goes on hourly. Those people who do not see it, look for it in
the wrong places. You cannot expect it to show itself in the public
offices. They are the strongholds of the enemy. You cannot expect it
to appear very often in the children of captivity, the upper
bourgeoisie. These men are easily put to sleep and will take the
promise of a politician any day as an excuse for non-activity. They
give consent. What we want is assertion, and it is coming like a
murmur from the poorer classes who desire the right and who need
only leadership to make them honest.
It is the recurrent tragedy in reform movements that the
merchants put forward something that the laboring man instantly
nails for a lie. It is not the loss of the election which does the harm,
but this insult to the souls of men.
Let no one expect the millennium, but let us play fair. We can see
that our standards, particularly among the well-to-do, are so low
that mere inspection of them causes indignant protest. But we must
also know that when we accepted democracy as our form of
government we ranked the political education of the individual as
more important than the expert administration of government. This
last can come only as a result, not as a precurser of the other.
The example of a whole people, mad with one passion, living
under a system which implies the abnegation of that passion, has
laid bare the heart of a community, has shown the interrelations
between the organs and functions of a society, in a way never before
visible in the history of the world. Everything is disturbed, but
everything is visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, yet betraying
all things; Architecture, still submerged in commerce but showing
every year some vital change; Social Life, the mere creature of
abuses, like a child covered with scars, but growing healthy; the
Drama, a drudge to thrift every way and yet palpably alive. By the
light of these things and their relation to each other we may view
history.
The American is a typical being. He is a creature of a single
passion. In so far as Tyre was commercial she was American. You
can reconstruct much of Venetian politics from a town caucus. In so
far as London is commercial it is American. You can trace the thing
in the shape of a handbill in Moscow. Or to take the matter up from
the other side: you can, by taking up these correlated ganglia of
American society, which do nevertheless simply represent the heart
of man, and are always present in every society—by imagining the
enlargement of one function, and the disuse of the next, you can
reconstruct the Greek period and re-imagine Athens.
No wonder the sociologists study America. It seems as if the key
and cause of human progress might be clutched from her entrails.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookluna.com