Chapter VII: Part 7

The novice soon finds that he is expected to defend the citadel, even against his own heresies. The lawyer who finds anomalies in the law, injustice in the courts, is not encouraged to publish abroad his facts, or make proposals for reform. The student who finds antiquated method, erroneous hypotheses in his subject, is not expected to use his knowledge and his genius to remodel the study. The minister who comes upon new and living interpretations for his old creeds is not encouraged to speak forth the truth that is in him. Nor is the business man who finds corrupt practices in his business encouraged to give the secrets away. There is a constant social pressure on these “reformers” to leave things alone.

And this does not arise from any corrupt connivance with the wrong, or from any sympathy with the evildoers. The cry rises equally from the corrupt and the holy, from the men who are responsible for the abuses and those who are innocent, from those who know of them and those who do not. It is simply the instinctive reaction of the herd against anything that savors of the unusual; it is the tendency of every social group simply to resist change. This alarm at innovation is universal, from college presidents to Catholic peasants, in fashionable club or sewing circle or political party. On the radical there is immediately brought, without examination, without reason or excuse, the whole pressure of the organization to stultify his vision and force him back into the required grooves. The methods employed are many: a warning is issued against him as being unsound and unsafe; his motive is to make trouble, or revenge himself on the directors for some slight; finally he is solemnly pilloried as an “enemy of the people.” Excellent reasons are discovered for his suppression. Effective working of an organization requires coöperation, but also subordination; in the interests of efficiency, therefore, individual opinion cannot be allowed full sway. The reputation of the organization before the world depends on its presenting a harmonious and united front; internal disagreements and criticisms tend to destroy the respect of the public. Smoothness of working is imperative; a certain individual liberty must, therefore, be sacrificed for the success of the organization. And if these plausible excuses fail, there is always the appeal to authority and to tried and tested experience. Now all these reasons are simply apologies brought up after the fact to justify the first instinctive reaction. What they all mean is this, and only this: He would unsettle things; away with him!

In olden times, they had sterner ways of enforcing these pressures. But although the stake and dungeon have disappeared, the spirit of conservatism does not seem to have changed very much. Educated men still defend the hoariest abuses, still stand sponsor for utterly antiquated laws and ideals. That is why the youth of this generation has to be so suspicious of those who seem to speak authoritatively. He knows not whom he can trust, for few there are who speak from their own inner conviction. Most of our leaders and moulders of public opinion speak simply as puppets pulled by the strings of the conservative bigotry of their class or group. It is well that the youth of to-day should know this, for the knowledge will go far towards steeling him against that most insidious form of pressure that comes from the intellectual and spiritual prestige of successful and honored men. When youth sees that a large part of their success has been simply their succumbing to social pressure, and that their honor is based largely on the fact that they do not annoy vested interests with proposals or agitations for betterment, he will seek to discover new standards of success, and find his prophets and guides among the less fortunate, perhaps, but among those who have retained their real integrity. This numbing palsy of conservative assent which steals over so many brilliant and sincere young men as they are subjected to the influence of prestige and authority in their profession is the most dangerous disease that threatens youth. It can be resisted only by constant criticism and candid vigilance. “Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good,” should be the motto of the intellectual life. Only by testing and comparing all the ideals that are presented to one is it possible to dodge that pressure of authority that would crush the soul’s original enthusiasms and beliefs. Not doubt but convention is the real enemy of youth.

Yet these spiritual pressures are comparatively easy to dodge when one is once awake to them. It is the physical pressure that those in power are able to bring to bear upon the dissenter that constitutes the real problem. The weak man soon becomes convinced of his hardihood and audacity in supposing that his ideas could be more valuable than the running tradition, and recants his heresies. But those who stick stiff-neckedly out are soon crushed. When the youth is settled in life, has trained for his profession and burned his bridges behind him, it means a great deal to combat authority. For those in power can make use of the economic pressure to force him to conformity. It is the shame of our universities that they are giving constant illustrations of this use of arbitrary power, directed usually against nonconformity in social and political opinion. Recent examples show the length to which even these supposedly enlightened institutions are willing to go to prevent social heresy in their midst. Often such harsh measures are not needed. A subtle appeal to a man’s honor is effective. “While you are a member of a society,” it is said, “it is your duty to think in harmony with its ideals and policies. If you no longer agree with those ideals, it is your duty to withdraw. You can fight honorably for your own ideas only from the outside.” All that need be said about this doctrine, so fair and reasonable on the surface, is that it contains all the philosophic support that would perpetuate the evil of the world forever. For it means attacking vested evil from the weakest vantage-point; it means willfully withdrawing to the greatest distance, shooting one’s puny arrows at the citadel, and then expecting to capture it. It means also to deny any possibility of progress within the organization itself. For as soon as dissent from the common inertia developed, it would be automatically eliminated. It is a principle, of course, that plays directly into the hands of the conservators. It is an appeal to honor that is dishonorable. Let it seduce no man’s sincerity!

The principal object of every organization, as every youth soon discovers who feels dissatisfaction with the policies of church, club, college, or party, is to remain true to type. Each is organized with a central vigilance committee, whose ostensible function is direction, but whose real business is to resist threatening change and keep matters as they are. The ideal is smoothness; every part of the machine is expected to run along in its well-oiled groove. Youths who have tried to introduce their new ideas into such organizations know the weight of this fearful resistance. It seems usually as if all the wisdom and experience of these elders had taught them only the excellence of doing nothing at all. Their favorite epithet for those who have individual opinions is “trouble-makers,” forgetting that men do not run the risk of the unpopularity and opprobrium that aggressiveness always causes, for the sheer love of making trouble. Through an instinct of self-preservation, such an organization always places loyalty above truth, the permanence of the organization above the permanence of its principles. Even in churches we are told that to alter one’s opinion of a creed to which one has once given allegiance is basely to betray one’s higher nature. These are the pressures that keep wavering men in the footpaths where they have once put their feet, and stunts their truer, growing selves. How many souls a false loyalty has blunted none can say; perhaps almost as many as false duty!

In the dodging of these pressures many a man finds the real spiritual battle of his life. They are a challenge to all his courage and faith. Unless he understands their nature, his defeat will bring despair or cynicism. When the group is weak and he is strong, he may resist successfully, press back in his turn, actually create a public opinion that will support him, and transfuse it all with his new spirit and attitude. Fortunate, indeed, is he who can not only dodge these pressures but dissolve them! If he is weak and his efforts are useless, and the pressure threatens to crush him, he would better withdraw and let the organization go to its own diseased perdition. If he can remain within without sacrifice to his principles, this is well, for then he has a vantage-ground for the enunciation of those principles. Eternal vigilance, however, is the price of his liberty.

The secret ambition of the group seems to be to turn out all its members as nearly alike as possible. It seeks to create a type to which all new adherents shall be moulded. Each group, then, that we have relations with is ceaselessly working to mould us to its type and pattern. It is this marvellous unseen power that a group has of forming after its own image all that come under its influence, that conquers men. It has the two instincts of self-preservation and propagation strongly developed, and we tend unthinkingly to measure its value in terms of its success in the expression of those instincts. Rather should it be measured always in terms of its ability to create and stimulate varied individuality. This is the new ideal of social life. This is what makes it so imperative that young men of to-day should recognize and dodge the pressures that would thwart the assertion of this ideal. The aim of the group must be to cultivate personality, leaving open the road for each to follow his own. The bond of cohesion will be the common direction in which those roads point, but this is far from saying that all the travelers must be alike. It is enough that there be a common aim and a common ideal.

Societies are rarely content with this, however; they demand a close mechanical similarity, and a conformity to a reactionary and not a progressive type. If we would be resolute in turning our gaze towards the common aim, and dodging the pressure of the common pattern, our family, business, and social life would be filled with a new spirit. We can scarcely imagine the achievement and liberation that would result. Individuality would come to its own; it would no longer be suspect. Youth would no longer be fettered and bound, but would come to its own as the leaven and even leader of life. Men would worship progress as they now worship stagnation; their ideal in working together would be a living effectiveness instead of a mechanical efficiency.

This gospel is no call to ease and comfort. It is rather one of peril. The youth of this generation will not be so lightly seduced, or go so innocently into the bonds of conservatism and convention, under the impression that they are following the inspired road to success. Their consciences will be more delicate. They know now the dangers that confront them and the road they are called on to tread. It is not an easy road. It is beset with opportunities for real eccentricity, for selfishness, for willfulness, for mere bravado. It would be surprising, after the long premium that has been placed on the pattern, not to see a reaction in favor of sheer freakishness. Many of our modern radicals are examples of this reaction. Yet their method is so sound, their goal so clear and noble, their spirit so sincere, that they are true pioneers of the new individuality. Their raciness is but the raciness of all pioneers everywhere. And much of their irresponsibility is a result of that intolerable pressure against which they are revolting. They have dodged it, but it dogs them and concentrates itself sullenly behind them to punish them for their temerity. The scorn of the world hurts and hampers them. That ridicule which the family employed against deviation is employed in all large social movements against the innovators. Yet slowly and surely the new social ideal makes its way.

It is not a call to the surrendering of obligations, in family or business or profession, but it is a call to the criticism of obligations. Youth must distinguish carefully between the essential duties and the non-essential, between those which make for the realization of the best common ideals, and those which make merely for the maintenance of a dogma or unchallenged superstition. By resisting the pressures that would warp, do we really best serve society; by allowing our free personality to develop, do we contribute most to the common good. We must recognize that our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires. No duty that runs rough-shod over the personality can have a legitimate claim upon us. We serve by being as well as by doing.

It is easy to distort this teaching into a counsel to unbridled selfishness. And that, of course, is the risk. But shall we not dare to take the risk? It may be also that in our care to dodge the pressures, we may lose all the inestimable influences of good that come along mixed in with the hurtful. But shall we not take the risk? Our judgments can only grow by exercise; we can only learn by constantly discriminating. Self-recognition is necessary to know one’s road, but, knowing the road, the price of the mistakes and perils is worth paying. The following of that road will be all the discipline one needs. Discipline does not mean being moulded by outside forces, but sticking to one’s road against the forces that would deflect or bury the soul. People speak of finding one’s niche in the world. Society, as we have seen, is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of a statue it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has. But for us, not the niche but the open road, with the spirit always traveling, always criticizing, always learning, always escaping the pressures that threaten its integrity. With its own fresh power it will keep strong and true to the journey’s end.

XII

FOR RADICALS

The great social movement of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow has hit us of the younger generation hard. Many of us were early converted to a belief in the possibilities of a regenerated social order, and to a passionate desire to do something in aid of that regeneration. The appeal is not only to our sympathy for the weak and exploited, but also to our delight in a healthy, free, social life, to an artistic longing for a society where the treasures of civilization may be open to all, and to our desire for an environment where we ourselves will be able to exercise our capacities, and exert the untrammeled influences which we believe might be ours and our fellows’. All these good things the social movement seems to demand and seems to offer, and its appeal is irresistible. Before the age of machinery was developed, or before the structure of our social system and the relations between classes and individuals was revealed, the appeal might have been merely sentimental. But it is no longer so. The aims of the social movement to-day seem to have all the tremendous power of a practicable ideal. To the satisfactions which its separate ideals give to all the finer instincts of men is added the overwhelming conviction that those satisfactions are most of them realizable here and now by concerted methods which are already partly in operation and partially successful. It is this union of the idealistic and the efficient that gives the movement its hold on the disinterested and serious youth of to-day.

With that conversion has necessarily come the transvaluation of many of our social values. No longer can we pay the conventional respect to success or join in the common opinions of men and causes. The mighty have been pulled down from their seats, and those of low degree exalted. We feel only contempt for college presidents, editors, and statesmen who stultify their talents and pervert their logical and historical knowledge in defending outworn political philosophies and economic codes. We can no longer wholly believe in the usefulness or significance of those teachers and writers who show themselves serenely oblivious to the social problems. We become keen analysts of the society around us; we put uncomfortable questions to our sleek and successful elders. We criticize the activities in which they engage, the hitherto sacred professions and businesses, and learn to distinguish carefully between actually productive work for society, work which makes for the material and spiritual well-being of the people for whom it is done, and parasitic or wasteful work, which simply extends the friction of competition, or lives on the labor or profits of others. We distinguish, too, between the instruction and writing that consists in handing down unexamined and uncriticized moral and political ideas, and ideas that let in the fresh air and sunlight to the thick prejudices of men. We come to test the papers we read, the teachers we learn from, the professional men we come into contact with, by these new standards. Various and surprising are the new interweavings we discover, and the contrasts and ironies of the modern intellectual life. The childlike innocence in which so many seem still to slumber is almost incredible to those whose vision is so clear. The mechanical way in which educated men tend to absorb and repeat whole systems of formulas is a constant surprise to those whose ideas hum and clash and react against each other. But the minds of so many of these men of position seem to run in automatic channels, such that, given one set of opinions, one could predict with accuracy their whole philosophy of life. Our distrust of their whole spiritual fabric thus becomes fundamental. We can no longer take most of them seriously. It is true that they are doing the serious work of the world, while we do nothing as yet except criticize, and perhaps are doomed to fail altogether when we try. To be sure, it is exactly their way of doing that serious work that we object to, but still we are the dreamers, they the doers; we are the theorists, they the practical achievers. Yet the precision of our view will not down; we can see in their boasted activity little but a resolute sitting on the lid, a sort of glorified routine of keeping the desk clear. And we would rather remain dreamers, we feel, than do much of their work. Other values we find are changed. We become hopelessly perverted by democracy. We no longer make the careful distinctions between the fit and the unfit, the successful and the unsuccessful, the effective and the ineffective, the presentable and the unpresentable. We are more interested in the influences that have produced these seeming differences than in the fact of the differences themselves. We classify people by new categories. We look for personality, for sincerity, for social sympathy, for democratic feeling, for social productiveness, and we interpret success in terms of these attainments.

The young radical, then, in such a situation and in possession of these new social values, stands on the verge of his career in a mood of great perplexity. Two questions he must answer,--“What is to be done?” and “What must I do?” If he has had an education and is given a real opportunity for the choice of a vocation, his position is crucial. For his education, if it has been in one of the advanced universities, will have only tended to confirm his radicalism and render more vivid the contrast between the new philosophy which is being crystallized there out of modern science and philosophy and the new interpretations of history and ethics, and the obscurantist attitude of so many of our intellectual guardians. The youth, ambitious and aggressive, desires an effective and serviceable career, yet every career open to him seems a compromise with the old order. If he has come to see the law as an attempt to fit immutable principles of social action on a dynamic and ever-growing society; if he has come to see the church as an organization working along the lines of greatest spiritual resistance, preaching a personal where the world is crying for a social gospel; if he has come to see higher education as an esoteric institution of savants, only casually reaching down to touch the mass of people with their knowledge and ideas; if he has come to see business as a clever way of distributing unearned wealth, and the levying of a refined tribute on the property-less workers; if he has come to see the press as devoted to bolstering up all these institutions in their inefficiency and inertia;--if he has caught this radical vision of the social institutions about him, he will find it hard to fit neatly into any of them and let it set its brand upon him. It would seem to be a treason not only to society but to his own best self. He would seem to have become one of the vast conspiracy to keep things as they are. He has spent his youth, perhaps, in studying things as they are in order to help in changing them into things as they ought to be, but he is now confronted with the question how the change can be accomplished, and how he can help in that accomplishment.

The attempt to answer these questions seems at first to bring him to a deadlock and to inhibit all his powers. He desires self-development and self-expression, and the only opportunities offered him seem to be ways of life and training that will only mock the best social ideals that he has. This is the dilemma of latter-day youth, and it is a dilemma which is new and original to our own age. Earnest men and women have always had before them the task of adjusting themselves to this world, of “overcoming the world,” but the proper method has always been found in withdrawing from it altogether, or in passing through it with as little spot and blemish as possible, not in plunging into its activity and attempting to subjugate it to one’s ideals. Yet this is the task that the young radical sets for himself. Subjugation without compromise! But so many young men and women feel that this is impossible. Confident of their sincerity, yet distrustful of their strength, eager yet timorous, they stand on the brink, longing to serve, but not knowing how, and too likely, through their distrust and fears, to make a wreck of their whole lives. They feel somehow that they have no right to seek their own welfare or the training of their own talents until they have paid that service to society which they have learned is its due.

It does not do to tell them that one of their best services will be that training. They demand some more direct way of influencing their fellows, some short road to radical activity. It would be good for them to know that they cannot hope to accomplish very much in radiating their ideals without the skill and personality which gives impetus to that radiation. Good-will alone has little efficacy. For centuries well-wishers of men have shown a touching faith in the power of pure ideals to propagate themselves. The tragic failures of the beginnings of the social movement itself were largely due to this belief. Great efforts ended only in sentimentality. But we have no intention now that the fund of intellectual and spiritual energy liberated by radical thought in the younger generation shall die away in such ineffective efforts. To radiate influence, one’s light must shine before men, and it must glow, moreover, with a steady and resolute flame, or men will neither see nor believe the good works that are being done.

It would be an easy way out of the dilemma if we could all adopt the solution of Kropotkin, the Russian radical writer, and engage in radical journalism. This seems to be the most direct means of bringing one’s ideals to the people, to be a real fighting on the firing line. It is well to remember, however, that a weak propagandist is a hindrance rather than an assistance, and that the social movement needs the best of talent, and the skill. This is a challenge to genius, but it is also a reminder that those who fight in other ranks than the front may do as valiant and worthy service. One of the first lessons the young radical has to learn is that influence can be indirect as well as direct, and will be strongest when backed by the most glowing personality. So that self-cultivation becomes almost a duty, if one wants to be effective towards the great end. And not only personality but prestige; for the prestige of the person from whom ideals come is one of the strongest factors in driving home those ideas to the mind of the hearer and making them a motive force in his life. Vested interests do not hesitate to make use of the services of college presidents and other men of intellectual prestige to give their practices a philosophic support; neither should radicals disdain, as many seem to disdain, the use of prestige as a vantage-ground from which to hurl their dogmas. Even though Kropotkin himself deprecated his useless learning, his scientific reputation has been a great factor in spreading his radical ideas.

It is the fashion among some radicals to despise the applause of the conventional, unthinking mass, and scorn any success which has that appreciation as an ingredient. But this is not the way to influence that same crass, unthinking mass or convert it to one’s doctrines. It is to alienate at the beginning the heathen to whom the gospel is being brought. And even the radical has the right to be wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. He must see merely that his distinctiveness is based on real merit and not, as many reputations are, on conformity to an established code. Scientific research, engineering, medicine, and any honest craft, are vocations where it is hard to win prestige without being socially productive; their only disadvantage lies in the fact that their activity does not give opportunity for the influence of the kind the radical wishes to exert. Art, literature, and teaching are perilous; the pressures to conform are deadly, but the triumphs of individuality splendid. For one’s daily work lies there directly in the line of impressing other minds. The genius can almost swing the lash over men’s spirits, and form their ideas for them; he combines enormous prestige with enormous direct influence. Law, the ministry, and business seem to be peculiarly deadly; it is hard to see how eminence can be attained in those professions except at the cost of many of one’s social ideals.

The radical can thus choose his career with full knowledge of the social possibilities. Where he is forced by economic necessity to engage in distasteful and unsocial work, he may still leave no doubt, in the small realm he does illuminate, as to his attitude and his purpose, his enthusiasm and his hope. For all his powers and talents can be found to contribute something; fusing together they form his personality and create his prestige, and it is these that give the real impetus and the vital impulse that drive one’s beliefs and ideals into the hearts of other men. If he speaks, he will be listened to, for it is faith and not doubt that men strain their ears to hear. It is the believing word that they are eager to hear. Let the social faith be in a youth, and it will leak out in every activity of his life, it will permeate his words and color his deeds. The belief and the vision are the essentials; these given, there is little need for him to worry how he may count in society. He will count in spite of himself. He may never know just how he is counting, he may never hear the reverberations of his own personality in others, but reverberate it will, and the timbre and resonance will be in proportion to the quality and power of that vision.

The first concrete duty of every youth to whom social idealism is more than a phrase is to see that he is giving back to society as much as or more than he receives, and, moreover, that he is a nourisher of the common life and not a drain upon its resources. This was Tolstoy’s problem, and his solution to the question--“What is to be done?”--was--“Get off the other fellow’s back!” His duty, he found, was to arrange his life so that the satisfaction of his needs did not involve the servitude or the servility of any of his fellow men; to do away with personal servants, and with the articles of useless luxury whose production meant the labor of thousands who might otherwise have been engaged in some productive and life-bringing work; to make his own living either directly from the soil, or by the coöperative exchange of services, in professional, intellectual, artistic, or handicraft labor. Splendidly sound as this solution is, both ethically and economically, the tragic fact remains that so inextricably are we woven into the social web that we cannot live except in some degree at the expense of somebody else, and that somebody is too often a man, woman, or even little child who gives grudgingly, painfully, a stint of labor that we may enjoy. We do not see the labor and the pain, and with easy hearts and quiet consciences we enjoy what we can of the good things of life; or, if we see the truth, as Tolstoy saw it, we still fancy, like him, that we have it in our power to escape the curse by simple living and our own labor. But the very food we eat, the clothes we wear, the simplest necessities of life with which we provide ourselves, have their roots somewhere, somehow, in exploitation and injustice. It is a cardinal necessity of the social system under which we live that this should be so, where the bulk of the work of the world is done, not for human use and happiness, but primarily and directly for the profits of masters and owners. We are all tainted with the original sin; we cannot escape our guilt. And we can be saved out of it only by the skill and enthusiasm which we show in our efforts to change things. We cannot help the poisonous soil from which our sustenance springs, but we can be laboring mightily at agitating that soil, ploughing it, turning it, and sweetening it, against the day when new seed will be planted and a fairer fruitage be produced.

The solution of these dilemmas of radical youth will, therefore, not come from a renunciation of the personality or a refusal to participate actively in life. Granted the indignation at our world as it is, and the vision of the world as it might and ought to be, both the heightening of all the powers of the personality and a firm grappling with some definite work-activity of life are necessary to make that indignation powerful and purging, and to transmute that vision into actual satisfaction for our own souls and those of our fellows. It is a fallacy of radical youth to demand all or nothing, and to view every partial activity as compromise. Either engage in something that will bring revolution and transformation all at one blow, or do nothing, it seems to say. But compromise is really only a desperate attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It is not compromise to study to understand the world in which one lives, to seek expression for one’s inner life, to work to harmonize it and make it an integer, nor is it compromise to work in some small sphere for the harmonization of social life and the relations between men who work together, a harmonization that will bring democracy into every sphere of life, industrial and social.

Radical youth is apt to long for some supreme sacrifice and feels that a lesser surrender is worth nothing. But better than sacrifice is efficiency! It is absurd to stand perplexedly waiting for the great occasion, unwilling to make the little efforts and test the little occasions, and unwilling to work at developing the power that would make those occasions great. Of all the roads of activity that lie before the youth at the threshold of life, one paramount road must be taken. This fear that one sees so often in young people, that, if they choose one of their talents or interests or opportunities of influence and make themselves in it “competent ones of their generation,” they must slaughter all the others, is irrational. It is true that the stern present demands singleness of purpose and attention. A worthy success is impossible to-day if the labor is divided among many interests. In a more leisurely time, the soul could encompass many fields, and even to-day the genius may conquer and hold at once many spiritual kingdoms. But this is simply a stern challenge to us all to make ourselves geniuses. For serious and sincere as the desire of radical youth may be to lead the many-sided life, a life without a permanent core of active and productive interest, of efficient work in the world, leads to dilettantism and triviality. Such efficient work, instead of killing the other interests of life, rather fertilizes them and makes them in turn enrich the central activity. Instead of feeding on their time, it actually creates time for the play of the other interests, which is all the sweeter for its preciousness.

Always trying to make sure that the work, apart from the inevitable taint of exploitation which is involved in modern work, is socially productive, that it actually in some way contributes to the material or spiritual welfare of the people for whom it is done, and does not simply reiterate old formulas, does not simply extend the friction of competition or consist simply in living on the labor and profits of others. Such work cannot be found by rule. The situation is a real dilemma for the idealistic youth of to-day, and its solution is to be worked out in the years to come. It is these crucial dilemmas that make this age so difficult to live in, that make life so hard to harmonize and integrate. The shock of the crassnesses and crudities of the modern social world thrown against the conventionally satisfying picture which that world has formed of itself makes any young life of purpose and sincerity a real peril and adventure. There are all sorts of spiritual disasters lying in wait for the youth who embarks on the perilous ocean of radicalism. The disapproval of those around him is likely to be the least of his dangers. It should rather fortify his soul than discourage him. Far more dangerous is it that he lose his way on the uncharted seas before him, or follow false guides to shipwreck. But the solution is not to stay at home, fearful and depressed. It is rather to cultivate deliberately the widest knowledge, the broadest sympathy, the keenest insight, the most superb skill, and then set sail, exulting in one’s resources, and crowding on every inch of sail.

For if the radical life has its perils, it also has its great rewards. The strength and beauty of the radical’s position is that he already to a large extent lives in that sort of world which he desires. Many people there are who would like to live in a world arranged in some sort of harmony with socialistic ideals, but who, believing they are impossible, dismiss the whole movement as an idle if delightful dream. They thus throw away all the opportunity to have a share in the extending of those ideals. They do not see that the gradual infiltration of those ideals into our world as it is does brighten and sweeten it enormously. They do not know the power and advantage of even their “little faith” which their inclinations might give them. But the faith of the radical has already transformed the world in which he lives. He sees the “muddle” around him, but what he actually feels and lives are the germs of the future. His mind selects out the living, growing ideas and activities of the socially fruitful that exist here and now, and it is with these that his soul keeps company; it is to their growth and cultivation that he is responsive. This is no illusion that he knows, no living in a pleasing but futile world of fancy. For this living the socialistic life as far as he is able, he believes has its efficient part in creating that communal life of the future. He feels himself, not as an idle spectator of evolution, but as an actual co-worker in the process. He does not wait timidly to jump until all the others are ready to jump; he jumps now, and anticipates that life which all desire, but which most, through inertia, prejudice, insufficient knowledge, and feeble sympathy, distrust or despair of. He knows that the world runs largely on a principle of imitation, and he launches boldly his personality into society, confident of its effect in polarizing the ideas and attitudes of the wistful. Towards himself he finds gravitating the sort of people that he would find in a regenerated social order. To him come instinctively out of his reading and his listening the ideas and events that give promise of the actual realization of his ideals. In unlooked-for spots he finds the seeds of regeneration already here. In the midst of the sternest practicalities he finds blossoming those activities and personalities which the unbelieving have told him were impossible in a human world. And he finds, moreover, that it is these activities and personalities that furnish all the real joy, the real creation, the real life of the present. The prophets and the teachers he finds are with him. In his camp he finds all those writers and leaders who sway men’s minds to-day and make their life, all unconscious as they are of the revolutionary character of the message, more rich and dynamic. To live this life of his vision practically here in the present is thus the exceeding great reward of radical youth. And this life, so potent and glowing amongst the crude malignity of modern life, fortifies and stimulates him, and gives him the surety, which is sturdier than any dream or hope, of the coming time when this life will permeate and pervade all society instead of only a part.

XIII

THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW

The undergraduate of to-day, if he reads the magazines, discovers that a great many people are worrying seriously about his condition. College presidents and official investigators are discussing his scholarship, his extra-curricular activities, and his moral stamina. Not content with the surface of the matter, they are going deeper and are investigating the college itself, its curriculum, the scholarship of the instructors, and its adequacy in realizing its high ideal as a preparation for life. The undergraduate finds that these observers are pretty generally inclined to exonerate him for many of his shortcomings, and to lay the blame on the college itself; the system is indicted, and not the helpless product.

For this he is grateful, and he realizes that this dissatisfaction among educators, this uneasy searching of the academic heart, promises well for the education of his children, and for himself if he remains in college long enough to get the benefit of the reforms. Meanwhile, as he attends recitations and meetings of undergraduate societies, talks with his fellow students and the professors, and reads the college papers, he may, even if he can get no hint of the mysterious inner circles where the destinies of the students are shaped and great questions of policy decided, be able himself to see some of the things that complicate college scholarship to-day, from an inner point of view which is impossible to the observer looking down from above. He may find in the character of the student body itself, and the way in which it reacts to what the college offers it, an explanation of some of the complications of scholarship that so disturb our critics; and in a certain new quality in the spirit of the college, something that is beginning to crystallize his own ideals, and to make him count himself fortunate that he is receiving his education in this age and no other. In the constitution of college society, and in the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the teachers, he may find the explanation of why the college is as it is, and the inspiration of what the college ought to be and is coming to be.

The first thing that is likely to impress the undergraduate is the observation that college society is much less democratic than it used to be. It is to be expected, of course, that it will be simply an epitome of the society round about it. But the point is, that whereas the college of the past was probably more democratic than the society about it, the present-day college is very much less democratic. Democracy does not require uniformity, but it does require a certain homogeneity, and the college to-day is less homogeneous than that of our fathers. For the growing preponderance of the cities has meant that an ever-increasing proportion of city-bred men go to college, in contrast to the past, when the men were drawn chiefly from the small towns and country districts. Since social distinctions are very much more sharply marked in the city than in the country, this trend has been a potent influence in undemocratizing the college. In ordinary city life these distinctions are not yet, at least, insistent enough to cause any particular class feeling, but in the ideal world of college life they become aggravated, and sufficiently acute to cause much misunderstanding and ill-feeling. With increasing fashionableness, the small college, until recently the stronghold of democracy, is beginning to succumb, and to acquire all those delicately devised, subtle forms of snobbery which have hitherto characterized the life of the large college. If this tendency continues, the large college will have a decided advantage as a preparation for life, for as a rule it is situated in a large city, where the environment more nearly approximates the environment of after life than does the artificial and sheltered life of the small college.

The presence of aliens in large numbers in the big colleges, and increasingly in the smaller colleges, is an additional factor in complicating the social situation. It ought not to be ignored, for it has important results in making the college considerably less democratic even than would otherwise be the case. It puts the American representatives on the defensive, so that they draw still more closely together for self-defense, and pull more tightly their lines of vested interest and social and political privilege. The prejudice of race can always be successfully appealed to in undergraduate matters, even to the extent of beguiling many men with naturally democratic consciences into doing things which they would murmur at if called on to do as individuals, and not as the protectors of the social prestige of the college. The fraternities are of course the centre of this vast political system which fills the athletic managerships, selects members of the societies, officers of classes and clubs, editors and assistants of publications, and performs generally all that indispensable public service of excluding the aliens, the unpresentable, and the generally unemployable from activity.

I am aware that most of the colleges pride themselves on the fact that the poor man has an equal chance with the rich to-day to win extra-curricular honors, and mingle in college society on a perfect plane of social equality with the best. It is true, of course, that in college as in real life the exceptional man will always rise to the top. But this does not alter the fact that there exists at too many American colleges a wholesale disfranchisement from any participation in the extra-curricular activities, that is not based on any recognizable principle of talent or ability. It is all probably inherent in the nature of things, and to cavil at it sets one down as childish and unpractical. At present it certainly seems inevitable and unalterable. The organized efforts of the President recently to democratize the social situation at Princeton met with such dull, persistent hostility on the part of the alumni that they had to be abandoned.

This social situation in the college is not very often mentioned in the usual discussions of college problems, but I have dwelt on it here at length because I believe that it has a direct bearing on scholarship. For it creates an eternal and irreconcilable conflict between scholarship and extra-curricular activities. Scholarship is fundamentally democratic. Before the bar of marks and grades, penniless adventurer and rich man’s son stand equal. In college society, therefore, with its sharply marked social distinctions, scholarship fails to provide a satisfactory field for honor and reputation. This implies no dislike to scholarship as such on the part of the ruling class in college society, but means simply that scholarship forces an unwelcome democratic standard on a naturally undemocratic society. This class turns therefore to the extra-curricular activities as a superior field for distinction, a field where honor will be done a man, not only for his ability, but for the undefinable social prestige which he brings along with him to college from the outside world. There is thus a division of functions,--the socially fit take the fraternities, the managerships, the publications, the societies; the unpresentable take the honors and rewards of scholarship. Each class probably gets just what it needs for after life. The division would thus be palpably fair were it not for the fact that an invidious distinction gets attached to the extra-curricular activities, which turns the energy of many of the most capable and talented men, men with real personality and powers of leadership, men without a taint of snobbery, into a mad scramble for these outside places, with consequent, but quite unintentional, bad effects on their scholarship.

The result of all this is, of course, a general lowering of scholarship in the college. The ruling class is content with passing marks, and has no ambition to excel in scholarship, for it does not feel that the attainment of scholars’ honors confers the distinctions upon it that it desires. In addition, this listlessness for scholarship serves to retard the work of the scholarly portion of the classes; it makes the instructor work harder, and clogs up generally the work of the course. This listlessness may be partly due to another factor in the situation. An ever larger proportion of college students to-day comes from the business class, where fifty years ago it came from the professional class. This means a difference between the intellectual background of the home that the man leaves and of the college to which he comes, very much greater than when college training was still pretty much the exclusive property of the professional man or the solid merchant, and almost an hereditary matter. For, nowadays, probably a majority of undergraduates are sent to college by fathers who have not had a college education themselves, but who, reverencing, as all Americans do, Education if not Learning, are ambitious that their sons shall have its benefits. These parents can well afford to set their sons up handsomely so that they shall lose nothing of the well-rounded training that makes up college life; and although it is doubtful whether their idea of the result is much more than a vague feeling that college will give their boys tone, and polish them off much in the way that the young ladies’ boarding-school polishes off the girls, they are a serious factor to be reckoned with in any discussion of college problems.

Most of these young men come thus from homes of conventional religion, cheap literature, and lack of intellectual atmosphere, bring few intellectual acquisitions with them, and, since they are most of them going into business, and will therefore make little practical use of these acquisitions in after life, contrive to carry a minimum away with them. In the college courses and talks with their instructors they come into an intellectual atmosphere that is so utterly different from what they have been accustomed to that, instead of an intellectual sympathy between instructor and student, there ensues an intellectual struggle that is demoralizing to both. The instructor has sometimes to carry on a veritable guerilla warfare of new ideas against the pupils in his courses, with a disintegrating effect that is often far from happy. If he does not disintegrate, he too often stiffens the youth, if of the usually tough traditional cast of mind, into an impregnable resolution that defies all new ideas forever after. This divergence of ideals and attitudes toward life is one of the most interesting complications of scholarship, for it is dramatic and flashes out in the class-room, in aspects at times almost startling.

There is still another thing that complicates scholarship, at least in the larger colleges that have professional schools. Two or three years of regular college work are now required to enter the schools of law, medicine, divinity, and education. An undergraduate who looks forward to entering these professional schools, too often sees this period of college work as a necessary but troublesome evil which must be gone through with as speedily as possible. In his headlong rush he is apt to slight his work, or take a badly synthesized course of studies, or, in an effort to get all he can while he is in the college, to gorge himself with a mass of material that cannot possibly be digested. Now, the college work is of course only prescribed in order that the professional man may have a broad background of general culture before he begins to specialize. Any hurrying through defeats this purpose, and renders this preliminary work worse than useless. A college course must have a chance to digest if it is to be at all profitable to a man; and digestion takes time. Between the listlessness of the business youths who have no particular interest in scholarship, and the impetuosity of the prospective professional man who wants to get at his tools, the ordinary scholar who wants to learn to think, to get a robust sort of culture in an orderly and leisurely way, and feel his mental muscles growing month by month, gets the worst of it, or at least has little attention paid to him. The instructor is so busy, drumming on the laggards or restraining the reckless, that the scholar has to work out much of his own salvation alone.

Whether or not all this is good for the scholar in cultivating his self-reliance, the general level of scholarship certainly suffers. Neither the college administration nor the faculties have been entirely guiltless, in the past, of yielding before the rising tide of extra-curricular activities. Athletics, through the protection, supervision, and even financial assistance, of the college, have become a thoroughly unwholesome excrescence on college life. They have become the nucleus for a perverted college sentiment. College spirit has come to mean enthusiasm for the winning of a game, and a college that has no football team is supposed to have necessarily no college spirit. Pride and loyalty to Alma Mater, the prestige of one’s college, one’s own collegiate self-respect, get bound up and dependent upon a winning season at athletics. It seems amazing sometimes to the undergraduate how the college has surrendered to the student point of view. Instructors too often, in meeting students informally, assume that they must talk about what is supposed to interest the student rather than their own intellectual interests. They do not deceive the student, and they do miss a real opportunity to impress their personality upon him and to awaken him to a recognition of a broader world of vital interests than athletic scores and records.