decreased production, and a possible industrial chaos, we may sympathize. But if they raise the cry of loyalty to American principles, we shall know what to say. Efficient, feasible, democracy may or may not be; but it is at least the ideal to which we are committed, the ideal for which our forefathers bled, the ideal for which but just now our sons and brothers bled. To be obliged to argue this point at all shows how many people have as yet failed to grasp what the idea of Democracy really implies. During the War a brilliant speaker before the American Academy of Social and Political Science uttered these memorable words: "We stand committed as never before to the realization of democracy in America. We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end in the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy . . . We shall call that man unAmerican and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it at home. A force is loose in America as well." That this force may be used not for destruction but for construction should be our prayer and our earnest concern. Not only must the world be made safe for democracy, but democracy itself must be unfolded into its completest meaning. What further developments may lie before democracy we cannot now say; but just now it needs much effort to free it from the forces which are strangling it in politics, in journalism, and in industry. SUGGESTED READINGS J. G. Brooks, The Social Unrest. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, Chapters IV, V. H. G. Wells, Social Forces in England and America, pp. 112-154. Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals, Chap. II. G. H. D. Cole and Mellor, The Meaning of Industrial Freedom. Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy. R. W. Sellars, The Next Step in Democracy. J. Mackaye, Americanized Socialism. W. W. Willoughby, Social Justice, Chap. IX. T. N. Carver, Essays in Social Justice, Chap. VI. C. H. Douglas, Economic Democracy. John Spargo, Americanism and Social Democracy. P. W. Litchfield, The Industrial Republic. W. E. Weyl, The New Democracy, Chap. XVII. Ordway Tead, in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 122, p. 178. CHAPTER XX BIG BUSINESS WE are all, in our patriotic moments, proud of our ideal of Democracy, and of the extent to which it has already been successfully embodied in our institutions. But as an actual working motive in the lives of successful Americans it does not begin to have the potency of another ideal-efficiency. Efficiency it not one of the great historic slogans that we repeat on the Fourth of July, and attribute to Washington or Lincoln. But when the American traveller boasts of his country abroad, what he is most apt to speak of is the success of our big business, of our great transportation systems, and the other achievements in organization of our industrial order. And most foreign observers have given a verdict similar to that of Arnold Bennett's: "It seems to me that the brains and the imagination of America shine superlatively in the conception and ordering of its vast organizations of human beings, and of machinery, and of the two combined . . . For me they were the proudest material achievements, and essentially the most poetical achievements, of the United States." Because of this widespread pride in organization and efficiency, America has often been sneered at as a land of “materialists." But efficiency means the saving of human labor, its consequent release from concern with the mechanics of life, and greater freedom to pursue ideal ends. The simple peasant life |