same principle of equality of opportunity, by the same trust in man that solved for us the problem of political democracy.

A nation saturated with the conviction that all should have an equal chance, imbued with this volunteer, emulative spirit instilled by education and growing out of experience, cannot ultimately go wrong. Let us therefore make our individual contributions, and be assured that it is better to give than to receive.

CAN DEMOCRACY BE ORGANIZED?1

EDWIN ANDERSON ALDERMAN

[Edwin Anderson Alderman (1861- -) was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was educated at the University of North Carolina, and was for several years a teacher in the public schools of North Carolina. He has been successively professor of pedagogy at the University of North Carolina, president of the University of North Carolina, president of Tulane University, and, since 1904, president of the University of Virginia. He has been strongly interested in political and social questions, and his addresses, delivered with the accomplishments of a finished orator, have been brilliant discussions of many important questions. The selection here given was originally an address before the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society in 1915.]

The United States of America is one of the oldest governments on earth. England and Russia alone, among the nations of Europe, equal it in age, and even England has undergone such radical changes in the past century, as compared with the United States, as to constitute us, with our unchanged government since 1789, the most stable of modern nations. Our nearness to the perspective and our absorption in our own life have blinded us to the inspiring National panorama, as it has unfolded itself before the world. First, a group of rustic communities, making common cause in behalf of ancient guarantees of English freedom; then suspicious colonies, unused to the ways of democracies, striving after some bond amid the clash of jealous interests; then a wonderful paper-writing, compact of high sense and

1From Proceedings of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, 1915. Reprinted by permission.

human foresight and tragic compromise; then a young republic, lacking the instinct of unity, but virile, unlovely, raw, wayward, in its confident young strength. Some confused decades of sad, earnest effort to pluck out an evil growth planted in its life by the hard necessities of compromise by the fathers, but which needs must blossom into the flower of civil war before it could be plucked out and thrown to the void. Then young manhood, nursing its youth, whole and indivisible, proven by trial of fire and dark days, opening its eye upon a new world of steam and force, and seizing greedily and selfishly every coign of vantage; and today the most venerable republic, the richest of nations, the champion and exemplar of world democracy.

No nation, I venture to assert, was ever born grounded on so definite and fixed a principle and with so conscious a purpose. Such a wealth of hope for humanity never before gathered about a mere political experiment, and such a mass of pure idealism never before suffused itself into the framework of a state. How can such a nation so begun, so advanced, so beset, be so guided, that all of its citizens shall indeed become free men, entering continually into the possession of intellectual, material, and moral benefits? How can a people devoted to individualism and freedom retain that individualism which guarantees freedom and yet engraft upon their social order that genius for coöperation which alone insures power and progress? These are the final interrogatories of democracy as a sane vision glimpses it, robbed of its earlier illusions. The fathers of this republic did not understand the present mould of democracy. The very word was obnoxious to them. Their ideal was a state the citizens of which chose their leaders and then trusted them. They did not foresee the socialized state. They did not envisage a minute and · paternal organization of society which may be achieved alike by Prussian absolutism or mere socialism, which is chronologically, if not logically, the child of democracy. The fear that tugged at their hearts was the fear of tyranny, the dread of kings, the denial of self-direction, which prevented a man from speaking his opinion or going his way as he willed. Their democracy was a working government which should give effect to the will of the

people and at the same time provide sufficient safeguard for individual liberty. The emphasis of the time was everywhere upon the rights of the individual rather more than upon the duties of the citizen. When their theories, as Mr. Hadley points out, seemed likely to secure this result, the fathers published them boldly; when they seemed likely to interfere, they ignored them. The creed, then, which had a religious sanction in an age of moral imagination to men of superb human enthusiasm like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, was the belief that democracy, considered as individual freedom, was the final form of human society. It is idle to deny that a century of trial has somewhat dulled the halo about this ancient concept of democracy, but in my judgment only to men of little faith. It is quite true that our democracy of today is not what Rousseau thought it would be, nor Lord Byron, nor Shelley, nor Karl Marx. But as we meditate about it and conclude that it has not realized all of its hopes, we ought to try to settle first what it has done and then place that to its credit. Here are some things that I think democracy has done, or helped to do. It has abated sectarian fury. Sectarian fury is ridiculous in this age; it was not always so. It has abolished slavery. It has protected and enlarged manhood suffrage, and has gone far toward womanhood suffrage. It has mitigated much social injustice. It has developed a touching and almost sublime faith in the power of education, illustrating it by expending six hundred million dollars a year in the most daring thing that democracy has ever tried to do: namely, to fit for citizenship every human being born within its borders. It has increased kindness and gentleness, and thus diminished the fury of partisanship. It has preserved the form of the Union through the storm of a civil war, and yet has had power to touch with healing unity and forgiveness its passions and tragedies. It has conquered and civilized a vast continent. It has developed great agencies of culture and has somehow made itself a symbol of individual prosperity. It has developed a common consciousness and a volunteer statesmanship among its free citizens as manifested more strikingly than elsewhere in the world in great educational, religious, scientific

and philanthropic societies, which profoundly influence and mould society. Out of what other state could have issued as a volunteer movement so efficient an agency as the Commission for the Relief of Belgium or the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission? It has permitted and fostered the growth of a public press of gigantic power reflecting the crudities and impulses of a vast and varied population, but charged with a fierce idealism and staunch patriotism that have almost given it a place among the coördinate branches of our organized government. It has stimulated inventive genius and business enterprise to a point never before reached in human annals. It has brought to American-mindedness millions of men of all races, creeds, and ideals. I do not, therefore, think that democracy as it has evolved among us has failed. What autocracy on earth has done as much? It has justified itself of the sufferings and sacrifices and the dreams of the men who established it in this new land. But it has also without doubt, by the very trust that it places in men, developed new shapes of temptations and wrong-doing. Democracy, like a man's character, is never clear out of danger. The moral life of men, said Froude, is like the flight of a bird in the air; he is sustained only by effort, and when he ceases to exert himself he falls. And the same, it seems to me, is impressively true of institutional and governmental life.

Patriotism-which is hard to define and new with every ageand public spirit—which is hard to define and new with every age must constantly redefine themselves. Patriotism meant manhood's rights when Washington took it to his heart. It somehow spelled culture, refinement and distinction of mind when Emerson in his Phi Beta Kappa address besought the sluggish intellect of his country to look up from under its iron lids. It signified national ideals and theories of government to the soldiers of Lee and to the soldiers of Grant. It meant industrial greatness and a splendid desire to annex nature to man's uses when the great business leaders of this generation and of the last generation built up their great businesses and tied the Union together in a unity of steel and steam more completely than all the wars could do, and did it with a patriotism and a

statesmanship and an imagination that no man can deny. The honest businessman needs somebody to praise him. He has done a great service in this country, and when he is steady and honest there is no greater force in all our life. A decade ago patriotism in America meant a reaction from an unsocial and selfish individualism to restraint and consideration for the general welfare, expressing itself in a cry for moderation and fairness and justice and sympathy in the use of power and wealth as the states of spirit and mind that alone can safeguard republican ideals. The emphasis, as I have said, was formerly on the rights of man; it is getting to be placed, as Mazzini preached, upon the duties of man. If in our youth and feverish strength there had grown up a spirit of avarice and a desire for quick wealth, and a theory of life in lesser minds that estimated money as everything and was willing to do anything for money, that very fact served to define the patriotic duty and mood of the national mind. This reawakened patriotism of the common good had the advantage of appeal to a sound public conscience, and of being supported by a valid public opinion. The part that vulgar cunning has played in creating great fortunes has been made known to this democracy and they are coming to know the genuine from the spurious, and some who were once looked at with admiration and approval as great ones, are not now seen in that light.

This very growth in discernment gave us power to see in a nobler and truer light, for the people of America, the names of those upright souls in business and in politics-and there are many noble men in business and politics-who have held true in a heady time and who have kept clean and kept human their public sympathies and their republican ideals and by so doing have kept sweet their country's fame. Democracy simply had met and outfaced one of the million moral crises that are likely to assail free government, and I believe that it is cleaner today in ruling passion, in motive, and in practice than it has been in fifty years.

It is now clear to all minds that the movement of our business operations in this republic, unregulated and proceeding along