It was contended in the first chapter of this book that social morality is developed through sentiment and action. In this particular age we can live the truth which has been apprehended by our contemporaries, that truth which is especially our own, only by establishing nobler and wiser social relations and by discovering social bonds better fitted to our requirements.
Warfare in ( 214) the past has done much to bring men together.
A sense of common danger and the stirring appeal to action for a common purpose, easily open the channels of sympathy through which we partake of the life about us. But there are certainly other methods of opening those channels. A social life to be healthy must be consciously and fully adjusted to the march of social needs, and as we may easily make a mistake by forgetting that enlarged opportunities are ever demanding an enlarged morality, so we will fail in the task of substitution if we do not demand social sympathy in a larger measure and of a quality better adapted to the contemporaneous situation.
Perhaps the one point at which this undertaking is most needed is in regard to our conception of patriotism, which, although as genuine as ever before, is too much dressed in the trappings of the past and continually carries us back to its beginnings in military prowess and defence. To have been able to trace the origin and development of patriotism and then to rest content with that, and to fail to insist that it shall respond to the stimulus of a larger and more varied environment with which we are now confronted, is a confession of weakness; it exhibits lack of moral enterprise and of national vigor.
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We have all seen the breakdown of village standards of morality when the conditions of a great city are encountered. To do "the good Iying next at hand" may be a sufficient formula when the village idler and his needy children live but a few doors down the street, but the same dictum may be totally misleading when the villager becomes a city resident and finds his next-door neighbors prosperous and comfortable, while the poor and overburdened live many blocks away where he would never see them at all, unless he were stirred by a spirit of social enterprise to go forth and find them in the midst of their meagre living and their larger needs. The spirit of village gossip, penetrating and keen as it is, may be depended upon to bring to the notice of the kindhearted villager all cases of suffering -- that someone is needed "to sit up all night" with a sick neighbor, or that the village loafer has been drunk again and beaten his wife; but in a city divided so curiously into the regions of the well-to-do and the congested quarters of the immigrant, the conscientious person can no longer rely upon gossip. There is no intercourse, not even a scattered one, between the two, save what the daily paper brings, with its invincible propensity to report the gossip of poverty and crime, perhaps a healthier tendency than we imagine. The man who has moved from ( 216) the village to the cosmopolitan city and who would continue even his former share of beneficent activity must bestir himself to keep informed as to social needs and to make new channels through which his sympathy may flow. Without some such conscious effort, his sympathy will finally become stratified along the line of his social intercourse and he will be unable really to care for any people but his "own kind."American conceptions of patriotism have moved, so to speak, from the New England village into huge cosmopolitan cities. They find themselves bewildered by the change and have not only failed to make the adjustment, but the very effort in that direction is looked upon with deep suspicion by their old village neighbors. Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation. We know full well that the patriotism of common descent is the mere patriotism of the clan -- the early patriotism of the tribe -- and that, while the possession of a like territory is an advance upon that first conception, both of them are unworthy to be the patriotism of a great cosmopolitan nation. We shall not have made any genuine advance until we have grown impatient of a patriotism founded upon military prowess and defence, because this really gets in the way and ( 217) prevents the growth of that beneficent and progressive patriotism which we need for the understanding and healing of our current national difficulties.
To seek our patriotism in some age other than our own is to accept a code that is totally inadequate to help us through the problems which current life develops. We continue to found our patriotism upon war and to contrast conquest with nurture, militarism with industrialism, calling the latter passive and inert and the former active and aggressive, without really facing the situation as it exists. We tremble before our own convictions, and are afraid to find newer manifestations of courage and daring lest we thereby lose the virtues bequeathed to us by war. It is a pitiful acknowledgment that we have lost them already and that we shall have to give up the ways of war, if for no other reason than to preserve the finer spirit of courage and detachment which it has engendered and developed.
