Part 22 (2/2)
It is not unusual for college presidents or ordinary teachers to meet in conference and discuss their difficulties and aspirations, but a National Education a.s.sociation is c.u.mulative evidence that Americans think in terms of a continent, and that their interests are the same educationally in all parts of the land. It is no less true of other agencies of culture than the schools. Cultural a.s.sociations of all kinds abound. Some of them are limited by State boundaries, not a few are national in their scope. There is a national Chautauqua; inst.i.tutes with the same name hold their sessions all over the land.
Music, art, and the drama, sometimes the same organized group of artists, appeal to appreciative audiences in Boston, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. Popular songs from the opera, popular dances from the music-halls sweep the country with a wave of imitative enthusiasm. There are national whims and national tastes that chase each other from ocean to ocean, almost as fast as the sun moves from meridian to meridian.
326. =National Philanthropy.=--So much of national life is voluntary in direction and organization in America, as compared with Germany or Russia, that it is easy to overlook its national significance. As a national state the United States does not attempt philanthropy. The separate States have their asylums as they have penitentiaries and reformatories, but the nation performs no such function. Yet philanthropic organization girdles the continent. The National Conference of Charities and Corrections is one instance of a society that meets annually in the interest of the depressed cla.s.ses, discusses their problems, and reports its findings to the public as a basis for organized activity. Such an organization not only represents the humanitarian principles and interest of individuals here and there, but it helps to bind together local groups all over the country that are working on an altruistic basis. Whole sections of territory join in discussing still wider human interests. The Southern Sociological Conference appeals to the whole South and calls upon the rest of the country for speakers of reputation and wisdom.
327. =The Federal Council of Churches.=--It is fundamental to the spirit and word of the American Const.i.tution that church and state shall not be united, but this does not prevent religious interests from being cherished nationally, and ecclesiastical organizations from having national affiliations. Modern churches are grouped first of all in denominations, because of certain peculiarities, but most of the denominations have spread over the country and propagated their type as opportunity offered. National conferences and conventions, therefore, take place regularly, bringing together Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, or Methodists, as the case may be, to consider the interests that are most vital to the denomination as a whole, or which the denomination as a whole, in place of the local churches, holds within its sphere of control. Politics and sectional interests have sometimes divided denominations, large bodies have sometimes split along conservative or radical lines, but the national ideal has never been lost sight of, and national organizations enjoy dignity and prestige. One of the most recent ill.u.s.trations of a still broader interest and deeper consciousness is the federation of more than thirty evangelical Protestant denominations for better acquaintance and larger achievement. Temporary movements and even a definite Evangelical Alliance have been in evidence before, but now has come a permanent organization, to include all the religious interests that can be held in common, and especially to stress the more ambitious programme of social regeneration. The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America has yet to prove that it is not ahead of the times, but it is an earnest of a religious interest that oversteps the bounds of creed and denominational organization and calls upon the various divisions of the Protestant Church to unite for a national campaign.
328. =The Scope of National Life.=--Social life in the nation is not confined to any organization. It does not wait upon government to perform its various functions. It goes on because of the constant flow and counterflow of population through all the channels of acquaintance and correspondence, of travel and trade. People feel the need of one another, are in constant touch with one another, and inevitably are continually exchanging commodities and ideas. Barriers of race and language, of tariff walls and national conventions stand in the way of exchange between individuals of different nations, though a strenuous commercial age succeeds in making breaches in the barriers, but opportunity within the nation is free, and such natural barriers as language and race differences speedily give way before the mutual desires of the native and the hyphenated American.
READING REFERENCES
DEALEY: _Development of the State_, pages 63-115.
_Reports of the Commissioner of Education._
_American Year Book_, 1914, _pa.s.sim._
WARD: _Year Book of the Church and Social Service_, 1916, pages 24-29.
CHAPTER XLII
THE STATE
329. =The State and Its Sovereignty.=--The various economic and social functions that are exercised by the people as a nation can be performed in an orderly and effective way only when the people are organized politically, and the nation has full powers of sovereignty.
When the nation functions politically it is a state. States may be large like Russia, or small like Montenegro; they may have full sovereignty like Great Britain, or limited sovereignty like New York; the fact that they exercise political authority makes them states. It is conceivable that this political authority may be exercised through the sheer force of public opinion, but the experience of the newly organized United States under the Articles of Confederation showed that national moral suasion was not effective. History seems to prove that society needs a machinery of government able to legislate and enforce its laws, and the tendency has been for a comparatively small number of states to extend their authority over more and more of the earth's surface. This has become possible through the maintenance of efficient military forces and wise local administration, aided by increasing ease of communication and transportation. Once it was a question whether the United States could enforce its law as far away as western Pennsylvania; now Great Britain bears unquestioned sway over the antipodes. Many persons look forward to the time when the people of all nations will unite in a universal state, with power to enforce its will without resort to war.
330. =Why the State is Necessary.=--There are some persons, commonly known as anarchists, who do not believe that government is necessary.
They would have human relations reduced to their lowest terms, and then trust to human nature to behave itself properly. There are other persons known as Socialists, who would have the people in their collective capacity exercise a larger control than now over human action. Neither of these cla.s.ses represents the bulk of society.
Common sense and experience together seem to demand a government that will exercise a reasonable control, and by reasonable is meant a control that will preserve the best interests of all and make general progress possible. The political function of the nation is both coercive and directive. When we think of a state we naturally think of the power that it possesses to make peace or war with foreign powers, to keep order within the nation, to enforce its authority over any individual or group that breaks the laws that it has made; but while such power of control is essential and its exercise often spectacular, it is paralleled by the directive power. There are many social relations that need definition and much social conduct that needs direction. A man and a woman live together and bring up a family of children. Who is to determine their legal status, the terms of marriage, the rights of parenthood, the claims of childhood, the rights and obligations of the family as a part of the community? The family acc.u.mulates property in lands, houses, and movable possessions.
Who will make the acquisition legal, insure property protection, and provide legally for inheritance? Every individual has his personal relation to the state, and privileges of citizens.h.i.+p are important.
Who shall determine the right to vote and to hold office, or the duty to pay taxes or serve in the army or navy? In these various ways the state is no less functioning politically for the benefit of the people than when coercing recalcitrant citizens, warning or fighting other nations, or legislating in its congressional halls. Its opportunity to regulate the social interests of its citizens is almost illimitable, for while a written const.i.tution may prescribe what a state may and may not do, those who made the const.i.tution have the power to revise it or to override its provisions.
331. =Theories of the State.=--Archaeological and historical evidence point to the family as the nursery of the state. There was a time when the contract theory was popular. It was believed that the state became possible when individuals agreed to give up some of their own individual rights for the sake of living in peace with their neighbors and enjoying mutual protection. There is no doubt that such a mutual arrangement was made in the troublous feudal period of mediaeval European history, just as the original thirteen American colonies gave up some of their individual powers to make possible a real American state, but the social-contract theory is no longer accepted as a satisfactory explanation of the origin of government. There was no _Mayflower_ compact with the bushmen when Englishmen decided to live with the natives in Australia.
There is another theory that eminently wise men, with or without divine a.s.sistance, formulated law and government for cities and tribes, and that their codes were definitely accepted by the people, but the work of these men, as far as it is historical at all, seems to have been a work of codifying laws which had grown out of custom rather than of making new laws. Still another theory that was once held strenuously by a few was that of the divine right of kings, as if G.o.d had given to one dynasty or one cla.s.s the right to rule irresponsibly over their fellows. Individual political philosophers, like the Greek Aristotle and the German Bluntschli have published their theories, and have influenced schools of publicists, but the political science of the present day, basing its theories on observed facts, is content to trace the gradual changes that have taken place in the unconscious development of the past, and to point out the possibilities of intelligent progress in future evolution.
332. =How the State Came to Be.=--The true story of the development of the state seems to have been as follows. The roots of the state are in the family group. When the family expanded into the tribe, family discipline and family custom easily pa.s.sed over to tribal discipline and tribal custom, strengthened by religious superst.i.tion and the will of the priest. But not all chieftains and all tribes have the same ability or the same disposition, so that while political custom and religious sanctions tended in the main to remain unchanged, an occasional exception upset the social equilibrium. Race mixture and conflicting interests compelled organization on a civil rather than a tribal basis. Or an ambitious prince or a restless tribe interfered with the established relations, and presently a powerful military state was giving law to subjugated tribes. Egypt, Persia, Rome, Turkey have been such states. On a larger scale, something of the same sort has happened in the conquest of outlying parts of the world by the European Powers, until one man in Petrograd can give law to Kamchatka, a cabinet in London can determine a policy for the government of India, or the United States Congress can change the administration of affairs in the Philippines. Military power has been the weapon by which authority has been imposed from without, legislative action the instrument by which authority has been extended within.
333. =The Government of Great Britain.=--The government of Great Britain is one of the best concrete examples of the growth of a typical state. Its Teutonic founders learned the rudiments of government in the German forests, where the principles of democracy took root. Military and political exigencies gave the prince large power, but the people never forgot how to exert their influence through local a.s.sembly or national council. In the thirteenth century, when the King displeased the men of the nation, they demanded the privileges of Magna Carta, and when King and lords ruled inefficiently, the common people found a way to enlarge their own powers. Representatives of the townsmen and the country s.h.i.+res took their places in Parliament, and gradually, with growing wisdom and courage, a.s.sumed more and more prerogatives. Three times in the seventeenth century Parliament demanded successfully certain rights of citizens.h.i.+p, though once it had to fight and once more to depose a king. In the nineteenth century, by a succession of reform acts, King and Parliament admitted tradesmen, farmers, and working men to a full share in the workings of the state, and only recently the Commons have supplanted the Lords as the leading legislative body of the nation.
The story of Great Britain is a tale of growing democracy and increasing efficiency.
The story of local government and the story of imperial government might be placed side by side with the story of national government, and each would reveal the political principles that have guided British progress. Social need, patient experiment, and growth in efficiency are significant phrases that help to explain the story.
Every nation has worked out its government in its own way, interfered with occasionally by interested parties on the outside, but the general line of progress has been the same--local experimentation, federation or union more often imposed than agreed upon by popular consent, and a slow growth of popular rights over government by a privileged few. Present tendency is in the direction of safeguarding the interests of all by a fully representative government, in which the individual efficiency of prince or commoner alike shall have due weight, but no one sovereign or cla.s.s shall rule the people as a whole.
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