The Democratic Way of Life [antikvár]

BOOK ONE by T. V. Smith Introduction Democracy is more than a form of government. It is also a way of life, variegated and full of growth. Like every manifestation of vitality, democracy is many-dimensional. Its leeways are legion. The floor under it is food and clothing and shelter. Men well cared for of body are not looking for pied-pipers whose music is the minstrelsy of doom. Yet no men live by comforts or conveniences alone. Men are spirits and they are as surely oriented upward as bodies are solidly implemented downward. While we as children of Antaeus tread the earth with our feet, we fill our lungs with the ozone of imagination. What we see when we look aloft is ideality pluralizing itself into patterns for the improvement of all things here below. Nothing that exists is really as good as it might be, and even men who think they are as good as they ought to be, are in reality not as good as they ought to be. If motivation were all push from beneath, men would be but links in a cosmic chain of plasm in a biological succession. Men are indeed units, but they are also essences, with a mission that is upward. Ideals are glints in darkness which light up the sky; and their luminosity pulls men upward as bodily wants push men along. To be pulled by vision is more pleasant than to be pushed by animal urgencies. It is indeed the pleasant pull of ideals which can transform necessity into opportunity and can make a vocation of what otherwise were but the dour face of doom. Beauty alone redeems duty from the tight-lipped desperation of fanaticism. Ideals are many in form, even if unitary in direction. None are more precious than the trinity of ideals which has become associated with our democratic way of life. Covering all ideals with one, we speak of Justice. But delineating justice, there are Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; and most crucial of these is Equality. The easiest way, for instance, to prevent destruction of liberty by an undertow of license, is to implement liberty with equality for all. The surest way, again, to keep brotherhood from the loving kindness of liquidation, now practiced in all non-democratic lands, is to insist upon fraternity for men who are equally free. This golden mean of ideals will thus safeguard both the liberty-ideal and the fraternity-ideal. As Justice projects these ideals to 7 V'',.! , '1 i ' I ' ' il^/V 1 ¦ I. ¦ , w.tj'ii'i