It is not, indeed, that loyal people no longer are frequent amongst us. The faithful who live and die in loyalty so far as they know loyalty are indeed not yet uncommon. The loyalty of the common people is precisely the most precious moral treasure of our world. But the moral dangers of our American civil ization are twofold. First, loyalty is not suf ficiently prominent amongst our explicit social ideals in America. It is too much left to the true-hearted obscure people. It is not suffi ciently emphasized. Our popular literature too often ignores it or misrepresents it. This is one danger, since it means that loyalty is too often discouraged and confused, instead of glorified and honored. In the long run, if not checked, this tendency must lead to a great decrease of loyalty. The second danger lies in the fact that when loyalty is indeed emphasized THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY and glorified, it is then far too seldom conceived as rationally involving loyalty to universal loy alty. Hence we all think too often of loyalty as a warlike and intolerant virtue, and not as the spirit of universal peace. Enlightened loy alty, as we have now learned, means harm to no man's loyalty. It is at war only with disloy alty, and its warfare, unless necessity con strains, is only a spiritual warfare. It does not foster class hatreds; it knows of nothing reasonable about race prejudices, and it regards all races of men as one in their need of loyalty. It ignores mutual misunderstandings. It loves its own wherever upon earth its own, namely, loyalty itself, is to be found. Enlightened loy alty takes no delight in great armies or in great navies for their own sake. If it consents to them, it views them merely as transiently nec essary calamities. It has no joy in national prowess, except in so far as that prowess means a furtherance of universal loyalty. And it re gards the war-spirit, which in our first lecture we used as an example of loyalty, — it regards this spirit, I say, as at its best an outcome of SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS necessity or else of unenlightened loyalty, and as at its worst one of the basest of disloyalties to universal loyalty.
Now, it is precisely this enlightened form of loyalty, this conception of loyalty to loyalty, which we most need to have taught to our American people, — taught openly, explicitly, -yet not taught, for the most part, by the now too familiar method of fascinating denun ciations of the wicked, nor by the mere display of force, social or political, nor by the setting of class against class, nor yet by any glorifica tion of mere power, nor by appeals merely to patriotic but confused fervor. We want loyalty to loyalty taught by helping many people to be loyal to their own special causes, and by show ing them that loyalty is a precious common human good, and that it can never be a good to harm any man's loyalty except solely in necessary defence of our own loyalty.
Ill From the point of view of the foregoing dis cussion, if you want to do the best you can to THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY teach loyalty, not now to single individuals, but to great masses of people, — masses such as our whole nation, — you should do three things: (1) You should aid them to possess and to keep those physical and mental powers and posses sions which are the necessary conditions for the exercise of loyalty. (2) You should pro vide them with manifold opportunities to be loyal, that is, with a maximum of significant, rational enterprises, such as can be loyally carried out; you should, if possible, secure for them a minimum of the conditions that lead to the conflicts of various forms of loyalty; and you should furnish them a variety of oppor tunities to get social experience of the value of loyalty. (3) You should explicitly show them that loyalty is the best of human goods, and that loyalty to loyalty is the crown and the real meaning of all loyalty.
Helping the people to the attainment and preservation of their powers obviously involves the sort of care of public health, the sort of general training of intelligence, the sort of protection and assistance, which our philan- SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS thropists and teachers and public-spirited peo ple generally regard as important. There is no doubt that in our modern American life our social order does give to great numbers of people care and assistance and protection, such as earlier stages of civilization lacked. But the other side of the task of providing our people with the means of ethical advance ment, the side that has to do with letting them know what loyalty is, and with giving them opportunities to be loyal, this side, I say, of what we ought to do to further the moral prog ress of our people, is at present very imper fectly accomplished.
With prosperity, as we may well admit, sym pathy, benevolence, public spirit, even the more rational philanthropy which seeks not merely to relieve suffering, but to improve the effective powers of those whom we try to help, -all these things have become, in recent decades, more and more prominent on the better side of our civilization. And yet I insist, just as prosperity is not virtue, and just as power is not morality, so too even public THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY charity, and even the disposition to train peo ple, to make them more intelligent, to give them new power, all such dispositions are in sufficient to insure the right moral training of our people, or the effective furtherance of ideal life amongst them.
What men need involves opportunity for loyalty. And such opportunity they get, espe cially through the suggestion of objects to which they can be loyal. If you want to train a man to a good life, you must indeed do what you can to give him health and power. And you do something for him when, by example and by precept, you encourage him to be sym pathetic, public-spirited, amiable, or industri ous. But benevolence, sympathy, what some people love to call altruism, — these are all mere fragments of goodness, mere aspects of the dutiful life. What is needed is loyalty. Mean while, since loyalty is so plastic a virtue, since the choice of the objects of loyalty must vary so widely from individual to individual, and since, above all, you can never force anybody to be loyal, but can only show him opportunities SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS for loyalty, and teach him by example and pre cept what loyalty is, the great need of any higher civilization is a vast variety of oppor tunities for individual loyalty, and of sugges tion regarding what forms of loyalty are possi ble.
Now, I need not for a moment ignore the fact that every higher civilization, and of course our own, presents to any intelligent person nu merous opportunities to be loyal. But what I must point out in our present American life is, that our opportunities for loyalty are not rightly brought to our consciousness by the conditions of our civilization, so that a great mass of our people are far too little reminded of what chances for loyalty they themselves have, or of what loyalty is. Meanwhile our national prosperity and our national greatness involve us all in many new temptations to disloyalty, and distract our minds too much from dwelling upon the loyal side of life; so that at the very moment when our philanthropy is growing, when our sympathies are con stantly aroused through the press, the drama, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY and our sensitive social life generally, our training in loyalty is falling away. Our young people grow up with a great deal of their attention fixed upon personal success, and also with a great deal of training in sympathetic sentiments; but they get far too little knowl edge, either practical or theoretical, of what loyalty means.
IV The first natural opportunity for loyalty is furnished by family ties. We all know how some of the conditions of our civilization tend with great masses of our population to a new interpretation of family ties in which family loyalty often plays a much less part than it formerly did in family life. Since our mod ern family is less patriarchal than it used to be, our children, trained in an individualistic spirit, frequently make little of certain duties to their parents which the ancient family re garded as imperative and exalted as ideal. Many of us deliberately prefer the loss of cer tain results of the patriarchal family tie, and SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS are glad that in the modern American family the parental decisions regarding the marriage choices of children are so much less decisive than they used to be. Many insist that other weakenings of the family tie, such as divorce legislation and the practice of divorce have involved, are in the direction of a reasonable recognition of individual interests.
I will not try to discuss these matters at length. But this I can say without hesitation: The family ties, so far as they are natural, are opportunities for loyalty; so far as they are deliberately chosen or recognized, are in stances of the choice of a loyalty. From our point of view, therefore, they must be judged as all other opportunities and forms of loyalty are judged. That such opportunities and forms alter their character as civilization changes is inevitable, and need be no matter for super stitious cares regarding whatever was arbitrary in traditional views of family authority. But, after all, fidelity and family devotion are amongst the most precious opportunities and instances of loyalty. Faithlessness can never THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY become a virtue, however your traditions about the forms of faithfulness may vary in their external details. Whoever deliberately breaks the tie to which he is devoted loses the oppor tunity and the position of the loyal self, and in so far loses the best sort of thing that there is in the moral world. No fondness for individual ism will ever do away with this fact. We want more individuals and more rational individ ualism; but the only possible ethical use of an individual is to be loyal. He has no other destiny.
When a man feels his present ties to be arbitrary or to be a mechanical bondage, he sometimes says that it is irrational to be a mere spoke in a wheel. Now, a loyal self is always more than a spoke in a wheel. But still, at the worst, it is better to be a spoke in the wheel than a spoke out of the wheel. And you never make ethical individuals, or enlarge their opportunities, merely by breaking ties. Hence, so far as a change in family tradition actually involves a loss of opportunities and forms of loyalty, which tradition used to SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS emphasize, our new social order has lost a good thing. Do we see at present just what is taking its place? If the patriarchal family must pass away or be profoundly altered, surely we should not gain thereby unless there were to result a new family type, as rich in appeal to our human affections and our do mestic instincts as the old forms ever were.
But in our present American life the family tie has been weakened, and yet no substitute has been found. We have so far lost certain opportunities for loyalty.
Now, how shall we hope to win back these opportunities? I answer: We can win back something of what we have lost if only we in this country can get before ourselves and our pub lic a new, a transformed conception of what loyalty is. The loyalties of the past have lost their meaning for many people, simply because people have confounded loyalty with mere bondage to tradition, or with mere surrender of individual rights and preferences. Such people have forgotten that what has made loyalty a good has never been the convention THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY which undertook to enforce it, but has always been the spiritual dignity which lies in being loyal.
As to individual rights and preferences, no body can ever attain either the one or the other, in full measure, apart from loyalty to the clos est and the most lasting ties which the life of the individual in question is capable of accept ing with hearty willingness. Ties once loyally accepted may be broken in case, but only in case, the further keeping of those ties intact involves disloyalty to the universal cause of loyalty. When such reason for breaking ties exists, to break them becomes a duty; and then, indeed, a merely conventional persist ence in what has become a false position, is itself a disloyal deed. But ties may never be broken except for the sake of other and still stronger ties. No one may rationally say: "Loyalty can no longer bind me, because, from my deepest soul, I feel that I want my individual freedom." For any such outcry comes from an ignorance of what one's deep est soul really wants.
SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS Disloyalty is moral suicide. Many a poor human creature outlives all that, in the present life, can constitute his true self, — outlives as a mere psychological specimen any human expression of his moral personality, and does so because he has failed to observe that his loyalty, so far and so long as it has been his own, has been the very heart of this moral personality. When loyalty has once been fully aroused, and has then not merely blundered but died, there may, indeed, remain much fluttering eagerness of life; as if a stranded ship's torn canvas were still flapping in the wind. But there cannot remain freedom of personal exist ence. For the moral personality that once was loyal, and that then blindly sought free dom, is, to human vision, dead. What is, in such a case, left of the so-called life is merely an obituary. Curious people of prominence have sometimes expressed a wish to read their own obituaries. But it is hardly worth while to live them.
People sometimes fail to observe this fact, partly because they conceive loyalty as some- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY thing which convention forces upon the indi vidual, and partly because they also conceive loyalty, where it exists, as merely a relation of one individual to other individuals. Both views, as we now know, are wrong. No con vention can predetermine my personal loyalty without my free consent. But then, if I loyally consent, I mean to be faithful; I give myself; I am henceforth the self thus given over to the cause; and therefore essential un faithfulness is, for me, moral suicide. Mean while, however, no mere individual can ever be my whole object of loyalty; for to another individual human being I can only say, "So far as in me lies I will be loyal to our tie, to our cause, to our union." For this reason the loyal are never the mere slaves of convention; and, on the other hand, they can never say one to another, "Since we have now grown more or less tired of one another, our loyalty ceases." To tire of the cause to which my whole self is once for all committed, is indeed to tire of being my moral self. I cannot win my freedom in that way. And no individual, SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS as individual, ever has been, or ever can be, my whole cause. My cause has always been a tie, an union of various individuals in one.
Now, can our American people learn this lesson in so far as this lesson is illustrated by family ties? Can they come to see that loyalty does not mean the bondage of one individual to another, but does mean the exaltation of individuals to the rank of true personalities by virtue of their free acceptance of enduring causes, and by virtue of their lifelong service of their common personal ties? If this lesson can be learned by those serious-minded peo ple who have been misled, in recent times, by a false form of individualism, then we shall indeed not get rid of our moral problems, but we shall vastly simplify our moral situation. And a rational individualism will still remain our possession. How to treat the disloyal remains indeed a serious practical problem. But we shall never learn to deal with that problem if we suppose that the one cure for disloyalty, or the one revenge which we can take upon the disloyal, lies in a new act of THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY disloyalty, that is, in the mere assertion of our individual freedom. Train our people to know the essential preciousness of loyalty. In that way only can you hope to restore to the family, not, indeed, all of its older conven tional forms, but its true dignity. The prob lem, then, of the salvation of the family life of our nation resolves itself into the general problem of how to train our people at large into loyalty to loyalty.
The second great opportunity for loyalty is furnished, to the great mass of our people, by their relations to our various political powers and institutions, and to our larger social or ganizations generally. And here we meet, in the America of to-day, with many signs that our political and social life form at present a poor school in the arts of loyalty to loyalty.
Loyalty, indeed, as I have repeatedly said, we still have present all about us. The pre cious plain and obscure people, who are loyal to whatever they understand to be worthy SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS causes, and, on the other hand, those promi nent and voluntary public servants, who in so many cases are our leaders in good works, — these we have so far still with us. And new forms of loyalty constantly appear in our so cial life. Reform movements, trades-unions, religious sects, partisan organizations, both good and evil, arouse in various ways the loyalty of great numbers of people. Yet these special loyalties do not get rightly organized in such form as to further loyalty to loyalty. Narrow loyalties, side by side with irrational forms of individualism and with a cynical contempt for all loyalty, — these are what we too often see in the life of our country. For where the special loyalties are, amongst our people, most developed, they far too often take the form of a loyalty to mutually hostile partisan organiza tions, or to sects, or to social classes, at the expense of loyalty to the community or to the whole country. The labor-unions demand and cultivate the loyalty of their members; but they do so with a far too frequent emphasis upon the thesis that in order to be loyal to his THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY own social class, or, in particular, to his union, the laborer must disregard certain duties to the community at large, and to the nation, — du ties which loyalty to loyalty seems obviously to require. And party loyalty comes to be misused by corrupt politicians to the harm of the state. Therefore loyalty to special organi zations such as labor-unions comes to be mis directed by such leaders as are disloyal, until the welfare of the whole social order is en dangered.
The result is that the very spirit of loyalty itself has come to be regarded with suspicion by many of our social critics, and by many such partisans of ethical individualism as those whose various views we studied in our second lecture. Yet surely if such ethical individualists, ob jecting to the mischiefs wrought by the cor rupt politicians, or by the more unwise leaders of organized labor, imagine that loyalty is responsible for these evils, such critics have only to turn to the recent history of corporate misdeeds and of the unwise mismanagement of corporations in this country, in order to be SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS reminded that what we want, at present, from some of the managers of great corporate inter ests is more loyalty, and less of the individual ism of those who seek power. And I myself should say that precisely the same sort of loyalty is what we want both from the leaders and from the followers of organized labor. There is here one law for all.
Meanwhile, in case of the ill-advised labor agitations, and of the corrupt party manage ment, the cure, if it ever comes, surely will include cultivating amongst our people the spirit of loyalty to loyalty. Loyalty in itself is never an evil. The arbitrary interference with other men's loyalties, the disloyalty to the universal cause of loyalty, is what does the mischief here in question. The more the laborer is loyal to his union, if only he learns to conceive this loyalty as an instance of loyalty to loyalty, the more likely is his union to become, in the end, an instrument for social harmony, and not, as is now too often the case, an influence for oppression and for social dis organization. The loyalty which the trades- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY unions demand of their members is at present too often viewed as a mere class loyalty, and also as opposed to the individual freedom of choice on the part of those laborers who do not belong to a given union, or even to those who are in the union, but whose right choice and interests are sometimes hindered by their own union itself. But our people must learn that loyalty does not mean hostility to another man's loyalty. Loyalty is for all men, kings and laborers alike; and whenever we learn to recognize that fact, loyalty will no longer mean fraternal strife, and will no longer excuse treason to the country for the sake of fidelity to corrupt leaders or to mischievous agita tions.
VI But you may hereupon ask how the masses of our people are to learn such a lesson of loyalty to loyalty. I admit that the problem of teaching our people what the larger loyalty means is at present peculiarly difficult. And it is rendered all the more difficult by the fact SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS that, for us Americans, loyalty to our nation, as a whole, is a sentiment that we find to be at present by no means as prominent in the minds of our people as such sentiments have been in the past in other nations. Let me explain what I mean by this assertion.
The history of our sentiment towards our national government is somewhat different from the history of the sentiment of patriotism in other countries. We have never had a king as the symbol of our national dignity and unity. We have, on the other hand, never had to war against a privileged class. Our constitutional problem which led to the Civil War was a different problem from that which the French Revolution, or the English political wars of the seventeenth century, have exemplified. At one time loyalty to the nation stood, in the minds of many of our people, in strong contrast to their loyalty to their state, or to their section of the country. This contrast led in many cases to a bitter conflict between the two sorts of loyal interests. At last such conflicts had to be decided by war. The result of the war THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY was such that, from one point of view, the national government and the authority of the nation, as a whole, have won a position that is at present politically unquestionable. The supremacy of the national government in its own sphere is well recognized. Within its legal limits, its power is popularly regarded as irresistible. The appearance of its soldiers at any moment of popular tumult is well known to be the most effective expression of public authority which we have at our disposal, even although the body of soldiers which may be accessible for such a show of force happens to be a very small body. Viewed, then, as a legal authority and as a physical force, our national government occupies at present a peculiarly secure position. And so, the President of the United States is, at any moment, more powerful than almost any living monarch. All this, viewed as the outcome of our long con stitutional struggle, would seem of itself to sug gest that the American people have become essentially loyal to our national government. But, nevertheless, is this quite true? I SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS think that almost any thoughtful American has to admit that in time of peace we do not regard our national government with any such intense sentiments of loyalty as would seem from report to be the living, the vital, the constant posses sion of Japanese patriots when they consider their traditional devotion to the nation and to their emperor. For them their country is part of a religion. In their consciousness it is said especially to be the land sacred to the memory of their dead. The living, as they say, are but of to-day. The dead they have always with them in memory, even if not in the determinate form of any fixed belief with re gard to the precise nature of the life beyond the grave. It is said that the Japanese are verv free as to the formulation of all their religious opinions. But in any case their religion includes a reverence for the historic past, a devotion to the dead whose memory makes their country sacred, and a present loyalty which is consciously determined by these religious motives.
Now, the most patriotic American can hardly THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY pretend that he consciously views his country, taken as a whole, in any such religious way. The country is to us an unquestionable political authority. Were it in danger, we should rally to its defence. We have a good many formal phrases of reverence for its history and for its dignity, — phrases which had a much more concrete meaning for our predecessors, when the country was smaller, or when the country was in greater danger from its foes. But, at present, is not our national loyalty somewhat in the background of our practical conscious ness? Are we really at present a highly patriotic people? Certainly, the observer of a presidential canvass can hardly think of that canvass as a religious function, or believe that a profound reverence for the sacred memory of the fathers is at present a very prominent factor in determining our choice of the party for which we shall vote at the polls.
And if you say that political dissensions are always of such a nature as to hide for the moment patriotism behind a mist of present perplexities, you may well be asked in reply SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS whether anywhere else, outside of political dissensions, we have in our national life func tions, ceremonies, expressions of practical de votion to our nation as an ideal, which serve to keep our loyalty to our country sufficiently alive, and sufficiently a factor in our lives. When can the ordinary American citizen say in time of peace that he performs notable acts of devotion to his country, such that he could describe those acts in the terms that the Speaker of the House of Commons used, in the story that I reported to you in my former lecture? In other words, how often, in your own present life, or in the lives of your fellow- citizens, as now you know them, is it the case that you do something critical, significant, in volving personal risk or sacrifice to yourself, and something which is meanwhile so inspired by your love of your nation as a whole that you can say that just then you have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as the country itself, in your opinion, requires you to see and to speak?
Now, all this state of things is opposed to THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY our easily forming a conception of what loyalty to loyalty demands of us in our social and political relations. But the faults in question are not peculiar to our American people. They seem to my mind to be merely symptomatic of something which naturally be longs to the general type of civilization upon which, in our national history, we are entering. The philosopher Hegel, in one of his works on the philosophy of history, depicts a type of civilization, which, in his mind, was espe cially associated with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as well as with the polit ical absolutism of the seventeenth and of the early eighteenth centuries in modern Europe. This type itself was conceived by him as a general one, such that it might be realized in very various ages and civilizations. Hegel called this type of social consciousness the type of the social mind, or of the "Spirit," that had become, as he said, "estranged from itself." Let me explain what Hegel meant by this phrase.
A social consciousness can be of the pro- SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS vincial type; that is, of the type which be longs to small commonwealths or to provinces, such as our own thirteen colonies once were. Or, on the other hand, the social life can be that of the great nation, which is so vast that the individuals concerned no longer recognize their social unity in ways which seem to them homelike. In the province the social mind is naturally aware of itself as at home with its own. In the Roman Empire, or in the state of Louis XIV, nobody is at home. The gov ernment in such vast social orders represents the law, a dictation that the individual finds relatively strange to himself. Or, again, the power of the state, even when it is attractive to the individual, still seems to him like a great nature force, rather than like his own loyal self, writ large. The world of the "self -estranged social mind" of Hegel's defi nition we might, to use a current phrase ology, characterize as the world of the impe rialistic sort of national consciousness, or simply as the world of imperialism. In such a world, as Hegel skilfully points out, the THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY individual comes to regard himself as in rela tion to the social powers, which, in the first place, he cannot understand. The fact that, as in our present civilization, he is formally a free citizen, does not remove his character of self-estrangement from the social world in which he moves. Furthermore, since such a society is so vast as to be no longer easily intelligible, not only its political, but also its other social powers, appear to the individual in a similarly estranged and arbitrary fashion. In Hegel's account stress is laid upon the in evitable conflicts between wealth and govern mental authority, between corporate and polit ical dignities, — conflicts which characterize the imperial stage of civilization in question. In the world of the "self -estranged social mind," loyalty passes into the background, or tends to disappear altogether. The in dividual seeks his own. He submits to major force. Perhaps he finds such submission welcome, if it secures him safety in the acqui sition of private gain, or of stately social posi tion. But welcome or unwelcome, the author- SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS ity to which he submits, be it the authority of the government or the authority which wealth and the great aggregations of capital imply, is for him just the fact, not a matter for loyalty.
Such a formula as the one which Hegel suggests is always inadequate to the wealth of life. But we are able to understand our national position better when we see that our nation has entered in these days into the realm of the "self -estranged spirit," into the social realm where the distant and irresistible national government, however welcome its authority may be, is at best rather a guarantee of safety, an object for political contest, and a force with which everybody must reckon, than the opportunity for such loyalty, as our distinctly provincial fathers used to feel and express in their early utterances of the national spirit. In the same way in this world of the self- estranged spirit, the other forces of society arouse our curiosity, interest us intensely, must be reckoned with, and may be used more or less wisely to our advantage. But they are THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY