the great industrial forces, the aggregations of capital, the combinations of enormous physical power, employed for various social ends. These vast social forces are like the forces of nature. They excite our loyalty as little as do the trade-winds or the blizzard. They leave our patriotic sentiments cold. The smoke of our civilization hides the very heavens that used to be so near, and the stars to which we were once loyal. The conse quences of such social conditions are in part inevitable. I am not planning any social reform which would wholly do away with these conditions of the world of the self- estranged spirit. But these conditions of our national social order do not make loyalty to loyalty a less significant need. They only deprive us of certain formerly accessible op portunities for such loyalty. They lead us to take refuge in our unpatriotic sects, par tisan organizations, and unions. But they make it necessary that we should try to see how, under conditions as they are, we can best foster loyalty in its higher forms, not by SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS destroying the sects or the unions, but by inspiring them with a new loyalty to loyalty.
As the nation has in so many respects be come estranged from our more intimate con sciousness, we have lost a portion of what, in the days before the war, used to absorb the loyalty of a large proportion of our country men. I speak here of loyalty to the separate states and to the various provinces of our country. Such provincial loyalty still exists, but it has no longer the power that it possessed when it was able to bring on civil war, and very nearly to destroy the national unity. Instead of dangerous sectionalism, we now have the other dangerous tendency towards a war of classes, which the labor-unions and many other symptoms of social discontent em phasize. We have that corrupt political life which partisan mismanagement exemplifies. And we have that total indifference to all forms of loyalty which our seekers after individual power sometimes exhibit, and which occasion ally appears as so serious an evil in the conduct of the business of certain great corporations.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY All these, I insist, are in our present Ameri can life symptoms of the state of the self- estranged spirit. The decline of family loy alty, of which I spoke a while since, may be regarded as another symptom of the same general tendency. Loyalty itself, under such conditions, remains too often unconscious of its true office. Instead of developing into the true loyalty to loyalty, it fails to recognize its own in the vast world of national affairs. It is dazzled by the show of power. It limits its devotion to the service of the political party, or of the labor-union, or of some other sec tarian social organization. In private life, as we have seen, it too often loses control of the family. In public life it appears either as the service of a faction, or as a vague fondness for the remote ideals.
VII And nevertheless, as I insist, loyalty to loyalty is not a vague ideal. The spirit of loyalty is practical, is simple, is teachable, and is for all normal men. And in order to train loyalty to loyalty in a great mass of the people, SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS what is most of all needed is to help them to be less estranged than they are from their own social order.
To sum up, then, this too lengthy review, the problem of the training of our American people as a whole to a larger and richer social loyalty is the problem of educating the self- estranged spirit of our nation to know itself better. And now that we have the problem before us, what solution can we offer?
The question of what methods a training for loyalty should follow, is the special prob lem of our next lecture. But there is indeed one proposal, looking towards a better train ing of our nation to loyalty, which I have here to make as I close this statement of our na tional needs. The proposal is this. We need and we are beginning to get, in this country, a new and wiser provincialism. I mean by such provincialism no mere renewal of the old sectionalism. I mean the sort of pro vincialism which makes people want to ideal ize, to adorn, to ennoble, to educate, their own province; to hold sacred its traditions, to THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY honor its worthy dead, to support and to multiply its public possessions. I mean the spirit which shows itself in the multiplying of public libraries, in the laying out of public parks, in the wrork of local historical associa tions, in the enterprises of village improve ment societies, --yes, even in the genea logical societies, and in the provincial clubs. I mean also the present form of that spirit which has originated, endowed, and fostered the colleges and universities of our Western towns, cities, and states, and which is so well shown throughout our country in our American pride in local institutions of learning. Of course, we have always had something of this provin cialism. It is assuming new forms amongst us. I want to emphasize how much good it can do in training us to higher forms of loyalty.
That such provincialism is a good national trait to possess, the examples of Germany and of Great Britain, in their decidedly con trasting but equally important ways, can show us. The English village, the English country life, the Scotsman's love for his own native SOME AMERICAN PROBLEMS province, --these are central features in de termining the sort of loyalty upon which the British Empire as a whole has depended. Germany, like ourselves, has suffered much from sectionalism. But even to-day the Ger man national consciousness presupposes and depends upon a highly developed provincial life and loyalty. One of the historical weak nesses of France has been such a centraliza tion of power and of social influence about Paris as has held in check the full develop ment of the dignity of provincial consciousness in that country. Now, in our country wre do not want any mutual hatred of sections. But we do want a hearty growth of provincial ideals. And we want this growth just for the sake of the growth of a more general and effective patriotism. We want to train na tional loyalty through provincial loyalty. We want the ideals of the various provinces of our country to be enriched and made definite, and then to be strongly represented in the government of the nation. For, I insist, it is not the sect, it is not the labor-union, it is not THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY the political partisan organization, but it is the widely developed provincial loyalty which is the best mediator between the narrower interests of the individual and the larger patriotism of our nation. Further centraliza tion of power in the national government, with out a constantly enriched and diversified pro vincial consciousness, can only increase the estrangement of our national spirit from its own life. On the other hand, history shows that if you want a great people to be strong, you must depend upon provincial loyalties to me diate between the people and their nation.
The present tendency to the centralization of power in our national government seems to me, then, a distinct danger. It is a substitu tion of power for loyalty. To the increase of a wise provincialism in our country, I myself look for the best general social means of train ing our people in loyalty to loyalty. But of course such training in loyalty to loyalty must largely be a matter of the training of indi viduals, and to the problem of individual train ing for loyalty our next lecture will be devoted.
VI TRAINING FOR LOYALTY LECTURE VI TRAINING FOR LOYALTY TWO objections which have been expressed to me by hearers of the foregoing lectures of this course deserve a word of mention here, as I begin the present discussion of the work of training individuals for a loyal life.
The first of these objections concerns my use of the term " loyalty. " " Why," so the ob jection runs, "why can you not avoid the endless repetition of your one chosen term, * loyalty'? Why would not other words, such as fidelity, devotion, absorption, trustworthi ness, faithfulness, express just as well the moral quality to which you give the one name that you have employed?"
The second objection concerns my defini tion of the term "loyalty," and is closely con- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY nected with the first objection. It runs as follows: "Why do you insist that the cause which the loyal man serves must be a social cause? Why might one not show the same essential moral quality that you define, when the cause that he serves is something quite unearthly, or something earthly but quite unsocial? Saint Simeon on his pillar, Buddha seeking enlightenment under his lonely tree, the Greek geometer attempting to square the circle, — were they not as faithful as your loyal man is? And were their causes social causes?"
I reply to these objections together. I have defined my present usage of the popular term "loyalty" in my own distinctly technical way. Loyalty so far means for us, in these lectures, the willing, the thoroughgoing, and the prac tical devotion of a self to a cause. And a cause means, in these lectures, something that is conceived by its loyal servant as unify ing the lives of various human begins into one life. Now, I know of no other word whose popular usage comes closer than does that of TRAINING FOR LOYALTY the good old word "loyalty" to embodying the meaning that I have given to the term. I think, then, that I have a right to my technical definition. It is based upon popular usage, and goes beyond that usage only in a very natural way. I intend soon to show you that we are now ready to substitute for this first tech nical definition another and a still more sig nificant definition which will reveal to us, for the first time, the true spirit of the enterprise in which all the loyal are actually engaged. But I can reach this higher definition only through the simpler definition. To that, in adequate as it is, my discussion must cling until we are ready for something better.
Granting, however, my owTn definition of my term, I cannot easily use any other popular or philosophical term in the same way. I cannot substitute the word "devotion" for the term "loyalty, " since loyalty is to my mind a very special kind of devotion. A man might be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; but that would not make him loyal. Fidelity, again, is, in my own account, but one aspect THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY of loyalty. Loyalty includes fidelity, but means more, since, besides fidelity, decisive ness and the acceptance of a cause also be long to loyalty; and the fidelity of a dog to his master is only a pathetic hint of loyalty, or a fragment of the disposition that, in human beings, expresses itself in the full reasonable ness of loyal life. The same comment holds in case of the word "faithfulness." As for ab sorption, the loyal are absorbed in their cause, but the angry man is absorbed in his pas sion. Yet such absorption is not what I have in mind. The loyal, again, possess trust worthiness, but a watch may also be trust worthy; and that word ill expresses the vol untary nature of the spirit of loyalty.
I cannot find, then, another term to meet my purpose. My usage of this term is justi fied mainly by that simplification of our con ceptions of the moral life which our theory has made possible.
As for my insistence upon the social aspect of the loyal life, that insistence implies two assertions about such cases as those of the TRAINING FOR LOYALTY lonely saint on the pillar, or Buddha seeking enlightenment, or the geometer trying to solve his problem. The first assertion is that all such lonely enterprises have moral value only when they are indeed a part of one's service of the cause of humanity. The saint on the pillar was presumably trying to add to the store of merits which the universal church was supposed to possess. If so, he had a social cause which he served; namely, the church, — the mystic union of all the faithful. His cause may have been wrongly conceived by him, but it was, in our sense, a cause, and a social one. The Buddha of the legend was seeking to save not only himself but mankind. He was loyal, therefore, in our sense. As for the geometer, his search for the solution of his problem concerned one of the deepest com mon interests of the human mind; namely, an interest in the discovery and possession of rational truth. Truth is for everybody; and it unifies the lives of all men. Whoever seeks for a truth, as important as geometrical truth is, and seeks it with a serious devotion, has a THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY social cause. And no utterly lonely devotion to anything is morally worthy of a human being.
My second assertion as to the social aspect of causes is this. Sometimes men have indeed sought to serve God in an actually unsocial way, and have been devoted to a world of unseen and superhuman beings. But such beings, if they are real and are worthy of a moral devotion at all, are worthy of the devo tion of all mankind; and in such devotion, if it is indeed justified, all men may be blessed. The worship of the gods, even when a lonely worshipper has expressly tried not to think of his fellows, has therefore always implied a loyalty to the cause of one's own people, or else of mankind at large. The Christian's devotion to God is inseparably bound up with his loyalty to the mystic union of the faithful in the church. The non-social aspect of genuine worship is therefore but apparent. Religion seeks a certain fulfilment of the purposes of the moral life, — a fulfilment which we are hereafter to study. On the TRAINING FOR LOYALTY other hand, loyalty itself, as a devotion to a cause which unifies many human lives, is, as we shall see, profoundly religious in its spirit. For men, viewed merely as natural phe nomena, are many, and mutually conflicting creatures. Loyalty aims at their unity, and such unity, as wre shall see, is always some thing that has its supernatural meaning. In brief, then, to worship divine powers in a genuinely ethical spirit, is always to serve a cause which is also, in the human sense, social, — the cause of the state, or of the church, or of humanity; while, on the other hand, loyally to serve causes is to aim to give hu man life a supernatural, — an essentially divine meaning.
And these are the reasons why I have in sisted upon the social aspect of loyalty.
Bear, then, I pray you, with my too often repeated term; accept its apparently too narrow definition. We are on the way towards a view of the spiritual unity of all human life, — a view which may serve to justify this technical usage of a term, this THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY long dwelling upon the details of the moral life, these seemingly commonplace com ments upon social problems.
II How shall individuals be trained for a loyal life? That is the question of the present lecture. In trying to answer this question I shall first dwell, briefly, and very inadequately, upon the place that a training for loyalty should occupy in the education of the young. Then I shall speak of the way in which ma ture people are trained for such forms of loy alty as belong to the actual business of the social world.
Whether you like my use of terms or not, you will agree that training the young for a willing and thoroughgoing devotion of the self to a social cause, must be a long and manifold task. Before true loyalty can ap pear in any but rather crude and fragmen tary forms in the life of a growing human being, a long discipline of the whole mind must have preceded. One must have become TRAINING FOR LOYALTY capable of conceiving what a social cause is. One must have learned decisiveness and fidelity through an elaborate general prepara tion of the will. Therefore, while the begin nings of loyalty extend far back into the life of childhood, its full development must be long to mature years. Affection, obedience, a gradually increasing persistence in whole some activities, a growing patience and self- control, all these, in the natural growth of a human being, are preliminaries to the more elaborate forms of loyalty. By themselves they are not loyalty. In accordance with the general trend of modern educational theory, we therefore naturally point out that, in train ing children for future loyalty, teachers must avoid trying to awaken any particular sort of loyalty before its fitting basis is laid, and before a sufficient age has been reached. The basis in question involves a rich development of social habits. The age for true and system atic loyalty can hardly precede adolescence. One must obtain the material for a moral personality before a true conscience can be THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY won. Conscience, as we have seen, is the flower and not the root of the moral life.
But there is one contribution which child hood early makes to a possible future loyalty, — a contribution which we sometimes fail to take sufficiently into account. That con tribution is the well-known disposition to idealize heroes and adventures, to live an imaginary life, to have ideal comrades, and to dream of possible great enterprises. I have for years insisted, along with many others who have studied our educational problems, that these arts of idealization which childhood so often and so spontaneously practises, are not only in themselves fascinating and joyous, but are also a very important preliminary to that power to conceive the true nature of social causes upon which later loyalty depends. If I have never been fascinated in childhood by my heroes and by the wonders of life, it is harder to fascinate me later with the call of duty. Loyalty, as we have already seen, and as we have yet further to see, is an idealizing of human life, a communion with invisible TRAINING FOR LOYALTY aspects of our social existence. Too great literalness in the interpretation of human relations is, therefore, a foe to the develop ment of loyalty. If my neighbor is to me merely a creature of a day, who walks and eats and talks and buys and sells, I shall never learn to be loyal to his cause and to mine. But the child who plays with ideal comrades, or who idealizes writh an unconscious wisdom our literal doings and his own, is, in his own way, getting glimpses of that real spiritual world whose truth and whose unity we have hereafter more fully to consider. It is in his fantasies, then, that a child begins to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such fantasies may need to be carefully guarded. They may take a dangerous or even a disastrous turn in the life of one or another child. But in their better phases they are not mere illu sions and are great blessings. They are prophecies of the coming of conscience, and of a possible union with the world of an actually divine truth.
Yet since loyalty involves conduct, such THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY fantasies of childhood are indeed but a prep aration for loyalty. And higher loyalty be longs later. But in normal childhood there do indeed appear, in a fragmentary way, forms of conduct which already include a simple, but, so far as it goes, an actual loy alty to the causes the child already under stands. You all know some of these forms. The members of a gang of boys, sometimes of bad boys, show a certain loyalty to the cause represented by the gang. School children develop the code of honor that forbids the telling of tales to the teacher. Truthfulness becomes a conscious virtue early in normal childhood, and has its own childish casuistry, — often an amusing one.
The rule, of course, regarding all such childhood beginnings of loyalty is that we should always respect whatever is in the least socially tolerable about the expressions of even the crudest loyalty. The parent or teacher who trifles with the code of honor of children by encouraging the talebearer, or by even requiring that a child should become, TRAINING FOR LOYALTY an informer, is simply encouraging disloyalty. He outrages the embryonic conscience of his young charges.
For the rest, children appreciate the loy alty or disloyalty of our conduct towards them sooner than they can define their own duty. And the one who would train for loyalty must therefore be, in his dealings with children, peculiarly scrupulous about his own loyalty.
Ill But after all, whatever be the best train ing of childhood for a coming moral life, the rapid development of loyalty itself belongs to adolescence, just as the outcome of that development is reached only in mature life. Upon the importance of youth as the natural period for training in more elaborate forms of loyal conduct, our recent authority regarding adolescence, President Stanley Hall, has in sisted. In normal youth various forms of loyalty, of a highly complex character, appear with a great deal of spontaneity. Two of these forms have become important in the life THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY of the youth of many nations, and certainly in the life of our own American youth to-day. The one form is loyalty to the fraternal or ganization, — very generally to a secret fra ternity. The other form is loyalty to one's own side in an athletic contest, or to one's college or other institution, viewed as an athletic entity.
Both of these forms of loyalty have their excesses, and lead to well-known abuses. The secret fraternities may become organizations for general mischief and disorder; the ath letic contests may involve overmuch passion, and may even do harm to the general loyalty by fostering the spirit of unfair play. Now, it is notable that both of these sorts of abuses increase when the fraternities and the athletic organizations are imitated in the lower schools by the children. The resulting dangers show that loyalty ought not to be a prematurely forced plant. It should grow, in its various forms, in its due time. Hence those in charge of our secondary schools should not be misled by their knowledge of the preciousness of loy- TRAINING FOR LOYALTY ally into encouraging an overhasty develop ment of secret fraternities and of fully formed athletic organizations amongst those who are not old enough to reap the fruits of such forms of loyalty. The coming of true loyalty may be seriously hindered by the too early organiza tion of the perfectly natural gang of boys into some too elaborate social structure. Harm has been done of late years by too much aping of athletic and fraternity life in connection with the lower grades of schools.
But when youth is fairly reached, and the secret fraternity and the athletic organization become spontaneously prominent, it is plain that our efforts to train our youth to a higher life must recognize these natural types of loyalty, but must do so without overempha sizing their cruder features. We must always build upon what we have; and therefore any unnecessary hostility to the fraternities and to the athletic life is profoundly objectionable. But the most unhappy features of the athletic, and in some measure of the fraternity, life in our colleges and universities are due to the THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY false social prominence which the public opin ion of those who have nothing to do with college life often forces upon our youth. The athletic evils, such as they are, of our academic world, are not due to the college students themselves nearly so much as to the absurd social promi nence which the newspapers and the vast modern crowds give to contests which ought to be cheerful youthful sports, wherein a natural loyalty is to be trained, but wherein a national prominence of the games and the con testants is utterly out of place. It is as absurd to overemphasize such matters as it is wicked to interfere unnecessarily with any other aspect of youthful moral development. It is the extravagant publicity of our intercollegiate sports which is responsible for their principal evils. Leave wholesome youth to their natural life, not irritated and not aroused to unwise emotions by the exaggerated comments of the press, and our athletic organizations would serve their proper function of training the muscles as well as the souls of our youth to loyalty. As for the fraternities, — the false TRAINING FOR LOYALTY social prominence which their graduate mem bers sometimes force upon them is a distinct hindrance to the work that they can do in train ing youth for a loyal life.
Fair play in sport is a peculiarly good instance of loyalty. And in insisting upon the spirit of fair play, the elders who lead and who or ganize our youthful sports can do a great work for the nation. The coach, or the other leader in college sports, to whom fair play is not a first concern, is simply a traitor to our youth and to our nation. If the doctrine of these lectures is right, we can see with what stupendous hu man interests he is trifling.
As to other ways in which the loyalty of our youth can be trained, we still too much lack, in this country, dignified modes of celebrating great occasions. Once the Fourth of July was a day for training patriotic loyalty; it has now degenerated, and is probably irretrievably lost to the cause of true loyalty. Memorial Day and our national Thanksgiving Day are our best holidays for expressing loyalty to the community and to the nation. Let us cherish THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY them, and preserve them from desecration. But with us both holidays and public cere monials have a certain democratic tendency to degeneration. We need more means for sym bolizing loyalty, both in public monuments and in ceremonials, as well as in forms of common public service to our community. European nations glorify the army as a prac tical teacher of loyalty to the youth. The loyalty thus won is mingled with the war-spirit, and is therefore dear bought. But we unques tionably need substitutes for military service as a means of training for a loyal life. It be longs to the task of our social leaders to invent and to popularize such substitutes. Herein lies one of the great undertakings of the future.
IV The true sphere of a complete loyalty is mature life. We constantly need, all of us, individual training in the art of loyalty. How is this work accomplished in the social order? In answering this question, let history and our daily social experience be our guides.
TRAINING FOR LOYALTY The main lessons that these guides teach us, as I think, are three: First, our loyalty is trained and kept alive by the influence of personal leaders. Secondly, the higher forms of train ing for loyalty involve a momentous process which I shall call the Idealizing of the Cause. Thirdly, loyalty is especially perfected through great strains, labors, and sacrifices in the ser vice of the cause.
Of the three factors here mentioned, the first and second are inseparable and universal. If we are to be made loyal, we want personal leaders, and highly idealized causes. In ex ceptional cases a man may seem to be his own sole leader in loyalty. But this is rare. Al ways, to be sure, a loyal man uses his own leadership, since, as we saw in our fourth lec ture, his conscience is his leader. But usually he needs the aid of other personal leaders be sides himself. As for the idealizing of the cause, — I have called it a momentous process. How momentous we shall soon see. For it is by this process that we are introduced into the true spiritual world.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY Let me illustrate my theses. We are all familiar with the history of clubs and of sec tarian social organizations generally. Now how are these social enterprises, good or evil, made to succeed?
You all know that if a club or a sect is to be begun, or if a political or social movement is to be rendered effective, two things are neces sary: first, a leader, or a group of leaders, eager, enthusiastic, convinced, or, at the worst, capable of speaking as if they were convinced, - leaders persistent, obstinate, and in their own fitting way aggressive; and, secondly, a cause that can be idealized so that, when the leaders talk of it in their glowing exhortations, it seems to be a sort of supernatural being, in one sense impersonal, but in another sense capable of being personified, an exalted but still per sonally interesting spiritual power. The two aspects of loyalty, the personal and the seem ingly superpersonal, must thus be emphasized together.
Consider, in particular, the process of mak ing almost any new club succeed. Some group TRAINING FOR LOYALTY of persons, sometimes a single leader, must be found, willing to devote time and energy to directing the new organization. The leader or leaders must believe the enterprise worth while, must proclaim its importance in vigor ous terms, and must patiently stand by the club through all the doubtful first period of its existence. But the personal influence of these leaders cannot be enough to arouse any genuine loyalty in the members of the club, unless the organization itself can be made to appear as a sort of ideal personality, of a higher than merely human type. If the leaders impress their companions as being people who are concerned merely with their own private im portance, they in vain persist in their propa ganda. In that case the club is nicknamed as their particular pet or as their fad; one makes light of their energy, one maligns their motives, and the club crumbles into nothing. In order to succeed, the leaders must give to the club the character of a sort of ideal entity, often of an improvised mythological goddess, who is to be conceived as favoring her devotees, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY as bestowing upon them extraordinary social or spiritual benefits. Even the convivial festi vals of the club, if such festivals there be, must have some sort of ceremonial dignity about them, — a dignity such as suggests the impersonal or superpersonal rank of the club as an ideal. The club must become a cause, in whose service the members are one. If it is a reform club, or other body engaged in a propaganda, then social interests that lie out side of the boundaries of the club's separate being serve to define this cause; the club is then merely an instrument to further a loyalty that is intelligible apart from the existence of this very instrument; and in such a case the leaders of the club have mainly to insist effec tively upon the importance of this already exist ing loyalty. But if the club is to be an end in itself, — an organization that exists for its own sake and for the sake of its own members, — the process of learning to ascribe to the new club the ideal dignity of a common cause is sometimes a difficult process. The devices used by the leaders are, upon occasion, very TRAINING FOR LOYALTY direct. One simply calls the club an ideal; one personifies it in various poetical ways; and one praises it as a sort of superhuman being. Or, more practically still, one incor porates the club, endows it with a legal per sonality, and makes it a property owner. But other devices are more indirect. Club ceremonials and festivals, some more or less rudimentary club ritual, perhaps also the various familiar devices of the secret societies, the air of mystery, club emblems and symbols, — all serve to give to the club the appearances, at least, of a fitting cause for the exercise of loyalty. Another indirect device consists in naming the club after famous or beloved peo ple, now dead, whose honor and whose mem ory idealize the new organization. Or, again, one arbitrarily calls the club ancient and dig nifies it by a more or less conscious myth about its past. All such devices serve to call out loyalty in ways that may be comparatively trivial, but that may also be of a very profound significance, if the new organization is actually a fitting object of loyalty.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY