Page:The New England Magazine 1891, 5.1.djvu/10

have taken the place of autocracy, dei gratit has yielded to vox populi, vox dei as the fundamental social and economic principle. This revolution was not the spontaneity of a day. It was the culmination of the work of the whole antecedent century. Philosophy did not do its work in vain. Revolutions were also evolutions. Poets involuntarily sang for a purpose. Educators like Rousseau and Richter were at the bottom of it. Washington and Franklin and Paine had first to be made, before they could create the Republic. The Republic at last was to be bottomed on Democracy by the greatest of our statesmen, Thomas Jefferson. So the nineteenth century came in as an idea.

A review of history will show us that mankind has busied itself in like manner in all the past. There have been no dark ages. Each century has in truth incubated a purpose of some sort and we inherit the same in the table of contents of our human biography. Luther began the sixteenth century with no novelty. He simply, in those theses on the cathedral door, wrote down what had already been thought out and felt out and worked out; what some had been burned for, but what, after all, was fairly well established. It was the consummation, not the inauguration of an evolution.

Has our own century been idle in thought and purpose? Do we go out without finding any columns of achievement to add up, and with no visions and hopes to make assured? Are the men in platoons right, that we are to march on without change of countersign until the old heroism grows stale in our hearts and heads, and politics becomes an automaton? On the contrary, no century ever pulsated with nobler purpose or more vigorous endeavor. The apparent drifting of our moral and intellectual life for thirty years past has been not only in appearance. We are in the last decade of the century; events do not crowd so much as ideas. These will hasten on to fulfilment. They cover every field of human energy. Education is at the bottom of all hope and progress; and out of education has just been born the enthusiasm called "University Extension," a term that fails wholly to convey to the popular mind the novelty and the greatness of the purpose conceived. It is a purpose that will totally transform, and in some ways secure our popular education and obliterate our present inchoate popular methods. Not less grand and natural as a result of the past is the conception of a "World-wide Democratic Church." This is only the application of republicanism to theology and religious effort. It means the displacement of a world-wide monarchical church by a church based on popular sentiment and individual liberty. It is possible. The pope himself begins to desert the monarchy. His recent encyclical is a plain effort to readjust the old church to modern progress. We still wait for a word to describe succinctly the social struggle which in different quarters has striven and strives to embody itself in Nationalism, Socialism, Communism—Utopianism, perhaps. The idea is not yet thought through; and it will be nameless until that is done. But the world throbs with the conviction that our inequalities are monstrous and largely needless. We have a fixed purpose to devise a remedy. These are some of the purposive trends of our age. The twentieth century will inherit a grand legacy.

But are we at anchor politically? Evidently not. Omitting all notice of the crumbling of old autocracies and monarchies—brute force and imperial force—it is clear that democracy itself is capable of new expansions and applications. Internationalism is surely supplanting nationalism. Mr. Blaine showed his unequalled statesmanship when he desired the Pan-American Congress, to be followed by Pan-American enterprises, and unfettered Pan-American commerce. Here was a bold break with conservatism. Precedent is valuable to establish equilibrium in society; but the innovator is needed with far-sight to prevent a consequent stagnation of human purpose. Pan-Republicanism is another new phrase that covers an advance all along the line. It is the idea of a world-wide democracy instead of a duplication of republics although the latter idea may be covered by it. The question now is, have we