We see now that the state as the appearance of the federal principle must be more than a coordinating agency. It must appear as the great moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering. What is morality? The fulfilment of relation by man to man, since it is impossible to conceive an isolated man: the father and mother appear in our mind and with the three the whole infinite series. The state is the ordering of this infinite series into their right relations that the greatest possible welfare of the total may be worked out. This ordering of relations is morality in its essence and completeness. The state must gather up into itself all the moral power of its day, and more than this, as our relations are widening constantly it must be the explorer which discovers the kind of ordering, the kind of grouping, which best expresses its intent.

But “things are rotten in Denmark.” The world is at present a moral bankrupt, for nations are immoral and men worship their nations. We have for centuries been thinking out the morals of individuals. The morality of the state must now have equal consideration. We spring to that duty today. We have the ten commandments for the individual; we want the ten commandments for the state.

How is the state to gain moral and spiritual authority?

Only through its citizens in their growing understanding of the widening promise of relation. The neighborhood group feeds the imagination because we have daily to consider the wants of all in order to make a synthesis of those wants; we have to recognize the rights of others and adapt ourselves to them. Men must recognize and unify difference and then the moral law appears in all its majesty in concrete form. This is the universal striving. This is the trend of all nature⁠—the harmonious unifying of all. The call of the moral law is constantly to recognize this. Our neighborhood group gives us preeminently the opportunity for moral training, the associated groups continue it, the goal, the infinite goal, the emergence of the all-inclusive state which is the visible appearance of the total relativity of man in all right connections and articulations.

The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual activity of its citizens. There is no state except through me. James’ deep-seated antagonism to the idealists is because of their assertion that the absolute is, always has been and always will be. The contribution of pragmatism is that we must work out the absolute. You are drugging yourselves, cries James, the absolute is real as far as you make it real, as far as you bring forth in tangible, concrete form all its potentialities. In the same way we have no state until we make one. This is the teaching of the new psychology. We have not to “postulate” all sorts of things as the philosophers do (“organic actuality of the moral order” etc.), we have to live it; if we can make a moral whole then we shall know whether or not there is one. We cannot become the state imaginatively, but only actually through our group relations. Stamped with the image of All-State-potentiality we must be forever making the state. We are pragmatists in politics as the new school of philosophy is in religion: just as they say that we are one with God not by prayer and communion alone, but by doing the God-deed every moment, so we are one with the state by actualizing the latent state at every instant of our lives. As God appears only through us, so is the state made visible through the political man. We must gird up our loins, we must light our lamp and set forth, we must do it.

The federal state can be the moral state only through its being built anew from hour to hour by the activity of all its members. We have had within our memory three ideas of the individual’s relation to society: the individual as deserving “rights” from society, next with a duty to society, and now the idea of the individual as an activity of society. Our relation to society is so close that there is no room for either rights or duties. This means a new ethics and a new politics. Citizenship is not a right nor a privilege nor a duty, but an activity to be exercised every moment of the time. Democracy does not exist unless each man is doing his part fully every minute, unless everyone is taking his share in building the state-to-be. This is the trumpet call to men today. A creative citizenship must be made the force of American political life, a trained, responsible citizenship always in control creating always its own life. In most of the writing on American politics we find the demand for a “creative statesmanship” as the most pressing need of America today. It is indeed true that with so much crystallized conservatism and chaotic radicalism we need leadership and a constructive leadership, but the doctrine of true democracy is that every man is and must be a creative citizen.

We are now awaking to this need. In the past the American conception of government has been a machine-made not a man-made thing. We have wanted a perfect machine which could be set going like an international exhibition by pressing the button, but who is going to press the button? We have talked about the public without thinking that we were the public, of public opinion as something quite distinct from any opinion of our own. It is partly because men have not wanted the trouble of governing themselves that they have put all their faith in “good” officials and “good” charters. “I hate this school, I wish it would burn up,” wrote a boy home, “there’s too much old self-government about it, you can’t have any fun.” Many of us have not wanted that kind of government.

The idea of the state as a collection of units has fatally misled us in regard to our duty as citizens. A man often thinks of his share in the collective responsibility for Boston as a ¹⁄₅₀₀,₀₀₀ part of the whole responsibility. This is too small a part to interest him, and therefore he often disregards such an infinitesimal duty altogether. Of course we tell him about little drops of water, little grains of sand etc., but hitherto such eloquence has produced little effect. This is because it is untrue. We must somehow make it clear that the part of every man in a great city is not analogous to the grain of sand in the desert, it is not a ¹⁄₅₀₀,₀₀₀ part of the whole duty. It is a part so bound up with every other part that no fraction of a whole can represent it. It is like the key of a piano, the value of which is not in its being ¹⁄₅₆ of all the notes, but in its infinite relations to all the other notes. If that note is lacking every other note loses its value.

Another twist in our ideas which has tended to reduce our sense of personal responsibility has been that we have often thought of democracy as a happy method by which all our particular limitations are lost sight of in the general strength. Matthew Arnold said, “Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself.” But there is no mysterious value in people conceived of all together. A lot of ignorant or a lot of bad people do not acquire wisdom and virtue the moment we conceive them collectively. There is no alchemy by which the poornesses and weaknesses of the individual get transmuted in the group; there is no trick by which we can lose them in the whole. The truth is that all that the individual has or is enhances society, all that the individual lacks, detracts from society. The state will become a splendid thing when each one of us becomes a splendid individual. Democracy does not mean being lost in the mass, it means the contribution of every power I possess to social uses. The individual is not lost in the whole, he makes the whole.

A striking exception to the attitude of the average American in the matter of his personal responsibility was Mr. John Jay Chapman’s visit to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, to do penance for “that blot on American history”⁠—the burning a negro to death in the public square of Coatesville⁠—because he felt that “it was not the wickedness of Coatesville but the wickedness of all America.”

But there are signs today of a new spirit among us. We have begun to be restless under our present political forms: we are demanding that the machine give way to the man, we want a world of men governed by the will of men. What signs have we that we are now ready for a creative citizenship?

Everyone is claiming today a share in the larger life of society. Each of us wants to pour forth in community use the life that we feel welling up within us. Citizens’ associations, civic clubs and forums are springing up every day in every part of the country. Men are seeking through direct government a closer share in lawmaking. The woman suffrage movement, the labor movement, are parts of this vital and irresistible current. They have not come from surface springs, their sources are deep in the life forces of our age. There is a more fundamental cause of our present unrest than the superficial ones given for the woman movement, or the selfish ones given for our labor troubles: it is not the “demand for justice” from women nor the “economic greed” of labor, but the desire for one’s place, for each to give his share, for each to control his own life⁠—this is the underlying thought which is so profoundly moving both men and women today.

But a greater awakening has come since April, 1917. It has taken the ploughshare of fire to reveal our true selves: this war is running the furrows deep in the hearts of men and turning up desires of which they were unconscious themselves in their days of ease. Men are flocking to Washington at the sacrifice of business and personal interests willing to pour out their all for the great stake of democracy; the moment came when the possession of self-government was imperilled and all leapt forward ready to lay down their lives to preserve it. This war has revealed the deeper self with its deeper wishes to every man and he sees that he prizes beyond life the power to govern himself. Now is the moment to use all this rush of patriotism and devotion and love of liberty and willingness to serve, and not let it sink back again into its hidden and subterranean depths. Let us develop the kind of institutions which will call forth and utilize these powers and energies for peace as for war, for the works of peace are glorious if men can but see the goal. Let us make a fitting abiding place for men’s innate grandeur. Let us build high the walls of democracy and enlarge its courts for our daily dwelling.

Then must men understand that in peace as in war ours is to be a life of endeavor, of work, of conscious effort towards conscious ends. The ordinary man is not to do his work and then play a little in order to refresh himself, with the understanding that the world of industry and the government of his country are to be run by experts. They are to be run by him and he is to prepare himself to tackle his job. The leisure-time problem is not how the workman can have more time for play, it is how he can have more time for association, to take his share in the integrated thought and will and responsibility which is to make the new world. The “good citizen” is not he who obeys the laws, but he who has an active sense of being an integral part of the state. This is the essence and the basis of effective good citizenship. We are not part of a nation because we are living within its boundaries, because we feel in sympathy with it and have accepted its ideas, because we have become naturalized. We are part of a nation only in so far as we are helping to make that nation.

For this we must provide methods by which every man is enabled to take his part. We are no longer to put business and political affairs in the hands of one set of men and then appoint another set as watchdogs over them, with the people at best a sort of chorus in the background, at the worst practically nonexistent. But we are so to democratize our industrial and our political methods that all will have a share in policy and in responsibility. Exhortation to good citizenship is useless. We get good citizenship by creating those forms within which good citizenship can operate, by making it possible to acquire the habit of good citizenship by the practice of good citizenship.

The neighborhood group gives the best opportunity for the training and for the practice of citizenship. The leader of a neighborhood group should be able to help everyone discover his greatest ability, he should see the stimulus to apply, the path of approach, that the constituents of his neighborhood should not merely serve, but should serve in exactly that way which will best fit themselves into the community’s needs. The system of war registration where men and women record what they are best able to do, might, through the medium of the neighborhood group, be applied to the whole country. The chief object of neighborhood organization is not to right wrongs, as is often supposed, but to found more firmly and build more widely the right.

Moreover, neighborhood organization gives us a definite objective for individual responsibility. We cannot understand our duty or perform our duty unless it is a duty to something. It is because of the erroneous notion that the individual is related to “society” rather than to a group or groups that we can trace much of our lack of responsibility. A man trusts vaguely that he is doing his duty to “society,” but such vagueness gets him nowhere. There is no “society,” and therefore he often does no duty. But let him once understand that his duty is to his group⁠—to his neighborhood group, to his industrial group⁠—and he will begin to see his duty as a specific, concrete thing taking definite shape for him.

But my gospel is not for a moment of citizenship as a mere duty. We must bring to politics passion and joy. It is not through the cramping and stultification of desire that life is nobly lived, it is through seeing life in its fullness. We want to use the whole of man. You cannot put some of his energies on one side and some on the other and say some are good and some bad⁠—all are good and should be put to good use. Men follow their passions and should do so, but they must purify their passions, educate them, discipline and direct them. We turn our impulses to wrong uses, but our impulses are not wrong. The forces of life should be used, not stifled. It is not corruption, dishonesty, we have to fight; it is ignorance, lack of insight, desires not transmuted. We want a state which will transmute the instincts of men into the energies of the nation. You cannot dam the stream entirely, you can only see that it flows so as to irrigate and fructify. It all comes down to our fear of men. If we could believe in men, if we could see that circle which unites human passion and divine achievement as a halo round the head of each human being, then social and political reorganization would no longer be a hope but a fact. The old individualism feared men; the cornerstone of the new individualism is faith in men. We need a constructive faith and a robust faith, faith in men, in this world, in this day, in the Here and the Now.

From the belief of savages in the spirits who ruled their fate to the “power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness,” through the weak man’s reliance on luck and the strong man’s reliance on his isolated individuality, we have had innumerable forms of the misunderstanding of responsibility. But all this is now changing. The distinguishing mark of our age is that we are coming to a keen sense of personal responsibility, that we are taking upon ourselves the blame for all our evils, the charge for all our progress. We are beginning to realize that the redemptive power is within the social bond, that we have creative evolution only through individual responsibility.

The old ways of thinking are breaking up. The New Life is before us. Are we ready? Are we making ourselves ready? A new man is needed for the New Life⁠—a man who understands self-discipline, who understands training, who is willing to purge himself of his particularist desires, who is conscious of relations as the stuff of his existence.

To sum up this chapter: the moral state is the task of man. This must be achieved through the creative power of man as brought into visibility and actuality through his group life. The great cosmic force in the womb of humanity is latent in the group as its creative energy; that it may appear the individual must do his duty every moment. We do not get the whole power of the group unless every individual is given full value, is giving full value. It is the creative spontaneity of each which makes life march on irresistibly to the purposes of the whole. Our social and political organization must be such that this group life is possible. We hear much of “the wasted forces of our nation.” The neighborhood organization movement is a movement to use some of the wasted forces of this nation⁠—it is the biggest movement yet conceived for conservation. Have we more “value” in forests and waterpower in America than in human beings? The new generation cries, “No, this release of the spiritual energy of human beings is to be the salvation of the nation, for the life of all these human beings is the nation.” The success of democracy depends (1) upon the degree of responsibility it is possible to arouse in every man and woman, (2) on the opportunity they are given to exercise that responsibility. The new democracy depends upon you and me. It depends upon you and me because there is no one else in the world but you and me. If I pledge myself to the new democracy and you pledge yourself to the new democracy, a new motor force will be born in the world.

We need today new principles. We can reform and reform but all this is on the surface. What we have got to do is to change some of the fundamental ideas of our American life. This is not being disloyal to our past, it is exactly the opposite. Let us be loyal to our inheritance and tradition, but let us understand what that inheritance and tradition truly is. It is not our tradition to stick to an outworn past, a conventional ideal, a rigid religion. We are children of men who have not been afraid of new continents or new ideas. In our blood is the impulse to leap to the highest we can see, as the wills of our fathers fixed themselves on the convictions of their hearts. To spring forward and then to follow the path steadfastly is forever the duty of Americans. We must live democracy.