PREFATORY REMARKS

GENTLEMEN OF YALE UNIVERSITY:

In delivering the lectures of 19071 on the responsibilities of citizenship, upon the foundation established by the late William Earl Dodge, I look back with pleasure to nearly forty years of friendship with Mr. Dodge, and to the example which his whole life gave of unselfish public spirit and of unremitting and intelligent effort for the welfare of his country and of his fellow-men. The establishment of this lectureship is but one of a multitude of acts which expressed his constant solicitude for the welfare of others and his grateful appreciation of all the blessings he owed to the just and equal laws, the liberty, and the opportunities of his country. His life was a better lesson in the responsibility of Christian citizenship than any lecturer can put into words; for he did what we write about and he proved what we assert. It is my purpose to speak to you of your responsibilities regarding the government of your country and to discuss:

1. The task inherited or assumed by members of the governing body in a democracy.

2. The function of political parties as agencies of the governing body.

3. The duties of the citizen as a member of a political party. 4. The grounds for encouragement.

1 These lectures were delivered at Yale University, May 13, 14, 20, and 21, 1907, under the William Earl Dodge Foundation, and were published and copyrighted by the Yale University Press in that year under the title "The Citizen's Part in Government." The editors acknowledge the courtesy of the Yale University Press in permitting their republication, and take this method of expressing their appreciation.

THE CITIZEN'S PART IN GOVERNMENT

I

THE TASK INHERITED OR ASSUMED BY MEMBERS OF THE GOVERNING BODY IN A DEMOCRACY

LARGE part of mankind still regards government as

A something quite apart from the main business of life

something which is undoubtedly necessary to enable them to attend to their business, but only incidental or accessory to it. They plow and sow and harvest; they manufacture and buy and sell; they practice the professions and the arts; they write and preach; they work and they play, under a subconscious impression that government is something outside all this real business - a function to be performed by some one else with whom they have little or no concern, as the janitor of an apartment house, whom somebody or other has hired to keep out thieves and keep the furnace running. In reality, government is an essential part in every act of all this wide range of human activity. If it is bad, ruin comes to all; if it is good, success comes according to capacity and courage. The fairest and most fertile parts of the earth have been for centuries wilderness and desert because of bad government; not only lands capable of supporting multitudes in comfort and prosperity, but lands that have actually done so in the past, are today filled with wretchedness and squalor, with ignorance and vice, because of bad government; while under good government industry and comfort flourish on the most sterile soil and under the most rigorous climate.

The proportional part played by government in the personal affairs of every individual life is rapidly increasing. The crowding and complications, the inventions and improve

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ments and coöperation of modern life have enormously increased the dependence of men upon each other. A century ago the farmers, who made up the bulk of the people of the United States, were quite independent in their comparatively isolated lives and with their few wants. I can recall a picture drawn by one who remembered the life of that time upon a farm familiar to my childhood. He said:

We had abundance of food and clothing; we raised our own wheat and corn, which were ground into flour and meal at a neighboring mill for a share of the grain; we raised all the beef and pork and vegetables that we required; we raised sheep and sheared them, and carded and spun and wove the cloth for our winter clothing; we raised flax and from it made our own linen; we dipped our own candles, which afforded sufficient artificial light for a life in which it was the rule to rise with daylight and go to bed when it was dark; we had milk from our own cows, eggs from our own fowls and abundant firewood from our own forest. We had everything we needed except money and we had little need for that; the chief occasion for its use was to pay the small taxes which were required each year. There was little money in the community and it was sometimes hard to get enough to meet the taxes.

Under such conditions, government might well have been regarded as an outside affair, of which the less people heard the better.

Compare such a life with that of a resident in one of the cities, in which a third of the population of the United States are now crowded together. The city family is dependent for every article of food and clothing upon the products of fardistant places. These products are supplied through great and complicated agencies of transportation, and for the most part have been prepared for use by a variety of distant mills and factories. The family depends upon fuel brought from distant coal mines; its light comes from gas and electrical plants over which it has no control; the habits of business and social life are all adjusted to means of communication furnished by great telegraph and telephone companies and a government postal service. It exercises no control at all

over the things that are absolutely necessary to its daily life. A strike in the coal mines, like that which occurred in Pennsylvania five years ago, may at any time put out not only the furnace but the kitchen fire; a strike in the lighting plants, like that which happened in Paris a few weeks ago, may plunge the house and the neighborhood into darkness. A quarrel between railroad companies and their employees, or the inability of a railroad company to furnish sufficient transportation, may cut off the most necessary supplies; the meat is liable to be diseased unless some one inspects the packing-house, the name and place of which no one in the family knows. The milk may be full of tuberculosis and the water full of typhoid germs unless some one has tested the cattle and some one enforced sanitary ordinances upon distant farms. Access to the house depends upon a street department, safety from thieves upon a police force, and freedom from pestilence upon the sanitary disposal of the sewage of thousands of other families. Under these circumstances of complete interdependence, the individual is entirely helpless. The only way in which he can compel the continuance of conditions under which he and his family can go on living is by combination with others equally dependent with himself, and by organization for whatever control over those conditions is necessary. That combination and organization is government.

Men may leave all this part of the business of life to others and treat it as no concern of theirs; men may voluntarily elect to play no part in the control of the affairs which make up their daily life and to play no part in the working out of the great questions upon which the prosperity of their country, the future of their children, and the welfare of the race depend; but they need not flatter themselves that these things are matters apart from them, or that they are leading free and independent lives. Abstention is impossible under

the conditions of modern life and modern popular government. Men must either govern or be governed; they must take part in the control of their own lives, or they must lead subject lives, helplessly dependent in the little things and great things of life upon the will and power of others.

The theory and practice of government have vastly changed within the past few centuries and especially within the last century and a half. Control by superior authority, claiming by divine right, selected by inheritance, and supported by a comparatively small governing class selected in the same way was repressive and directive. Government was then apart from the main and general activities of life, but it was apart from them by being above them, by exercising rights over them and making them all pay tribute. Under our modern systems of popular government the repressive function still continues, but entirely new and different modes of action have been developed. The repression is self-repression, and the direction is the resultant of internal forces determining the character of the directed mass. Popular government is organized self-control — organized capacity for the development of the race. It is the good and noble impulses and the selfish and cruel passions of man struggling with each other for the maintenance or the denial of justice; it is the lust for power and savage instinct for oppression struggling against manhood and selfrespect for the maintenance or destruction of liberty; it is the greed and cunning that have shamed the history of the world struggling with honesty and virtue for public purity; it is the longing in the heart of man for better things up through education to broader knowledge and higher life; it is the vast elemental forces of humanity moving great masses of men in violent protest against the ills of life, to the destruction of social order; it is the instinct of self-preservation which rallies other multitudes in defense of vested