content of religion.

CHAPTER VII

TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP[8]

The altruism of America is philanthropic rather than civic and in
deliberate disregard of government, the average citizen of the United
States has no equal. However intelligent or capable he may be, he is in
the main a poor citizen. This habit of having no care for the ship of
state and of seeking comfort and self-advantage, regardless of her
future, is exactly the reverse of what one would expect. For by the
manner of her birth and her natural genius the republic would seem to
guarantee forever a high type of efficient public service.

But the capable and typical man of the church, and presumptively the man
of conscience, studiously avoids the hazards of political life. It is
not necessary to rehearse the well-known and deplorable results of this
policy whereby the best men have generally avoided public office,
especially in municipal government. Intelligence of the ills of the body
politic or of the fact that it lies bruised and violated among thieves
serves chiefly to divert the disgusted churchman to the other side of
the road as he hastens to his destination of personal gain. Indeed it is
not an uncommon thing for him to be a past master in circumventing or
debauching government and in thus spreading the virus of political
cynicism throughout the mass of the people.

Such a separation of church and state is hardly to be desired, and the
call to political service is quite as urgent, quite as moral, and far
more exacting than the perfectly just calls to foreign mission support
and to the support of the great philanthropies of the day. Because of
the influx of foreign peoples, the unsolved race problem, tardy economic
reforms, uncertain justice, political corruption, and official
mediocrity, America stands more in need of good citizenship than of
generosity, more in need of statesmen than of clergymen.

No subsequent philanthropy can atone for misgovernment, and furthermore
all social injustice, whether by positive act or simple neglect, tends
to take toll from the defenseless classes. The more efficient extricate
themselves, while the ignorant, the weak, the aged, and chiefly the
little children bear the brunt of governmental folly. It is for this
reason, together with the passing of materialistic standards of pomp
and circumstance and the growing insistence upon human values, that the
women are demanding full citizenship. And this new c