at experience gives the easy and
trustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in the
narrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast our
experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the
larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not
because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, because
of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation
naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare
ourselves for the larger social duties." Such a demand is reasonable,
for by our daily experience we have discovered that we cannot
mechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare moments
of exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even as the
ideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength to
attain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn
that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may
come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from
selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of
Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all
men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and
equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well
as a test of faith.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by
travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common
road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size
of one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality results
perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for
it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy
which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.

There are many indications that this conception of Democracy is growing
among us. We have come to have an enormous interest in human life as
such, accompanied by confidence in its essential soundness. We do not
believe that genuine experience can lead us astray any more than
scientific data can.

We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come
only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the
surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and
concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a
consciousness of the illumi