Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 213, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1917 — Democracy Not Merely a Governmental Form but a Method of Progress [ARTICLE]

Democracy Not Merely a Governmental Form but a Method of Progress

By Prof. Frederick D. Bramhall

Democracy is not merely a form of machinery of suffrage, or representation, of elections, of relations of executive and legislature, and the like, though they may all have something to do with it. It is not a thing 'to be enacted, not a goal to be attained and enjoyed. If it were that and if we had attained it, why, then, the sooner we found something more important to talk about the better. No! Democracy is a method of progress. It is faith—unproved like other faiths, but with heartening gleams of promise—a faith in a common humanity; a belief that men are essentially the same kind of stuff; that in this long pilgrimage of history all travel a common road and that only by the co-operation of all, by the •recognition of all as common partners in the enterprise, with the common dignity of membership, the common experience of failure and achievement, can any sound and permanent advance, any progress worth the fighting for, be attained. , It denies, then, that there can be any such thing as a govemihg class. To attempt to set aside any such class is in the first place an intolerable waste of human spiritual resources; and in the second place it thwarts the hope of civilization. The progress of organized society is the progress of justice between men, and the fruitful ideas of social justice are not handed down from above, but forced up from below. Democracy holds that only by raising a whole people to higher levels can any part of that nation ultimately prosper, and that only as participating and on-operating members can the whole people be raised. It stands for the appeal to reason. And what, bf contrast, is autocracy? It is the appeal to authority as such, to prescription, to the method of power. It denies the righteousness and the profit of general co-operation. It believes in the management of many wilis by the competent few. Where democracy holds that men are in general such that they will respond to opportunity and turn toward the light, autocracy holds that they must in general be managed for their own good and that of the state, by a will that is not their will. Democracy invites the ranging human spirit to experiment with life. Autocracy proposes to order and to regiment it. Democracy respec intrinsic humanity, with a respect touched with humility; autocracy distrusts and suppresses it.