Thus choice, working on a large scale, is competition, and the only alternative is some mechanical principle, either tire inherited status of history or some new rule of stability to be worked out, perhaps, by socialism. Yet the present competitive order is not unjustly censured as wasteful, harassing, unjust and hostile to the artistic spirit. Choice is working somewhat riotously, without an adequate basis of established principles and standards, and so far as socialism is seeking these it is doing well.
Carlyle and others have urged with much reason that the mediaeval workman, hemmed in as he was by mechanical and to us unreasonable restrictions, was in some respects better off than his modern successor. There was less freedom of opportunity, but also less strain, ugliness and (324) despair; and the standards of the day were perhaps better maintained than ours are now.
We need a better discipline, a more adequate organization; the competent student can hardly fail to see this; but these things do not exist ready-made, and our present task seems to be to work them out, at the expense, doubt.
less, of other objects toward which, in quieter times, choice might be directed.
Thus it is from the interaction of personality and institutions that progress comes. The person represents more directly that human nature which it is the end of all institutions to serve, but the institution represents the net result of a development far transcending any single personal consciousness.
The person will criticise, and be mostly in the wrong, but not altogether.
He will attack, and mostly fail, but from many attacks change will ensue.
It is also true that- although institutions stand, in a general way, for the more mechanical phase of life, they yet require, within themselves, an element of personal freedom. Individuality, provided it be in harness, is the life of institutions, all vigor and adaptability depending upon it.
An army is the type of a mechanical institution; and yet, even in an army, individual choice, confined of course within special channels, is vital to the machine. In the German army, according to a competent observer, there is a systematic culture of self-reliance, a "development of the individual powers by according liberty to the utmost extent possible with the maintenance of the necessary system and discipline." "To the commandant of the company is left the entire responsibility for the instruction (325) of his men, in what mode and at what hour he may see fit," and "a like freedom is accorded to every officer charged with every branch whatsoever of instruction," while "the intelligence and self-reliance of the soldier is constantly appealed to." [6] In American armies the self-reliant spirit Of the soldier and the common-sense and adaptability developed by our rough-and-ready civilization have always been of the utmost value. Nor are they unfavorable to discipline, that " true discipline of the soldiers of freedom, a discipline which must arise from individual conviction of duty and is very different from the compulsory discipline of the soldier of despotism." [7] Thus, in the battle of Gettysburg, when Pickett's charge broke the Federal line, and when for the moment, owing to the death of many officers, the succession of command was lost, it is said that the men without orders took up a position which enabled them to crush the invading column.
As the general character of organization becomes freer and more human, both the mechanical and the choosing elements of the institution rise to a higher plane. The former ceases to be an arbitrary and intolerant law, upheld by fear, by supernatural sanctions and the suppression of free speech;and tends to become simply a settled habit of thought, settled not because discussion is stifled but because it is superfluous, because the habit of thought has so proved its fitness to existing conditions that there is no prospect of shaking it.
Thus in a free modern state, the political system, funda-(326)-mental property rights and the like are settled, so far as they are settled, not because they are sacred or authoritative, but because the public mind is convinced of their soundness. Though we may not reason about them they are, so to speak, potentially rational, inasmuch as they are believed to rest upon reason and may at any time be tested by it.
The advantages and disadvantages of this sort of institutions are well understood. They do not afford quite the sharp and definite discipline of a more arbitrary system, but they are more flexible, more closely expressive of the public mind, and so, if they can be made to work at all, more stable.
The free element in institutions also tends to become better informed, better trained, better organized, more truly rational. We have so many occasions to note this that it is unnecessary to dwell upon it here.
Endnotes Wordsworth, Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, etc. In a paper on The Personal and the Factional in the Life of Society. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1905, p. 337 By Mantegna. Page 30. See also the last chapter. I mean by mechanism anything in the way of habit, authority or formula that tends to dispense with choice. Baring-Gould, Germany, i, 350 ff Garibaldi's Autobiography, i, 105.
