t on the thought
life of the world will be even greater--vastly greater--than that of the
French Revolution. The twentieth century will differ from the
nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. The effect on the
relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so
far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the nineteenth
century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as the Athenian
tribal system or mediaeval feudalism.

Thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. We Americans
are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to
political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise.
All across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion
--if anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. Thus we are
suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly
trusting to it to solve all problems. Legislation is no solution for
moral evils. It is possible, to some extent, to suppress vice by
legislation, but not to create virtue. Virtue can be developed only by
conduct and education. You cannot drive men into the kingdom of heaven
with the whip of legislation; and if you could, you would so change the
atmosphere of the place that one would prefer to take the other road.

If our democracy is to survive, we must think it through; carrying it
down, from these superficial political devices, into our industry and
commerce, still so largely dominated by feudal ideas of the middle age,
into our science and art, far more completely into our education, into
our social relationship, and beyond all else, into our fundamental
attitude of mind. Democracy is, at bottom, not a series of political
forms, but a way of life.

Thus the War will be the supreme test of democracy. The question it
will settle is this: can free men, by voluntary cooperation, develop an
efficiency and an endurance which will make it possible for them to
stand and protect their liberties against the machinery and aggressive
ambitions of autocratic empires where everything is done paternally from
the top? If they can, then democracy will survive and grow as the
highest form of society for ages to come; if not, then democracy will
pass and be succeeded by some other social order.

That is why this War has been our war from the beginning, though we have
entered it so late. As we look back upon the struggle of Athens and the
other f