Page:Jay William Hudson - America's International Ideals (1915).djvu/19

 to be achieved. Let the United States of America be followed by the United Nations of the World!

The second great principle for which American civilization has stood is the value of the individual. The securing of this recognition of the individual has been the result of a long and painful struggle. There was a time when the individual counted for naught; when the social unit was everything and the individual nothing. There was little initiative accorded the individual, even in the regulation of what might be called his own private affairs; social tradition dictated most of the things that he had to do and how he was to do them. In religion this insignificance of the individual was expressed in the denial of personal immortality and in making it the sum of religious duty to lose all personal desires, and indeed all personal identity, in God as the Absolute in whom all things are merged. The person was but a passing wave in the infinite sea,—an illusion, in short. In the state, this idea of the worthlessness of the individual was expressed in the doctrine that the individual exists to be used by the state for its own purposes: it was a controversion of political philosophy to suppose that the state existed for the individual.

Out of the suppression involved in such social solidarity the individual has gradually emerged and claimed his freedom and his rights. To-day in America the individual has come to his own to an extent never before found in human history. No longer does the individual exist for society or for the state: all social institutions, including government, are conceived of as justified only because