Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 129.djvu/870

864 bit of character acting was cheap at twenty-nine dollars; but my wife is doubtless right in maintaining that we could have got more for the same money at the theatres. My nine-year-old—pretty young, I think, to be disillusionized—lives in the hope that, when he goes to England this summer, he'll find the delightful Mr. Cooke and his two little nephews on the same ship.

When Dean Inge next crosses the Atlantic, as we hope he may, he will find that Democracy, like Boston, is a state of mind in America. This emotional value of the long suffering word is defended, from Charlottesville, Virginia, by Dr. Dillard.

Whenever we read such thoughtful words as those of Dean Inge in the March Atlantic, I think we should constantly bear in mind the fact that the word Democracy has come to have, and to be used in, at least two well-defined senses. One meaning of the word, which is the strict and correct use and Dean Inge's use, is of course that of a government by the people. In the other sense Democracy refers, as has been often implied, not so much to a form of government as to a state of mind. The word, as we all know, has come to be the terminology for the state of mind which found expression in a much-abused phrase of the Declaration of Independence. It stands for the thought of equality in the sense in which the Declaration must have meant it, that is, equality not of course in gifts or position or personality, but in the fact of common humanity. It says that the aristocratic mind, while it may be benevolent, emphasizes distinctions among men; that the democratic mind, while it knows all the many differences, emphasizes the common equality on the common basis of humanity.

It is evident that this broader use of the word, whether justified or not, contains a deeper thought than the consideration of any special form of government. One can conceive of a King having the democratic mind, or of a President of a Republic having the aristocratic mind. It is this broader use of the word at which Dean Inge hints when he says 'that in America the word Democracy is charged with emotional values which do not really belong to it.' But it is just this emotional value which many consider the highest value in measuring human progress. May it not be Dean Inge's disregard of this which makes him so dubious about the word 'progress'? Some would go so far as to say that the measure of the progress of civilization is based on the spread of the sentiment which tries to find expression in the words 'democratic mind.'

That Dean Inge has little patience with this conception, or at least with this way of using the word, he shows by his allusion to the words of a Boston professor. 'And so,' he writes, 'we find a Boston professor saying: "You cannot separate God and Democracy. This is the sense in which many have thought and said that Jesus Christ was the greatest of democrats, and that the second great commandment of human brotherhood is the expression of the democratic mind. Nor is this broad use of the word exclusively American. Dean Inge's own countryman, Mr. Chesterton, has frequently used the word Democracy in the broad sense, as for example in the nineteenth chapter of Heretics, where he says it is not undemocratic to kick a butler, but it is undemocratic to say one must make allowances for his being a butler.

I am not criticizing Dean Inge's restriction. But the fact remains that the word Democracy is often used in the broader sense.

The author of 'Hairy Mary,' in the May Atlantic writes from County Down:—

We are quiet in this part of my unhappy country, with rival Free State and Republican armies, fully armed and equipped, at each other's throats, and both united against Ulster who only claims what they themselves clamor for the right of self-determination; one cannot feel very happy Added to this there is a Bolshevist party in connection with the Russians, and they murder Protestants and Roman Catholics alike, and set them against each other. Ulster only wants to be left alone. When the Free Staters have established a settled government will be time to consider whether to join them or not, but burning and destroying small Orange Halls, smashing up railways and even goods from Scotland because they were forwarded through Belfast is not the way of conciliation.

'Let your communication be; Yea, Yea, Nay, Nay,' is not a hard and fast precept for this column; but when the contributor is developing his epistolary thesis, he would do well to pause and count his words and consider how many letters as long as his own can be printed in our four pages.