Democratic Tendencies in the 19th C

social state which recognizing to the full the sacredness of the individual soul offers it completest freedom for full development through its own activity, and in which each individual recognizing his kinship with every other soul feels the fullest measure of responsibility to each and all. I shall perhaps be going too far if I add what is in my own mind a necessary accompaniment and condition of this social ideal — a

recognition by man of the kinship of all life, a pantheistic feeling — shall we say? — of an all-pervading life, or a Christian belief in the omnipresence of God. Call it what we may it is a feeling, a belief, an attitude of mind and heart that makes us look upon the earth and call it good, that makes man no stranger or sojourner, prisoner or exile here, but a home dweller.

The notes of democracy

then, if I am in any way [way?] right in my conception are a profound sense of the dignity and sanctity of the individual soul as such, and an equally profound sense of the solidarity of society — a sense of individual responsibility to society and of the responsibility of society to the individual. To there I would add also a sense of affinity between man and his environment, a recognition of something in

all the animate world that is like man himself, and therefore, since man's egotism maked his sense of moral relation dependent on his recognition of each likeness, a recognition and acknowledgement of something at least [least?] approaching a moral relationship between man and nature.

If there be indeed its notes, democracy doubtless remains a goal always perhaps to be unattained, yet surely a goal to be more

and more nearly approached. And in spite of all the inconsistencies, in spite of wars, spite of gross outrages inflicted by stronger nations upon weaker, in spite of apparently growing inequalities of conditions among men, yet I believe that the nineteenth century both relatively and absolutely made very considerable advances toward the democratic ideal.

One of the surest ways of discovering what was in