These men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact in
their eagerness for a wider acquaintance with and participation in the
life about them. They believe that experience gives the easy and
trustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in the
narrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast our
experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the
larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not
because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, because
of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation
naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare
ourselves for the larger social duties." Such a demand is reasonable,
for by our daily experience we have discovered that we cannot
mechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare moments
of exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even as the
ideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength to
attain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn
that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may
come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from
selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of
Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all
men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and
equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well
as a test of faith.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by
travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common
road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size
of one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality results
perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for