Article August 15, 1925 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from J. Ramsay MacDonald

[From the Progressive Farmer, Weldon, North Carolina, March, 1925]

As we study conditions all over the world, it becomes increasingly evident that the four great factors carrying humanity forward are democracy, science, education, and religion. Our faith in democracy, the rule of the people, increase with the years. Democracy has vindicated itself in America, in France, in Great Britain; and it will eventually vindicate itself in Russia. Even in such matters as student government in American colleges and universities, and in more direct popular control in cooperative marketing associations, genuine democracy is proving the only way to health and peace. Far more striking still, democracy has vindicated itself by the recent extension of its powers and prerogatives to that half of the human race so long disfranchised,—the women. All the dreadful things which alarmists predicted would follow woman suffrage,—these dreadful things have not happened; while, on the contrary, laws for temperance, education, and human progress are safer and surer as a result of woman's new power in government and politics.

"The remedy for the evils of democracy," as Dr. Lyman Abbott used to say, "is more democracy." Certainly te truth of Thomas Jefferson's declartion becomes increasingly apparent all the time: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." In other words, the usefulness of democrary is limited only by the extent of education.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Signs of the Times

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access