Article December 9, 1939 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: The Right Social Order

with contributions from Malcolm W. Bingay, Orien W. Fifer, William T. Ellis, Joseph Fort Newton, James Reid

[Malcolm W. Bingay, in the Free Press, Detroit, Michigan]

True democracy is not a thing of formula, ritual, and definitions. Real democracy comes not from the head, but from the heart. Like the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount, it belongs to the intangibles. Even in this most cynical of ages it is well to remember that American democracy lives, moves, and has its being only on the grounds of basic morality. . . . In a properly functioning democracy, where the judgments of the people prevail, morality must always be the key to the solution of any of our problems in the long run. For collectively the people determine, not on the basis of their own individual lives, but on the broader aspects of honesty, good will, and common decency. . . .

James Bryce, British author of the "American Common-wealth," wrote: "When Americans say, as they often do, that they trust to time, they mean that they trust to reason, to the general sound moral tone of the multitude, to a shrewdness which, after failures and through experiments, learns what is the true interest of the majority and finds that this interest coincides with the teachings of morality."

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