Democracy & Socialism

“Why is it,” asks a correspondent, “that you are always talking of Democracy, and while you praise Socialism often, yet you insist that you are not a So­cialist? Is not Socialism pure Democracy? Why don’t you come out flat for Socialism?”

Because Socialism is European. It is the best Europe can do. In America we have something better—Democracy.

• Socialism is an Ism, or theory. Democ­racy is a Cracy, or a power.
• Socialism is a scheme; Democracy is a growth.
• Socialism is artificial; Democracy is nat­ural.
• Socialism is a dream of men; Democracy is the outworking of destiny.
• Socialism appeals to the class spirit; De­mocracy loathes it.
• Socialism is an air plant, a fungus growth subsisting upon the branches of the future; Democracy has its roots in the past.
• Socialism proclaims revolution; Democ­racy evolution.

Both revolt at injustice and herald the era of equality, but the one is to be by the will of men, the other by getting into line with the deep purpose of that power in whose mind is the great universal plan.

Democracy is something being wrought out now in the workshop of actual condi­tions, it is a “word” being “made flesh” by infinite pains, a lesson which a nation is la-boring goodnaturedly to learn by practice. Democracy means patient readjustment of things as they are, in order to get things as they ought to be. Socialism is fiercely im­patient for fruit, with a contemptuous disre­gard of tree and soil.

Democracy is the determined effort of the New World; Socialism is the petulant ges­ture of the Old.

Socialism is represented by the wish of Omar to “grasp this sorry scheme of things entire” and “remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.” Democracy is expressed in the lines of Tennyson:

“Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”

Socialism is a phase of Democracy, one of the effects of the spirit of Democracy work­ing in men’s minds. Hence we are in favor of whatever there is in Socialism that helps along Democracy, but do not join the party because it carries a lot of European by-products for which Democracy in the United States does not care.

With a noble persistence Democracy ap­plies itself to the complex and baffling task of making things better without smashing those things our fathers got from an un­toward world and bequeathed to us.

America is committed to no well-tinkered scheme, to no Utopian plan, that leaves the instincts of human nature and the practical­ities of our present immaturity out of mind, but throughout her history have

“Statesmen at her council met
Who know the seasons, when to take
Occasion by the hand, and make
The bounds of freedom wider yet.”

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from the 1919 book “Four Minute Essays,” by Dr. Frank Crane, these words are just as poignant today. I ran across this essay while reading this public domain work this afternoon, and thought it was just too good not to share with all of our readers.

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