Adventure Magazine Cover — page 191: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Looking About HE Reds tell us democracy is a mistaken idea. Italy, at the op- posite extreme, dethrones it for a dictatorship. Our own _intelli- gentsia, a bit inclined to sophomoric cyni- cism, tell us democracy has proved a failure. The politicians don’t dare tell us that, of course, but their actions speak louder than words. The money powers say nothing, at least not openly. The rest of us, disturbed both by the condemning opinions and by the facts themselves, begin to wonder whether democracy is after all what the world wants to be safe for and, if it is, whether the world’s chances of getting it are even fairly good. There is no doubt about it, democracy is not so popular among us as it once was. Socialism, communism, Bolshevism unde- niably grow stronger every day. On the other hand public power and private wealth undeniably center more and more into a few hands. Democracy is being ground be- tween the upper and the nether millstones. WE: ORDINARY people see much that is wrong. Democracy seems not to be working out according to our fore- fathers’ ideas. Public office is bought and sold in an almost open market. Graft rots its way through all our public machinery. The party system is openly advocated as more important than the choice of the best man for office and, less openly, as more im- portant than democracy itself. Year by year we find our rights as individual citizens more and more proscribed and year by year we find we have less and less to say in the actual shaping of our public affairs, and find ourselves increasingly unfit to have a sayinthem. As for the Constitution it ap- pears to be only something that can be in- terpreted into pretty much anything the lawyers and their employers choose. No, things are not working out as we’d like. And the principle of democracy is being blamed. That seems to me a very superficial judg- ment. Personally I believe it is not the principle of democracy but the application of that principle that is to blame. [still be- heve that successful government must be derived from consent of the governed and that democracy is the only possible machinery for full expression of that prin- ciple, no matter what ism the governed, by use of that machinery, may elect to follow. 189 Bu my opinion is not what is going to settle matters. What is going to de- termine the fate of democracy in this country, unless our form of government is to be dictated by others than ourselves—a possibility not so remote as most “good Americans” consider it—is the opinion of the American people as a whole, expressed and acted upon. The air we breathe is full of theories and propaganda hostile to democracy or igno- rantly destructive of it. Unless the body of the people form, express and act upon opinions that will uphold democracy against these assaults democracy will pass from among us. You, I, the other fellow are the ones who compose the body of the people. The kind of casual thinking we’ve been doing on the subject has proved inadequate. There- fore we must think more carefully. What little action we have taken has been in- sufficient. Therefore we must act more efficiently. ig IS obvious that if our thinking is to have practical result, our action to have effect, we must act not separately but to- gether. Our magazine has worked out a plan for cooperation, and a general line on which to cooperate with due allowance for difference of opinion. I have nothing to say now about that plan except that it exists, that it is neither hasty of inception nor expected to cure everything by magic ina few months, and that it will be gradually presented to your judgment in “Looking About.” Any such plan merits your careful con- sideration if you are an American citizen or a Canadian, whose problems are to a large extent similar to our own. You are as in- terested a party as any one else and as much under obligation as any one else. You can not escape the fact that you are a citizen of a democracy and, being such, just as responsible as any other human being for the fate of that democracy. OME one has said that there is in one square inch of sod more than any human intellect can master. When I see, or hear, any one holding forth as very wise I think of a square inch of sod.—Aa. S. H. CoOnnicloool (C@