American Democracy.
When I reached Washington on May 9, work began at once in the form of giving interviews and in resuming close touch with Mr. Charles R. Crane whom I had last seen at Kieff. With him my relations had been intimate since 1901. At that time he had established a Slavonic Foundation at Chicago University where I lectured in 1902. Thereafter he had devoted himself with quiet intensity to Slavonic affairs; and his position in American industry had brought him into political life. An excursion with him and his friend, Mr. Houston, the Secretary for Agriculture (who enjoyed the good-will of President Elliot of Harvard), and with a British officer, Major Innes, to the battlefield of Gettysburg—where, on July 8, 1868, Meade defeated Lee—served to inaugurate my American work in 1918.
As a memorial to the American War for national unity, Gettysburg impresses Europeans deeply. Many monuments are there, great and small, but by no means monuments in honour only of one military commander, or even of several. In this, too, the spirit of democracy finds expression. Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech cannot be read without emotion—the speech which sums up American democracy in the well-known words “Government of the People, by the People, for the People.” As a souvenir of my visit, the local minister of religion gave me a bullet which he had found in a grave and had kept as a warning symbol against the spirit of war; and, as such, it lies on my desk to-day.
I cherished the hope that in America, and with President Wilson particularly, good fortune would attend me. My personal and family ties with America were close. I had been there repeatedly, from 1878 onwards; and American democracy and the development of American civilization had aroused my lively interest from the beginning of my scientific and political career.
There is democracy and democracy. As the latest historical studies of the development of the American Republic clearly show, democracy in the United States was built on religious foundations. The importance of the moral influence of religion upon the American Republic is rightly indicated by de Tocqueville. Nor has the splitting up of America into the most diversified sects weakened either the Republic or democracy, for sectarianism is a sign of religious vigour, and equally of modern individualization. In America, as in England,
