It would certainly occasion
reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding
mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the
physical environment. But the principle applies even more
significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it -- the
sphere of social contacts. Every expansive era in the history of
mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have
tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes
previously hemmed off from one another. Even the alleged
benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse
between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one
another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic
and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down
external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and
more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the
most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance
of this physical annihilation of space.
2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both
point to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous
and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater
reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in
social control. The second means not only freer interaction
between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could
keep up a separation) but change in social habit -- its
continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations
produced by varied intercourse.
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