COLLECTIVE ACTION AND THE INDIVIDUAL
THISmeans increased efficiency of governmental action. It does not mean in the slightest degree any impairment or weakening of individual character. The combination of efficient collective action and of individual ability and initiative is essential to the success of the modern state. It is in civil life as it is in military life. No amount of personal prowess will make soldiers collectively formidable unless they possess also the trained ability to act in common for a common end. On the other hand, no perfection of military organization will atone for the lack of the fighting edge in the man in the ranks. The same principle applies in civil life. We not merely recognize but insist upon the fact that in the life career of any man or any woman the prime factor as regards success or failure must be his or her possession of that bundle of qualities and attributes which in their aggregate we denominate as character; and yet that, in addition, there must be proper social conditions surrounding him or her.
Recognition of and insistence upon either fact must never be permitted to mean failure to recognize the other and complementary fact. The character of the individual is vital, and yet, in order to give it fair expression, it must be supplemented by collective action through the agencies of government. Our critics speak as if we were striving to weaken the strength of individual initiative. Yet these critics, who for the most part are either men of wealth who do not think deeply on subjects unconnected with the acquisition of wealth, or else men of a cloistered intellectualism, are themselves in practice the very men who are most ready to demand the exercise of collective power in its broadest manifestation; that is, through the police force, when there is danger of disorder or violence.
Roosevelt. From a photograph; copyright by Pach Bros. Color-tone engraved for The Century by H. Davidson⇒LARGER IMAGE
⇒LARGER IMAGE
The growth in the complexity of community life means the partial substitution of collectivism for individualism, not to destroy, but to save individualism. A veryprimitive country community hardly needs a constable at all. As it changes into a village and then into a city, it becomes necessary to organize a police force, and this not because the average man has deteriorated in individual initiative and prowess, but because social conditions have so changed as to make collective action necessary. When New York was a little village, a watchman with a lantern and a stave was able to grapple with the only type of law-breaker that had yet been developed. Nowadays, in place of this baggy-breeched, stave-and-lantern carrier, we have the complex machinery of our police department, with a personnel ranging from a plain-clothes detective to a khaki-clad mounted officer with an automatic-repeating pistol. As the complexity of life has grown, as criminals have become more efficient and possessed of a greater power of combined action, it has been necessary for the government to keep the peace by the development of the efficient use of its own police powers. It is just the same with many matters wholly unconnected with criminality. The government has been forced to take the place of the individual in a hundred different ways; in, for instance, such matters as the prevention of fires, the construction of drainage systems, the supply of water, light, and transportation. In a primitive community every man or family looks after his or its interest in all these matters. In a city it would be an absurdity either to expect every man to continue to do this, or to say that he had lost the power of individual initiative because he relegated any or all of these matters to the province of those public officers whose usefulness consists in expressing the collective activities of all the people.