The American nation : its problems and psychology / by William McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
[1926]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The American nation : its problems and psychology / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    most open to dispute. In America, where the dem¬ ocratic principle has long been openly proclaimed and proudly practiced, there will be few to dispute it. But others may point to examples of nations recorded in the pages of history which have reached a high level of national life and achievement under forms of government not distinctively democratic. And they may seriously question, and often have questioned, whether any people may hope, under the forms of democracy, to rise to an equally high level. Here is a difference of honest and well-informed opinions. The future course of history alone can decide in favor of one or the other. But we are now sketching in imagination the features of an ideal type; and we may assert, without fear of contra¬ diction, that any nation, democratic in both the social and the political senses of the word, if it can prove itself the equal of less democratic nations in respect of all other standards of national greatness, must be awarded a higher place than these. And for this reason: in a democratic nation, the mass of the people, taking an active part in the maintenance and the control of government, sharing in its re¬ sponsibilities, its achievements, and its failures, thereby take part in an educative process which none other can equal in the intensity and continuity of its incidence upon individuals, and in the univer¬ sality of its stimulating influence, both moral and intellectual.