We must be careful not to be beguiled by the present state of national unity into a false state of security. The type of criticism we are now witnessing is healthy democratic criticism. Every one, motivated by a high and common ideal, is taking care that his opinions be guided by this common interest. But this should not blind us to the fact that three short months ago we were still in the throes of a war debate in which it was common to refer to your opponent as a traitor, a Nazi, or a war-monger.

The irresponsibility of public utterances during the last ten years is one of the most alarming facts of democracy. Behind it apparently lay the breakdown of what had been a common faith. Under the exigencies of abnormal times, we seemed to forget that the fellow who was advocating isolation or the New Deal or whatever we were opposed to had the same interest in the future of the country and the betterment of the people as we had. The oratorical extravagances that became the cliches of politics indicated much more than a quaint Americanism. They indicate a fundamental distrust that strikes at the very base of our democratic principles. In the twenty years before this war it might well be said that we lost the driving force that bound us together as a nation during the more illustrious periods of our history.

What we must do now it seems to me is analyze carefully just exactly what the ingredients of such a driving force are. It is all very well to say "national defense" or "freedom and democracy," but the point is that these ideas didn't make a force of unity before the war. What ground have we to think they will after? Freedom of speech is a deceptive concept, not positive at all. It can be used as easily to defend the lack of an ideal as to develop the form of a way of life. Unless it is used in the second sense, it is weakening and destructive, as we have seen it.

What I am urging is that we make this unity of national defense into unity for very definite positive ideas, that we rededicate ourselves, all of us, to the high principles of human dignity and natural law that we fought the revolution to achieve, and that we make such fundamental splits as dominated our recent politics impossible. Consideration of the interest of others, social consciousness, direction of the state to the common good regardless of national or class boundaries these are the bases of our belief. It is against the denial of these fundamental truths that we like to think we are fighting.

If we achieve unity behind these ideas, it will not fall apart at the end of the war, and freedom of speech will not be a weapon of the forces opposing democracy. If we don't, we will be as unfit and unable to rule the world as we were after Versailles.