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Conditions
of Social Life
by Woodrow Wilson
Co-operation is the vital principle of social
life, not organization merely. I think I know
something about organization. I can make an
organization, but it is one thing to have an
organization and another thing to fill it with
live. And then it is a very important matter what
sort of life you fill it with. If the object of the
organization is what the object of some business
organizations is, to absorb the life of the
community for its own benefit, then there is
nothing beneficial in it. But if the object of the
organization is to afford a mechanism by which the
whole community can cooperatively use its life,
then there is a great deal in it. An organization
without the spirit of cooperation is dead and may
be dangerous....
Legislation cannot save society. Legislation
cannot even rectify society. The law that will work
is merely the summing up in legislative form of the
moral judgment that the community has already
reached. Law records how far society has got; there
have got to be instrumentalities preceding the law
that get society up to that point where it will be
ready to record....Law is a record of achievement.
It is not a process of regeneration. Our wills have
to be regenerated, and our purposes rectified
before we are in a position to enact laws that
record those moral achievements. And that is the
business, primarily, it seems to me, of the
Christian....
All the transforming influences in the world are
unselfish. There is not a single selfish force in
the world that is not touched with sinister power,
and the church is the only embodiment of the things
that are entirely unselfish, the principles of
self-sacrifice and devotion....America is great in
the world, not as she is a successful government
merely, but as she is the successful embodiment of
a great ideal of unselfish citizenship.
Excerpted from Woodrow Wilson's
Memorial Day Address, Arlington, Virginia, May 31,
1915.
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The
Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, by Kendrick A.
Clements
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