good and great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; - not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION 1

PHILANDER P. CLAXTON,

A STUDY of the chapters of the portion of the report submitted herewith and of certain other chapters which were not ready in time to be included in this report shows that within the year there has been in this country an increase in tendency toward democracy in education, toward giving to every child of whatever condition a full and equal opportunity with all other children for that degree and kind of education, that quantity and quality of education, which will develop in the fullest measure its manhood or womanhood, its human qualities, prepare it for the duties and responsibilities of democratic citizenship, for participation in civic and social life, and for making an honest living, contributing its part to the Commonwealth, and serving humanity by some useful occupation, followed intelligently and skillfully with good-will and strong purpose. In a larger degree than ever before are we beginning to understand that, next to the right to live, this is the most important right of every child. If democracy has any valuable and ultimate meaning it is equality of opportunity. But there can be no equality of opportunity without equality of opportunity in education. If to any child this is denied and it is permitted to grow to manhood or womanhood without that education which prepares it for good living, for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and for making an honest living by some intelligent, useful occupation, then there is nothing

1 From the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education (1915), vol. 1, p. xvi.

which individual or society can do, nothing which man or God can do, to make good the loss. More than ever before are we beginning to understand that material progress, social purity, civic righteousness, political stability and strength, and the possibilities of culture and the attainment of higher ideals, all depend on the right education of all the people. If any man or woman follows his or her trade or profession with less intelligence and skill than he or she might, the total amount of wealth produced is less than it might be. If any lack knowledge of fundamental principles of government and institutional life necessary for intelligent citizenship in our democracy, the civic and political life of city, State, and Nation is affected thereby. If the health, the culture, or the moral education of any has been neglected, all society and each of its members must suffer as a result. If any, through wrong education or the inculcation of false ideals, work at occupations for which they are not fitted or in which they may not serve themselves and society as well as they might in other ways, their own lives and the lives of us all are less full and satisfactory than they might otherwise be. We are bound up in the sheaf of life together, and our interests from the lowest to the highest and from the highest to the lowest are inextricably interwoven. Therefore the liberal use of public funds for the support of schools and other agencies of education is more and more clearly recognized as good business, and careful thinking and planning for the fullest and best education of all the children of all the people as the highest duty of citizenship.

CAN DEMOCRACY BE ORGANIZED? 1

EDWIN A. ALDERMAN

THE United States of America is one of the oldest Governments on earth. England and Russia alone, among the nations of Europe, equal it in age, and even England has undergone such radical changes in the past century, as compared with the United States, as to constitute us, with our unchanged Government since 1789, the most stable of modern nations. Our nearness to the perspective and our absorption in our own life have blinded us to the inspiring National panorama, as it has unfolded itself before the world. First, a group of rustic communities, making common cause in behalf of ancient guarantees of English freedom; then suspicious colonies, unused to the ways of democracies, striving after some bond amid the clash of jealous interests; then a wonderful paper-writing, compact of high sense and human foresight and tragic compromise; then a young Republic, lacking the instinct of unity, but virile, unlovely, raw, wayward, in its confident young strength. Some confused decades of sad, earnest effort to pluck out an evil growth planted in its life by the hard necessities of compromise by the fathers, but which needs must blossom into the flower of civil war before it could be plucked out and thrown to the void. Then young manhood, nursing its youth, whole and undivisible, proven by trial of fire and dark days, opening its eye upon a new world of steam and force, and seizing

1 Spoken before the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, November 9, 1915, by the president of the University of Virginia. Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Society with the generous permission of the author.

greedily and selfishly every coign of vantage; and to-day the most venerable Republic, the richest of nations, the champion and exemplar of World Democracy.

No nation, I venture to assert, was ever born grounded on so definite and fixed a principle and with so conscious a purpose. Such a wealth of hope for humanity never before gathered about a mere political experiment, and such a mass of pure idealism never before suffused itself into the framework of a State. How can such a Nation so begun, so advanced, so beset, be so guided, that all of its citizens shall indeed become free men, entering continually into the possession of intellectual, material, and moral benefits? How can a people devoted to individualism and freedom retain that individualism which guarantees freedom and yet engraft upon their social order that genius for coöperation which alone insures power and progress? These are the final interrogatories of democracy as a sane vision glimpses it, robbed of its earlier illusions. The fathers of this Republic did not understand the present mould of democracy. The very word was obnoxious to them. Their ideal was a State the citizens of which chose their leaders and then trusted them. They did not foresee the socialized State. They did not envisage a minute and paternal organization of society which may be achieved alike by Prussian absolutism or mere socialism, which is chronologically, if not logically, the child of democracy. The fear that tugged at their hearts was the fear of tyranny, the dread of kings, the denial of self-direction, which prevented a man from speaking his opinion or going his way as he willed. Their democracy was a working government which should give effect to the will of the people and at the same time provide sufficient safeguard for individual liberty. The emphasis of the time was everywhere upon the rights of the individual rather more than upon the duties of the citizen. When their theories, as