ness until now there are few people who really understand all its technical complications. Government is getting out of the hands of the people, not in the sense that anybody is taking it away from them, but in the sense that with the rapid extension of its technical aspects it is becoming more and more difficult to comprehend and control.

At this point we often make an erroneous assumption. We assume that man's capacity keeps up with his inventions. We assume that, as civilization becomes great, the human stock which is building it also becomes great; that by some alchemy or other there is a rise in individual capacity from generation to generation to match the increasing complexity of our physical environment. We take it for granted that there is some sure inhibition that prevents men from creating machines which they cannot control; and that the very fact that they have created them is proof of their ability to manage them.

But this is not the fact. Knowledge may mean power, but it does not necessarily mean capacity. We cannot be dogmatically sure that there has been substantial improvement in the human stock

since the days of the Egyptians or the Greeks. The men who laboured with their hands to build Cheops's pyramid probably had wit enough and intelligence enough to use a steam hoist and a concrete-mixer if these inventions had been given to them. Tutankhamen, brought up at Windsor Castle, would doubtless act like any other prince of the blood. Even less sure can we be that this last century which has added so tremendously to our mechanical environment has brought a corresponding improvement in human capacity. In fact, we know it is not true. Men were no less able in the days of Washington and Hamilton, and Channing and Fox, than they are to-day. We have come into our new inheritance with no greater abilities than our grandfathers had. The difference between the Harvard class of 1822 and any graduating class to-day lies not in their respective capacities, but in the loads which those capacities must bear.

In this field of government, therefore, our task is to control complex functions like subways and street railroad financing with the same intelligence that was adapted to the spade and the blacksmith shop. Our environment is becoming more and more involved, but the tools of control remain largely the same.

How faulty those tools may be we are only now beginning to realize. Here in America we have always thought of our own people as possessing a peculiar degree of training and intelligence. But the statistics of the United States Commissioner of Education are disillusioning. Only 3 per cent. of our vast population have ever attended a college or professional school. Two thirds of the American people never get beyond elementary school. Indeed 17 per cent. of the children of the United States never get beyond the fifth grade. What this means in its practical results was shown by the statistics gathered from our army during the war, when for the first time we had the opportunity of testing the intelligence of a substantial cross section of our people. Of the white draft-that is, the white soldiers as opposed to Negroes-30 per cent. were found to be unable to read and understand newspapers or to write letters home. Sixtysix and two-thirds per cent. of the white draft tested below a percentage that marked the minimum capacity necessary to carry on the so-called paper work of the army—that is, making reports and keeping the files. Out of all those millions of drafted men just a third had ability enough to

carry on this by no means laborious type of mental work.

Professor H. L. Hollingworth of Columbia University has recently been making some extensive measurements of the "average man" in America.* Here is his portrait: He leaves school at the eighth grade with a working knowledge of the "fundamentals," a smattering of local geography, a bit of history, and a few elementary facts of physiology. He has no general knowledge of civics, science, politics, or literature. He is able to speak one language only and never develops the intelligence required for satisfactory high-school work. When given intelligence tests of the standardized sort, his rating does not significantly exceed that which would be made by average adolescents at their fourteenth year. After a short period of industrial training he may become a plumber, a carpenter, a policeman, a mechanic. He has a vocabulary of about seventy-five hundred words, a little more than half that of the ordinary highschool graduate. He marries at a relatively early age and has a family of from three to five children. He is credulous to a marked degree and inclined to superstition.

The significance of these facts it is impossible

to avoid. They cannot be explained away. If the theory of democracy has any validity or promise, these products of the elementary school, these average men and women, are the people upon whom our complex life will place increasing responsibilities. These are the human tools through which we fondly hope that all this unintelligible machinery of civilization may somehow or other be intelligently controlled.

Humanity stands to-day in a position of unique peril. An unanswered question is written across the future: Is man to be the master of the civilization he has created, or is he to be its victim? Can he control the forces which he has himself let loose? Will this intricate machinery which he has built up and this vast body of knowledge which he has appropriated be the servant of the race, or will it be a Frankenstein monster that will slay its own maker? In brief, has man the capacity to keep up with his own machines?

This is the supreme question before us. All other problems that confront us are merely its corollaries. And the necessity of a right answer is perhaps more immediate than we realize. For