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' , \ , N \' --X' ^^•'^ ^ V 'J- V? -^' \>\ 1 \ V THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN THE EDUCATION OF IHE AMERICAN CITIZEN BY ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY President of Yale University AUTHOR OF "economics: AN ACCOUNT OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN PRIVATE PROPERTY AND PUBLIC WELFARE," "RAILROAD TRANSPORTATION: ITS HISTORY AND ITS LAWS " NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1901 o THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, Two Copiea Received SEP. 14 1901 COPVRIQHT ENTRY CLASS &- XXc. Na, COP^Y B. V >^" ^ Copyright, 1901, By Yale University Published, September, igoi UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. PREFACE In many of the political writiags of the day, there is a tendency to lay too much stress on the mechanism of government and of industry, and too little stress on the force by which this mechanism is kept at work. In recent educational movements, also, too much thought is perhaps given to the problem of preparing men and women to take their several places in a social machine, and too little to the development of that power and spirit upon which the perpetuation of our whole social order depends. From my public addresses and magazine articles of the past few years, I have tried to select those which emphasize the more neglected side of these questions, and to arrange them in a continuous series. In a book thus prepared, it is inevitable that there should be some repe- tition and some apparent inconsistencies. If the reader is perplexed by any of these things, he will perhaps find the explanation in the date of the different utterances and the special conditions under which they were made public. No sharp line can be drawn between those papers which are political and those which are educational. It is becoming evident that the really difficult political vii PREFACE problems of the day can be solved only by an educational process. Not by the axioms of metaphysics on the one hand, nor by the machinery of legislation on the other, can we deal with the questions which vex human society. We must rely on personal character; and as new diffi- culties arise, we must develop our standard of character to meet them. It is also becoming evident that the real test of an educational system lies in its training of the citizen to meet political exigencies. If it accomplishes this result, it is fundamentally good, whatever else it may leave undone ; if it fails at this cardinal point, no amount of excellence in other directions can save it from condemnation. This book is offered to the public in the hope that it may contribute something to the understanding of our political needs, to the growth of a public sentiment which shall give us power to meet those needs, and to the development of those educational methods which shall make for an increase of such power in the years which are to come, Yale University, New Haven, April, 1901. vm CONTENTS Page THE DEMANDS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY . 1 An Address delivered before The New England Soci- ety of New York City, December 22, 1900. OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY . '. 6 An Address delivered before the Convocation of the University of Chicago, January 2, 1900. GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION 17 An Address delivered at the Charter Day Exercises of the University of California, March 23, 1901. THE FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS . . 34 Scribner's Magazine, November, 1899. SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM 51 Forum, October, 1894. THE RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND POLI- TICS 64 Opening Address at the meeting of the American Eco- nomic Association, New Haven, December 27, 1898. ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY 83 Opening Address at the meeting of the American Eco- nomic Association, Ithaca, December 27, 1899. ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE 100 Yale Review, November, 18D2; February, 1893. ix CONTENTS Page POLITICAL EDUCATION 135 An Address delivered at the celebration of Founders' Day, Vassar College, April 27, 1900. THE RELATION BETWEEN HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE PUBLIC WELFARE 150 An Address delivered before the Connecticut State Board of Agriculture, December 11, 1900. THE DIRECTION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT 161 An Address delivered at the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of Vanderbilt University, October 23, 1900. FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN SCHOOL EDU- CATION 175 An Address delivered before a meeting of teachers at Norfolk, Connecticut, November 20, 1900. THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS . . 191 A Paper read before the Department of Superinten- dence, National Educational Association, February 26, 1901. YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT .... 210 Inaugural Address as President of Yale University, October 18, 1899. THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN THE DEMANDS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY It sometimes happens that the meaning of a great anniversary is for a time partly lost; and then found once more, when some renewal of the old conditions arises, and it becomes an inspiration for the present as well as a remembrance of the past. Such was the fate of the birthday of our national independence. During the first half of the nineteenth century the celebration of the Fourth of July grew more and more perfunctory. To those who knew not what it meant to fight for an idea, the memory of Revolu- tionary heroes became obscured; their principles be- came mere phrases, from which the vital substance had gone out. But under the stress of another great war, with the new emotions which it excited, tliis an- niversary at once rose into something more than an empty form of commemoration of the dead, and made itself an occasion of patriotism in the living. So it has been, to some extent, with Forefathers' Day, and the annual celebrations which attend it. There has been at times a somewhat perfunctory character in our remembrance of the Puritan, both of the old England and of the new. Although we have not ceased to render him gratitude for the hardships which he bore in order that his descendants might live a Hfe of freedom, we have in some measure lost personal contact with the 1 1 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN man and understanding of what he really was. By- nine persons out of ten, the Puritans of the seven- teenth century are remembered chiefly for the pattern of their clothes or the phraseology of their creeds; and even the tenth man who really goes below the surface often lays wrong emphasis on the different parts of their activity, and fails to understand the true reason of their power. He thinks of the Puritan not so much for what he did as for what he refused to do and forbade others to do; as one who held himself aloof from the joys of hfe and apart from the sympathies of humanity. Not in such restrictions and refusals was the strength of the Puritan character founded. Not by any such negative virtue did he conquer the world. The true Puritan was intensely human — a man who " ate when he was hungry, and drank when he was thirsty ; loved his friends and hated his enemies." If he submitted to self-imposed hardships, and practised abstention where others allowed themselves latitude, it was not because he had less range of interest than his fellows, but be- cause he had more range. He did these things as a means to an end. His thoughts went beyond the limits of the single day or the single island. He was a man who considered power as more than possession, princi- ples as better than acquirements, public duty as para- mount to personal allegiance. He regarded himself as part of a universe under God's government. For the joy of taking his place in that government he steeled himself to a temper which spared not his own body nor that of others. His Hfe, with all its powers, was held in trust. To the fulfilment of this trust he subordinated all considerations of personal pleasure. Men are always divided more or less clearly into two types, — those who recognize this character of life as a 2 THE DEMANDS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY trust, and those who fail to recognize it. But not in all ages and in all countries does the distinction between the two types manifest itself sharply in historic action. Often the range of possible interests is so small, and the conduct of life so bound down by conventions, that the man who would pursue pleasure finds no opportunity for adventure, nor does the man who is ready to accept large trusts find occasion for their exercise. But in England, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the dis- covery of new worlds abroad and the development of new problems at home gave opportunity for this diver- gence of character to show itself to the utmost. The explorer who journeyed for adventure or for gain was differentiated from him who journeyed for freedom's sake. The citizen who was ready to seek his fullest en- joyment in the old political order was separated from him who would hazard that enjoyment for what he be- lieved to be eternal principles of human government. It was because England had men of the latter type that her subsequent progress as a free nation has been realized. It was the Puritan who, by subjecting his power and his love of life to self-imposed restraints, made freedom possible in two hemispheres. Once more we are come to a similar parting of the ways. The close of the nineteenth century has wit- nessed an expansion of the geographical boundaries of men's interests comparable only to that which came three hundred years earlier, in the days of Queen Elizabeth. It is for the next generation to decide how these new fields shall be occupied. Shall it be to gratify ambition, commercial and political? or shall it be to exercise a trust which has been given us for the advancement of the human race ? Shall we enter upon our new posses- sions in the spirit of the adventurer, or in the spirit of 3 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN the Puritan? The conflict between these two views will be the really important issue in the complex maze of international relations during the half-century which is to come. The outcome of this conflict is Hkely to determine the course of the world's history for ages thereafter. Nor is it in international pohtics and in problems of colonization alone that this issue is arising between those who regard the world as a field for pleasure and those who regard it as a place for the exercise of a trust. The development of modern industry has placed the alter- native even more sharply before us in the ordering of our life at home. The day is past when the automatic action of self-interest could be trusted to regulate prices, or when a few simple principles of commercial law, if properly applied, secured the exercise of justice in matters of trade. The growth of large industries and of large fortunes enables those who use them rightly to do the public much better service than was possible in ages previous. It also permits those who use them wrongly to render the public correspondingly greater injury. No system of legislation is Hkely to meet this difficulty. The outcome depends on the character of the people. Is our business to be dominated by the spirit of the adven- turer, or by the spirit of the Puritan ? Shall we regard wealth as a means of enjoyment and commercial power as a plaything to be used in the game of personal ambition? or shall we treat the fortunes which come into our hands as a trust to be exercised for the benefit of the people, rigidly abstaining from its abuse our- selves, and unsparingly refusing to associate with others who abuse it? No American has a right to claim a share in the glory of the Pilgrim Fathers if he has any doubt concerning his answer. Let us throw ourselves, 4 THE DEMANDS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY heart and soul, on that side of the industrial question which proves us worthy of Puritan ancestry, — the side which regards wealth as a trust, to be used in behalf of the whole people and in the furtherance of the purposes of God's government. Abroad and at home the issue is defining itself. We have the chance to prove whence we are sprung. We cannot add to the glory of those whose deeds we cele- brate ; but we can help to carry their work one historic step farther toward its accomplishment. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, — no less appropriate now than in the day when they were first spoken at Gettysburg, — " It is for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take in- creased devotion to that cause to which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of free- dom ; that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY An unusually well-informed foreign critic — Mr. Muir- head, whose character as a dispassionate observer is well attested by the fact that he has written several of Baede- ker's handbooks — has recently published the opinion that the standard of personal morality in America is decidedly higher than in England, that of commercial morality probably a little lower, and that of political morality quite distinctly lower. His statement, thus formulated, undoubtedly represents a consensus of opinion of well-informed observers on both sides of the Atlantic. The causes for this condition of things de- mand serious attention. A failure to carry into politics the same kind of ethical standard which is appHed in matters of personal morals implies, as a rule, that there is something in a people's pohtical conditions to whose understanding it has not fully grown up. Such a failure implies a defect in public judgment rather than a weak- ness in individual character. It indicates that we do not know what virtues must be exercised for the maintenance of organized society as well as we know what virtues are necessary to the harmonious living of individuals among their neighbors. The difference between standards of political morality and of personal morality attracted attention even in the days of Plato and Aristotle. From that time onward 6 OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY every moralist who has really studied the subject has recognized that there were certain distinctive political virtues, elements superlatively necessary in the conduct of a good ruler or member of the ruling class, which may be relatively less important in matters outside the sphere of poHtics. What is to be regarded as par excel- lence the virtue of the ruler and the freeman is a ques- tion which is answered differently in different stages of society. In the earhest developments of civiUzation stress is chiefly laid on courage which can maintain authority; in a later stage greater importance is at- tached to the habit of self-restraint which will submit to the authority of a general code of law ; while in a still later development at least equal prominence must be given to public spirit, which mil use for a collective or unselfish end the measure of authority bestowed on each individual. American society has witnessed the passage from the first stage to the second ; much must be done before we have attained to the third. In the beginnings of civilization the virtue of courage is a necessary prerequisite for any and all government. When people so far emerge from superstition that they come to distrust the authority of the old priesthood, a strong and fearless hand is needed to create a recog- nized police authority which can repress license and disorder. Whoever has this courage will have the authority in his hands; for without it there is no authority at all. If it is possessed by but few, we shall have an oligarchy; the more -widely it is diffused the more nearly shall we approach democracy. So indis- pensable is such courage to the maintenance of social order, that society in its early stages vnW condone in the possessors of courage and fighting efficiency the want of many other virtues ; will let them vindicate the majesty 7 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN of the law by hanging the wrong man if the right man is not to be found ; will let them assert their authority to make laws by an assumption of an authority in their own person to break the laws which they have made ; and will despise or suppress the " base mechanical " who would protest against this arbitrary infraction of legal principle. But the " base mechanicals," thus unceremoniously despised in a nation's beginnings, prove a necessity for its progress beyond those beginnings. The State, as Aristotle says, having begun as a means of making life possible, continues as a means of making life prosperous. When once the necessary basis of authority is estabhshed, that authority becomes with each generation more im- partial and more absolute, protecting the laborer as well as the soldier or politician. The brave citizen can in these later generations best serve the cause of his country, not by an excess of personal zeal in chastising those who do him wrong, but by a readiness to submit his claims to the arbitrament of tribunals which have been established for the determination of justice. Forti- tudo gives place to temperantia as the characteristic virtue of the freeman. This change is manifest in every department of human activity as soon as it advances beyond a certain rudimentary stage. Fighting ceases to be a matter of personal courage, and becomes a matter of discipline, so that the ideal soldier is no longer the leader of a cavalry charge, but the organizer of victory, who can give and take orders as part of a larger whole. Success in business is no longer the perquisite of the venturesome trader who starts on a voyage of explora- tion, but of the painstaking merchant who understands the laws of supply and demand, and can regulate his conduct by those laws. In short, the whole feudal 8 OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY organization of society, where authority rests on courage and obedience is rendered in return for personal pro- tection, gives place to a newer and larger order, where the authority of permanent principles is recognized as superior to that of any individual, however courageous, and where obedience is no badge of servitude, but a duty \ wliich rests on every law-abiding citizen. Through these two stages, which it has taken Europe centuries to accomplish, America has been passing in a comparatively brief period. First we have had the lawless frontier community, where men have such rights as they can defend with their own revolvers ; where in case of emergency the vigilante, who takes the law into his own hands, is the most necessary of citizens ; where the necessity for the presence of Judge Ljmch is so sharply recognized that his occasional mis- takes are condoned; and where absence of power to insist on one's own rights is almost as bad as having no rights at all. With the necessity for more regular investment and employment of capital and the estab- lislmaent of the police authority which is coincident with that employment, the virtues and vices of the frontiersman pass out of political prominence, and we reach a stage where the standard of social success is found in playing with keenness the games of commerce and of politics ; where every man is expected to submit to the law of which he becomes a part ; but where, as long as he keeps within the rules set by that law, all things are condoned which do not pass that line of meanness or violent immorahty which disqualifies a man from associating personally with his fellow-men. The suddenness of the change has been attended with all the exaggeration to which sudden social movements are liable. In Europe the men who exercised authority 9 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN in virtue of their courage were only gradually tlisplaced by those who did so in virtue of their astuteness. Tlio earlier standard of military virtue as a qualilication for social distinction persisted long after it had ceased to be the main requisite for success in business and in politics, or even in war itself. Traditions as to the use of wealth which had survived from earlier times exer- cised a potent influence even upon those who had amassed that wealth by the methods peculiar to later ones. A man who would have that standing in the community which for most men is the chief object of ambition was compelled to pay his respects to the past no less than to the present. In America the case was different. The flood of industrial settlement swept so rapidly into the districts which but a short time before liad been the habitat of the miner or tlie ranclunan that it obliterated as with a sponge the traces of the social order of a ruder time. Unhampered by precedent, each man set out to make his fortune in a world where all were from one standpoint peaceful citizens and from another absolute adventurers. Life in the half-settled communities of the United States became a game in a sense which it perhaps never had been before; ii game played by a series of accepted rules, and wliero no tradition or code of etiquette not incorporated in the rules counted for anything at all. The result has been an exaltation of the principles peculiar to one stage of the world's history to an unquestioned su- premacy which they have elsewhere souglit in vain. As long as the conditions remained wliich gave birth to this state of things — free land, abundance of oppor- tunities, a body of men possessed of physical and mental soundness, and starting to play the game with appi-oxi- mately equal chances — so long did the moral and pohti- 10 OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY cal standards which were based upon these conditions prove themselves tolerably adequate for the purpose in hand. They might be criticised by outside observers as incomplete, wanting in background, crude, perhaps repul- sive ; but they at least enabled a vast social machine to be run with a great deal of aggregate happiness and mth less glaring violation of justice than had been exemplified in any other machine to which the critics could point. With a change in conditions this degree of success was less fully assured. And this change has already come about. Organization in business, in local poUtics, and in national politics has brought with it an inequality of opportunity and an unfairness of conditions under wliich the game of life is played. Competitive business is giving place to trusts. The town meeting has been supplanted by the organized municipality. The old federation of States, with its strong traditions of home rule, has become a centralized nation, reaching out be- yond its old borders to rule over other nations less civiUzed than itself. Under these circumstances it becomes impossible for the community to rest complacently in that egoistic morality which seemed sufQcient for the needs of a generation earlier. We can no longer rely on competi- tion to protect the consumers against abuse when in- dustry has become so highly organized that all production is centralized in the control of a single body. It is no longer true, in the sense that it was true fifty years ago, that each man may be left free to manage his o\vn busi- ness, and that the community will find its work best done as a consequence of such freedom. Commerce and industry are no longer to be regarded as games where we have nothing to do but to applaud the most skilful player when he wins, and rest in the assurance that his 11 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN triumph is in line with the best interests of the com- munity as a whole. What once was regarded as a game has now become a trust; not merely in the superficial and accidental sense in which the name " trust " is applied to all large combinations of capital, but in a profounder sense, as a pubhc function intrusted to those who control large capital which they can exercise well or ill at their pleasure, without adequate restraint from any quarter. Where competition is thus become a remote contingency, and where law is almost necessarily inadequate unless it be made so strict as to forbid the good no less than the evil in private business enterprise, a new system of ethics is a matter of vital necessity for the American people. This new system must not regard the director as an individual pursuing private business of his own. It must not allow him to resent the sugges- tion that he shall conduct tliis business unselfishly. It must regard him as having moral responsibihties to his stockholders, to his workingmen, and to the consumers that purchase Ms goods or his services. In the absence of such an ethical advance, no poHtical or legal solution of the so-called trust problem is hkely to be effective. Demagogues will continue to meet it with prohibitions which do not prohibit. Visionaries will attempt to limit its abuses by semi-socialistic measures that are readily evaded. But each of these classes will tend to perpetuate the evils which it is trying to check. They are attempting to reform by improved legal machinery matters for which there can be no real remedy without improved commercial morality. Nor are we better protected against the abuses of public trusts than against those of private ones. Our old-fashioned methods of representative government have not proved adequate to guard us against the evils 12 OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY incident to the working of administrative macliinery in our cities, our States, and our country as a whole. In old times legislatures were regarded chiefly as fields for debate between the champions of different interests. A representative assembly, whose members came from dif- ferent districts, was admirably adapted to secure this end. The presence of men from every locahty was sufficient protection against the adoption of measures through ignorance of the needs of the several sections to prevent that which would result in unfair sacrifices. But with the substitution of the work of actual govern- ment for that of discussion, the representative assembly no longer proves equally well adapted for our purposes. It becomes an arena for contests between confhcting claims, rather than for the interchange and reconciliation of differing views. It becomes a field where pohtical organization can exercise its fullest sway ; a field where the self-interest of the several parts, instead of becom- ing a means for the promotion of the welfare of the whole, becomes too often a means toward its spoliation. With the increasing scale on which public business is now conducted, it has undergone a change analogous to that which we see in private business. It has become a trust in a deeper sense than it was a generation or two ago. A wider discretionary power for good or ill is placed in the hands of those by whom the public affairs of the city or State are conducted. These affairs will not be safe while politics is regarded as a game, any more than private interests are safe wliile commerce is regarded as a game. Nor can they be made safe by any constitutional machinery, however well devised, unless we have the right kind of public sentiment behind it. A moderate degree of reform is indeed possible by fixing the responsibility in the hands of 13 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN a single person instead of dividing it among so many as to neutralize at once the power for good and the accountability for evil. But this change, however salu- tary and even necessary in the conduct of municipal or State business, is far from meeting the whole evil. Until there is a fundamental reform in the code of political ethics which the community imposes upon its members, public trusts will be no more adequately controlled than private ones. Nay, they are likely to be even less adequately controlled; because a public offi- cial, holding his power as a tool of a ring and acknowl- edging no allegiance to standards higher than those which have made his organization successful, is as a rule more firmly intrenched in authority than the representative of any private corporation, however ex- tensive and powerful. Until a change of ethical ideas is effected, the socialistic ideal of reforming abuse of private trust by the substitution of public trust will be but a substitution of one set of masters for another. If tliis difficulty is felt in internal affairs, where those who suffer are at any rate citizens and men of action, with the power to make their protests heard even where they cannot make their resistance successful, much worse will it be in dealing with colonies and dependencies. The history of our Indian relations has proved how much real immorality may characterize the public deal- ings of a people who in their private deahngs with one another are habitually honest and straightforward. Whenever we govern a race so inferior that it is not, and in the nature of things cannot be, adequately represented in our councils, one of two things must happen : either it will be left a victim of the most unscrupulous office- holders — as in the case alluded to — or it will be cham- pioned by disinterested men, not as a means for their own 14 OUR STANDARDS OF POLITICAL MORALITY political success, but as a duty which they owe to their own moral natures. Under an imperialistic policy our government cannot remain what it was. It must grow either worse or better. It cannot remain a game, in which the struggle for success is as far as possible dissociated from the moral sense of the participants. It will involve either a direct breach of trust or a direct acceptance of trust. Our own experience with problems other than these, and the experience of England with this particular problem, both warrant us in the belief that we shall move toward a better solution rather than toward a worse. England's first political dealings in India were characterized by methods totally indefensible. The career of Warren Hastings is an example of how a really great man may be infected by a disordered public morality. But the very powerlessness of India to pro- tect itself against official abuse brought home to the English mind the fact that public unmorality meant pubhc immorality. We need not go so far as to assert that the reform of the English civil service and the purification of English politics were the results of ex- periences in India and the colonies. This is a dis- puted point. But we can at any rate see that the very weakness of England's dependencies has compelled the young men of England, as they go out into official duties in these lands, to adopt the position of pro- tectors, and the responsibility which attaches to such a relation, rather than the position of adventurers who seek their fortunes in the opportunity of personal gain. The development of this mental attitude was in some respects less difficult in England than it will be in America, because there was in England a survival of certain traditions from the earlier military age of society 15 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN wMch. made social success depend far more upon the acceptance of responsibility than upon the achievement of eminence in busmess or in politics. Yet in spite of this difference, we maj' look forward to the future with confidence. A country like ours, which has in so many of its parts passed in a single generation from tlie law- lessness of frontier life to the legahty of organized commerce, may readily, in a generation more, pass from a conception of pubhc duty that is bounded by legality alone to one which is inspired by a sense of moral obli- gation ; and learn to carry into the conduct of pubhc affairs those principles and sentiments which we recog- nize as binding upon the indi^idual in his private deal- inofs %\'ith his fellow-men. 18 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION There are two quite distinct theories of democratic government, — the individualistic and the sociahstic. The former relies mainly on the self-interest of the various citizens, acting independently, as a means of detennining and promoting the general welfare. The latter relies mainly on the votes of those citizens acting as a body. The individuaUst believes that the selfish conduct of each man and woman, if properly enlightened and sub- jected to a certain necessary minimum of restraint, can be trusted to work out results which will conduce to the good of the body politic. The socialist believes that this good must be sought by the collective action of the people ; and that the machinery of government, by giving effect to those measures which, after proper discussion, the majority of the people believe to be desirable, is the agency on which we must place our chief confidence for the solution of political and industrial problems. Most thoughtful men would agree that neither of these theories has proved wholly satisfactoiy. Of the individualistic theory, this is now quite univer- sally admitted. Even those who emphasize most clearly what self-interest has done for political and industrial progress are compelled to recognize that it will not do everything. Its successes have been great, but they have not been umnixed with failures. It is a powerful stimulant, but it is by no means that panacea for social 3 17 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN ills which so many economists and moralists have con- sidered it. The exalted hopes of the individuahstic philosophers during the first half of the nineteenth cen- tury have been followed during the second half by a correspondingly depressing reaction. Down to the beginning of that century, business had been hedged about by a multitude of restrictions which had been thought necessary for the general good. The removal of these restrictions proved to be of great benefit. By giving a man, as far as possible, the right to enjoy what he produced, we furnished him the best motive to work. We were thus able to dispense with the necessity of serfdom, and obtained much more effective service under free labor than ever was possible under compul- sion. By guaranteeing a man the right to the un- hampered use of what he possessed, we stimulated the accumulation of capital, and thus developed new methods of production which helped the community even more than they enriched the individual possessor. We were able to arrange a system of competition which prevented trade from degenerating into a fight between buyer and seller, and utiHzed it as a means of mutual advantage. The institution of private property was thus made a vast machine for turning self-interest to the service of the body poHtic. The literature of pohtical economy, in the hands of Adam Smith and his successors, was occu- pied with developing the advantages of economic free- dom ; in other words, with showing how the enHghtened selfishness of each individual could be made to contribute to the good of others as well as of himself. Nor have these theories been confined to the field of economics. Outside of the realm of business, we have been developing a set of moral precepts based on enlightened selfishness. Instead of compelling the people to obey 18 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION laws because they were imposed by a superior authority, we have striven to show that they have a personal inter- est in obeying such laws — that by a violation of pubHc advantage they will in the long run hurt themselves scarcely less than they hurt others. Not a few writers have gone so far as to proclaun that this is the only rational basis of social obligations, and that the attempt to impose any other theory upon a democratic commun- ity is an insult to its intelligence. The restrictions contained in the old systems of class legislation, both on business and on personal conduct, had been so arbitrary that their abohtion was of itself an improvement ; and a moderately enhghtened degree of seK-interest could hardly fail of producing better business and better conduct. But as matters have ad- vanced farther, we see that the consequences of this freedom, though preferable to the system which they superseded, are not in every respect ideal. What might result if all men were sufficiently intelUgent to work them out to the best advantage is a doubtful question, which I shall not attempt to discuss. What does result, under the existing degree of intelhgence, is a mixture of good and evil, better than that which existed a century ago, but far short of anything with which we can rest sat- isfied. Even in the field of economics we have learned that the coincidence of private interest and pubUc inter- est cannot be made complete. However much we may preach the blessings of competition, we find that there are many cases in which competition will not work. However warmly we may champion the benefits of free labor and free capital, we reach a stage of development where the one cannot be obtained without considerable sacrifice of the other. We have come to a point where we regard the principles of pohtical economy in their 19 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN true light, as a valuable scientific discovery, but not in their false light, as a cure for every industrial wrong. The failure of the sociahstic principle of government by the will of the majority is less universally admitted. The theory seems so plausible that people are inclined to overlook its historical fallacies and its practical failures. Modern democracy has in its hands a vast poKtical machinery, the legacy left by the monarchical or aristo- cratic systems of government which it has superseded. The social democrats beheve that by the use of this machinery the voters can obtain all the benefits which the older systems enjoyed in the way of coherent power ; and that they can at the same time avoid the perver- sion of that power to destroy personal liberty, because authority is now vested in the whole body of citizens instead of in a single class. But the power for good, thus held by modern democ- racy, is in some respects more apparent than real. The machinery of government is a vast and complex thing, but it is not one which will run itself. It has to have force behind it. In a monarchy or an aristocracy it is easy to see where the force comes from. It is based on the superior military strength of a single individual or a single class. Where one man was pre-eminent above all others in his fighting power, he had the means of making his will respected at home no less than it was feared abroad. This state of things was seen in Homeric soci- ety. When Hector fell, all the Trojans ran; when Achilles fell, all the Greeks ran. It was a necessary consequence that the affairs of the home government were chiefly ordered by men like Hector and Achilles, in the interests of the famiUes which they represented. Where mihtary power was somewhat more widely dif- fused, there was a similar widening of political privi- 20 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION leges. This was seen in the earlier days of the Roman republic. It was seen on a still larger scale in mediaeval Europe under the feudal system. In either case we had an order arranged chiefly for the benefit of the knights, who possessed the monopoly of fighting strength. Aris- tocratic government was an engine for keeping each man in his place in a social order of this kind. The selfish interest of the aristocracy formed at once the support and the danger of such an order. It was a support, because it made the government effective; it was a menace, because it insured its perversion in favor of a single class. The invention of gunpowder, and the other changes in military tactics, which made larger armies imperative, put an end to the monopoly of power which the knights had previously enjoyed. Democracy was an ahnost necessary consequence of this change. The growth of democratic government, with its system of general elec- tions, put an end to the possibility of reserving all poht- ical privileges for a single group. This is everywhere recognized. An equally important consequence, how- ever, which is not everywhere recognized, is that it did away with much of the force which the older gov- ernments had behind them. Except in those grave crises when a wave of patriotism sweeps over the community, the support on which a democratic government reUes is spasmodic and accidental. No man except the profes- sional pohtician feels that the government is being run in his particular interest. On none, therefore, except the professional politician can it rely for continuous activity in giving effect to its decrees. Yet more serious than this absence of compelling force behind a democratic government, as compared with an aristocratic or monarchical one, is the absence of conti- 21 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN nuity of policy and tenacity of purpose. A small group of men knows what it wants. It pursues common in- terests, and it has the power to pursue them with an unwavering fidelity. We see this advantage illustrated when we compare the diplomacy of Russia, which is managed by a few men, with the diplomacy of England, which is under the control of a great many men. The diplomacy of Russia is steady in its purpose, ready to wait when waiting is needed, quick to strike when promptness is imperative; and it is intrusted, from be- ginning to end, to the hands of acknowledged experts. The diplomacy of England is, by contrast, vacillating of purpose, impatient of necessary delays, unready in the moment of action, and handled by men who are chosen for reasons not wholly connected with fitness for their work. What is true of England in this respect is in even larger measure true of the United States. And thus it happens that Russia, in spite of the inferior intelligence of her inhabitants and the lesser material resources at her command, is in a position to pursue diplomatic aims more surely and successfully than her rivals. If this condition shows itself in a field so re- stricted in its character as that of diplomacy, where the patriotism of the several countries enhsts their inhabi- tants in a common cause, what must we expect when the same difference of method is apphed to the whole field of domestic administration, whose purposes are infinitely complex, and in which the interests involved are diver- gent and antagonistic? In the face of these difficulties, it is obvious that democratic government, to be successful in what it un- dertakes, should be managed with great caution. With the inevitable changes of purpose due to the differing results of successive elections, it should confine its 22 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION undertakings to those matters of policy which have been thoroughly discussed and have pre-eminently commended themselves to the whole people. With the deficiency of physical force for carrying its decrees into effect, it should endeavor to restrict its action to those fields where there is a sufficient consensus of opinion and a degree of acquiescence on the part of the minority wliich will render a preponderance of force unnecessary. But this caution is by no means characteristic of modern popular governments. " The new democracy," to quote the words of Lord Farrer, "is passionately benevolent, and passionately fond of power." Conscious of its honesty of purpose, it is impatient of opposition, and contemptuous of difficulties, however real. It under- takes a vast amount of regulation of economic and social life in fields where two generations ago a free govern- ment would scarce have dared to enter. In these new regulations there are many instances of failure, and rela- tively few of success. We have had much infringement of personal liberty, with little or no corresponding benefit to the community. Prohibitory laws applied to places where there was no pubhc sentiment behind them have proved a mockery. Anti-trust acts have been so system- atically evaded that they have degenerated into a means of blackmail ; and they have often been so injudiciously drawn that their enforcement would have paralyzed the industry of the community. There is no need to con- tinue the catalogue of appropriation bills and currency bills, and tax bills and labor bills, often devised with the best of intents of coercing the wicked, but ending in nothing except evasion and inconvenience. Nor is it really possible that most of them should end otherwise. A statute passed by a majority and in tlie face of a reluctant minority does not represent the will 23 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN of the people. It is legislation in favor of one class, wliicli happens at the moment, through causes which may be good or bad, to control a greater number of votes at the polls, and against another class which can control a less number. Absolute majority rule, so far as it is really carried into effect, means tyrannical power in the hands of a weak and vacillating sovereign. There is a "curious poUtical superstition," to quote the phrase of Herbert Spencer, that such rule by majorities was a fundamental theory of those men whose work at the close of the last century emancipated America and Europe from the bonds of the aristocratic system. But history gives no warrant for this behef. Rousseau himself, the father of modern democracy, is explicit in saying that the wish or vote of a majority does not neces- sarily represent the will of the people. The Constitution of the United States, far from sanctioning unUmited rights of the majority against the minority, is filled from beginning to end with restrictions upon the exercise of such rights, — restrictions devised in the interest of per- sonal liberty. The Constitution indeed provides for elec- tions to decide who shall govern us ; but it in no wise encourages the intrusion of the officials thus elected into those fields of legislation where class and personal inter- ests are arrayed one against the other. Political aristocracy being a thing of the past, self- interest an inadequate support for political order, and over-legislation an evil worse than that which it under- takes to cure, I believe that we have but one alternative before us if we would preserve our integrity as a nation. We must go back to the principle that a just govern- ment is based on the consent of the governed. Without that consent we have tyranny, even though the govern- mg body possesses for the moment a majority at the GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION polls. Without that consent we can have neither self- government nor freedom in its true sense. To maintain such freedom we must accept the principle of govern- ment by public sentiment. This is a phrase which is often used, and almost as often ridiculed. The men who are engaged in what they call practical politics regai-d moral ideas in this field as a matter of slight importance, except in those rare national crises when the pubhc is thoroughly roused. They say that for every instance of failure of legislation without public sentiment behind it you can give at least as glaring an instance of failure of public sentiment without legislative and administrative machinery to support it. They hold, in short, that government by moral ideas will not work. I believe that this view, though widely held, rests on a misconception of what public sentiment really is. Whenever a large number of people want a thing we hear it said that there is a pubhc sentiment in its favor. This is not necessarily true. Even the fact that a majority may be willing to vote for a measure does not prove that it has this basis. The desire may be simply the outcome of widespread personal interest, and may not deserve in any sense the name of pubhc sentiment or public spirit. Take the whole matter of anti-trust legis- lation. Most people object to trusts. Why? Largely because they do not own them. If a man really beheves that a trust is a bad thing and would refuse to coun- tenance its pursuits if he were given a majority interest in its stock, he can fairly dignify his spirit of opposition to trusts by the title of public sentiment. And it may be added that if things are done by trusts or by any other forms of economic organization which arouse this sort of disinterested opposition, they speedily work their own 25 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN cure. If a considerable number of influential men see the pernicious effects of a business practice sufficiently to condemn it in themselves as well as in others, they can speedily restrict, if they cannot wholly prevent, its continuance. Most of the effective control of combina- tions of capital has been in fact brought about by intel- ligent public opinion slowly acting in this way. If, however, the critic is doing on a small scale what the trust is practising on a large scale; if he is making every effort to seU his goods for as high prices as pos- sible, not being over-scrupulous as to the means by which this is brought about ; if he in his own way tries to monopolize his market as the ill-managed trusts mo- nopohze theirs ; if, in short, he simply complains of the practices of the trusts because he is at the wrong end of certain important transactions, and becomes their victim instead of their beneficiary, then his words count for nothing. No matter how many thousands of men there may be in his position, their aggregate work is not Hkely to reach farther than the passage of a certain amount of iU-considered and inoperative legislation. Take another instance from similar ground, — that of the silver move- ment. Here the matter was more complex. A certain amount of agitation in favor of silver was based on a real feeling that gold had appreciated, and that this pro- duced an unfairness which was repugnant to the moral sense of the community. So far as this state of feehng existed the agitation had real strength, independent of the question whether the facts which gave rise to this feeling were rightly or wrongly interpreted. But at least an equally large part of the silver movement was based, not on the feeling that the exclusive use of gold hurt the public, but on the argument that it hurt certain individuals. When people were therefore urged to .26 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION vote for a change, not because one kind of money was better for the public than another, but because it was better for them as individuals to pay their debts in cheap money, then the silver agitation became an appeal to class interests wliich could command no power except that which was represented by the votes of the class in question. This does not mean that the appeal to class interests was any less marked on the other side ; but it means that even if the movement had been successful, the resulting laws would probably have been inoperative in practice, because imposed by a majority upon the transactions of a reluctant minority. It cannot be too often repeated that those opinions which a man is pre- pared to maintain at another's cost, but not at his own, count for little in forming the general sentiment of a community, or in producing any effective pubhc move- ment. They are manifestations of boastfulness, or envy, or selfishness, rather than of that public spirit wliich is an essential constituent in all true public opinion. There are some moralists who would deny the possibil- ity of any such public opinion which should be independ- ent of selfishness, and which should rise above personal interests. But they have the facts of history against them. Aristotle has well said that man is a pohtical animal. He has an instinct for forming communities, and for acting in concert with the fellow members of those communities. Every such political community or unit has its code of pohtical ethics. Under the influence of this code a man will do things which are quite in- dependent of his personal selfishness, and which may even militate against the dictates of such selfishness. The spirit of patriotism will lead him to risk personal suffering and death itself in the service of that commun- ity ; it will even lead hun to submit to disciphne and to :27 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN restraint which is irksome in the extreme. He will ac- quiesce in the results of laws which place burdens upon hun for the benefit of others. A community in which such patriotism and public devotion were wholly absent could no longer remain a people by itself. It would be daily threatened by conquest from mthout and by disso- lution from within. Pubhc sentiment, or pubhc spirit, is the name given to the feehng which gives effect to these virtues. It represents each man's share in that poUtical conscience which is as important for the ordering of the affairs of the state as is the personal conscience to the ordering of the affairs of the individual. Public opinion is a judg- ment formed in accordance with the dictates of this poHt- ical conscience, and representing a theory which a man is prepared to apply against himself as well as against others. Where it exists, such pubhc opinion is not only power- ful, but all-powerful. It can accompUsh more than any other coercive agency in the world. Take its operation, on a small scale, as brought out in the recent hazing investigation at West Point. When the pubhc senti- ment of the cadet corps is brought into conflict with the regulations of the Academy, the unwritten code of honor proves the stronger. We may differ as to our opinion of its merits ; but of its power there can be no question. And the power which is here illustrated on a small scale has been repeatedly exemphfied on a large scale in the history of public and private morals. What is it that has rendered murder a rare exception instead of a fre- quent social event? It is not the existence of statutes which make murder a crime ; it is the growth of a pubhc opinion wliich makes the individual condemn himself and his friends, as well as his enemies, for indulgence in that propensity. There were laws enough against mur- 28 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION der in Italy five hundred years ago ; but these laws were practically inoperative, because they had not really formed part of the social conscience, as they have to-day. On the other hand, the social conscience of mediaeval Italy, with aU its laxity in the matter of murder, was strict in certain matters of commercial trust, on which it is to-day relatively loose. A man actually forfeited self-respect by a questionable financial transaction in those days as he did not forfeit it by the murder of two or three of his best friends. As a consequence, that particular kind of financial immorality was much rarer then tlian it is now. Such instances can be indefinitely multiphed. What- ever may be the dictum of the theoretical moraUst, no student of social order will doubt that public sentiment, if once aroused, can be made to dominate the action of individuals and lead them to do things which from the standpoint of selfishness are inconvenient and irrational. But can public sentiment be thus aroused to do any large portion of the work which we now demand of gov- ernment ? Admitting its power in those cases where it already exists, can its apphcation be widened at will, so as to reach those financial and social wrongs in which the pursuit of self-interest has involved us ? This is a fair question, which must be fairly answered. It may be frankly recognized that public sentiment wiU not meet all those evils, or accomplish all those objects, for which numbers of people now desire legis- lation. This fact, however, can be considered a merit rather than a fault. If any agency were found to give effect to all the ill-considered demands of our major- ities, there would be no more freedom in America than there is in China. That it can be made broad enough to cover the field where legislation has proved practical and salutary is, I tliink, scarcely open to doubt. One or two 29 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN instances will help to illustrate this. The history of Hquor laws shows that the attempt to enforce prohibi- tion on all localities indiscriminately, independent of the pubhc sentiment which lay behind them, resulted not only in defiance of these laws, but in degradation of the authority of the state itself ; and that the really effective control was accomphshed by measures so framed that pubhc action went hand in hand with pubhc opinion. The history of railroad legislation in the United States furnishes even more marked instances of the same sort. It has been a pretty constant record of the success of measures which undertook httle, but provided for much pubhcity, as compared with measures which undertook much, but tended to drive the recusants into the dark. If this has been the case hitherto, when the development of pubhc opinion has been treated as a mere accident, how much more may we expect it to prove true if the principle were once brought home to the citizens as a body that pubhc sentiment was the important thing on wliich to rely, and that they could not afford to devolve upon the legislature or the administration a responsibihty which must finally come home to themselves. That the better class of American citizens would refuse to accept this responsibihty when thus squarely brought home to them, I do not for one moment believe. In the matter of personal morahty they do in fact accept it. In no nation is the influence of sympathy for others so power- ful; in none are the strong so ready to sacrifice their convenience to the comfort of the weak. That these methods are not carried out in our business and our poh- tics is, I beheve, due to false theories of government, accepted by the community as a whole, which lead men to rely too much on self-interest and on legislation. If our people can accept cheerfully those burdens involved 30 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION in the duties of private life, there is no inherent reason why they should fail to accept the trusts of pubhc life. That they are now inclined to make light of their obliga- tions to others in business and in politics, is not due to any incapacity for taking heavy obligations seriously ; it is due to the fact that they have been taught to regard business and politics as games, with no obligations pro- founder than the rules, and no authority higher than the umpire. It is this inadequate conception of pubUc responsibihty, rather than any reluctance to sacrifice themselves where a responsibility is recognized, that now stands in the way of our progress. What rules of conduct pubhc opinion would prescribe in order to meet the political and industrial dangers under wliich we suffer, it is too early to say. What specific obligations the public conscience, Avhen once aroused, would regard as binding in matters hke this, we have no time to consider at present. It would take not one hour, but many, to discuss the uses which could be made of such a power, when once fully recognized as a working force in political hfe. It is enough for the moment to call attention to the fact that this power ex- ists ; that it is an instrument fitted to meet the most urgent needs of society to-day — strong where strength is needed, slow where conservatism is required, capable of indefinite expansion without threatening the founda- tions of self-government. It lies for the time unused; but it awaits only the mind which shall discern its possi- bilities and the hand which shall wield it in the public interest. To the men who will thus see it and use it it offers the opportunity to become leaders in a higher type of social order than any which the world has yet seen, — an order in which the principle of noblesse oblige is recog- nized, not as the exclusive glory of one class, but as a 31 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN democratic possession which imposes its honorable bur- dens upon the whole body of the people. The question is often asked what constitutes the essen- tial mark of a gentleman, as distinct from the accidents of birth and of clothes, of manners and of speech. I believe it is to be found in the readiness to accept trusts, even when they are personally disadvantageous, — the readiness to subordinate a man's own convenience and desires to a social code. The code may be a good one or a bad one ; but it is an authority which the gentleman accepts of his own free will, without waiting for any one to compel him to accept it. To the extent that he does this, he not only proves himseK a gentleman, but proves himself capable of self-government. In this sense I beUeve that the great body of the American people are gentlemen; and that this is the best guarantee for the permanence of our system of self-government amid the increasing difficulties with which it has to deal. There is much which is as yet defective in our commer- cial and pohtical code of honor. But the fundamental fault is in the code and not in the man ; and therefore the task of the reformer is no insuperable one. The thing that makes democracy practicable is a will- ingness, on the part of the mass of the people, to submit to self-imposed authority without waiting for the poUce- man to enforce it. The cause of democracy was, as we have seen, the distribution of fighting power, which for- merly had been confined to one class. The possibihty of maintaining democracy is due to the fact that the readiness to accept self-imposed burdens has gone hand in hand with the distribution of power. The danger of democracy lies in the adoption of a false code of honor, i which tolerates and approves the pursuit of self-interest in lines where it must prove ultimately destructive to 32 GOVERNMENT BY PUBLIC OPINION the community. If our men of influence can see these dangers in time to submit to self-imposed restrictions, they can preserve their freedom from legislative inter- ference, and our republic can remain, as it now is, a self- governing body. If they do not see it in time, the demands for the extension of legislative machinery and pohce activity will so far restrict our personal Hberty that democratic freedom will exist only in name, and we shall have a social order where the form of an occasional election is but a decent veil to disguise struggles for the tyraimy of one class over another. It is for the young men who are coming on the field of pohtical hfe to-day to guard against this danger. Our college students have Hved in communities which have their historic traditions and their collective aspirations ; each of which is in a true sense a body politic, with its public spirit and its public sentiment. It is for them to carry into the larger world of business and of legislation the spirit which will subordinate personal convenience to collective honor. Let them cease to appeal exclusively to self-interest, either in their own judgment or in the judg- ment of others. For a political leader who has not only fixed standards of right, but a behef in the capacity of the people to accept those standards, the times are al- ways ready. Calhoun and Clay and Webster and Lin- coln differed in their judgments and in their conclusions. But it was characteristic of them all that they made their final appeal, not to the narrow interests of any class, but to what they beheved to be broad principles of public opinion and public morality. It was in the spirit of these men that our republic gained its growth during the century that is past ; it is for us, their sons, to see that the same spirit is applied to the yet larger problems of the century which is to come. 3 33 THE FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS In the year 1898 the new companies formed in the United States for purposes of industrial consolidation had an aggregate capital of over nine hundred million doUars. When this fact first transpired, it was regarded as surprising. Now it has become commonplace. For in the earlier half of 1899, according to the careful estimate of the Financial Chronicle, the capital of the new com- panies of this character was three thousand one hundred milHon dollars, or more than three times that of the whole year preceding.^ It is hard at once to appreciate the magnitude of these figures. No single event of a similar character, either in the American or in the English market, has involved such large and sudden transmutations of capital. It cannot be paralleled in the annals of railroad investment. Even in the year 1887, so conspicuous in our raih'oad history, the capital used in building thirteen thousand miles of new line can hardly have reached seven hundred million dollars. In the whole period of rapid expansion from 1879 to 1882, the volume of new railroad securities issued did not equal the industrial issues of this single half year alone. Under such circumstances the mat- ter of industrial consolidation becomes one of pressing 1 $1,981,000,000 common stock, $1,041,000,000 preferred stock, and $120,000,000 bonds. FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS importance. Is this a transient movement, or is it a manifestation of permanent tendencies ? How far is it likely to go? To what limits, commercial or legal, is it subject? How are its evils to be avoided? Is it, as the socialists claun, a stepping-stone toward a new organization of industry under government authority? These are the questions which must be asked and answered. It is safe to say at the outset that this movement is not Ukely to continue long at the rate which it is now maintaining. While some of the industrial issues repre- sent an investment of new capital, a much larger number represent a conversion of old capital. To such con- version there is, of course, a natural limit, when all, or nearly all, the older enterprises in an industry have become consohdated. Of the three thousand million dollars of securities placed on the market in the first half of the year 1899, it is doubtful whether one thousand million, or even five hundred million, really represent new capital put into the various lines of busi- ness enterprise. Measured in dollars and cents, the industrial growth is a comparatively small element in this movement, and the financial change of form a much larger one. We may, I think, go a step farther, and say that in no small part of these enterprises the financial motive of rendering the securities marketable is at present more prominent than the industrial motive of rendering the operations of the consolidated company more efficient. Let us see what is the difference between these two kinds of motives, and how they operate at the present juncture. A man who invests his money in a business has two distinct objects. He wishes to secure as large an income 35 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN as possible; this is his industrial motive. He also wishes to be able to get his money back whenever he needs it, and if possible to get back more than he put in ; this is his financial motive. The business must be profitable; the security must be marketable. To a certain extent these two things go hand in hand. An investment which has paid large and fairly regular divi- dends for a series of years becomes known in the local security market, and can be transferred to other hands at comparatively slight sacrifice in case the owner desires to sell it. But this is only true up to a certain point. Some of the things which make an industry profitable to the individual owner tend to make its securities less marketable instead of more so. A local business which a man has mider his own eye, and whose details he knows by experience, may be a very sure investment for him, and a relatively unsafe one for others; good to hold, but bad to sell. The intimate personal knowledge which is his protection becomes a possible menace to other holders. The majority of investors throughout the country cannot safely have anything to do with it. In such an industry the market value of the stock when it is sold is apt to be less than proportionate to its income-producing power. A great many of the manufacturing industries of the country have remained in this localised condition. If we compare the past history of industrial investments and of railroad investments, we are struck with the relative narrowness of the market for the former. The securities of a good railroad could find purchasers anywhere. If the price paid for the stock was low in proportion to the return, it was only because people distrusted its future earning capacity. Even a small railroad might have a national reputation as an investment. The demand for S6 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS the securities of Iowa railroads was not in any sense confined to one State or one section. As much as ninety- seven per cent came from districts remote from Iowa. But the demand for the securities of an Iowa factory was for the most part local. Its operations were not performed under the public eye. Its stocks could there- fore safely be held only by those who had private advan- tages for getting an inside view. But when an industry throughout the country was consolidated, this condition rapidly changed. A very much larger public was ready to buy securities of the American Sugar Refineries Company or the American Tobacco Company than would have cared to invest in any of the individual concerns of wliich they were com- posed. The national extent of the organization gave the holder of its shares larger and steadier opportunities of converting his investment into cash than he could have had when his factory remained separate from the others ; and it often, though not always, enabled him to reahze a much higher price than he otherwise would have obtained. While tliis was not always a dominant purpose in the formation of these earlier " trusts," it was an incidental advantage by which their organizers were quick to profit. Besides the motive of economy in oper- ation, which was first urged as the reason for enter- ing these combinations, the motive of selling securities easily and at a high price soon took its place as one of co-ordinate importance. Apart from this legitimate increase in the value of trust securities, due to the national extent of industry which enables them to find a market among a larger circle of investors, there is an illegitimate increase due to the opportunities which they afford for manipulation by inside rings. There is a fashion in investments as in 37 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN everything else. A large section of the pubhc bnys the kind of thing that others are bu3dng. Sometimes it has been land ; sometimes it has been railroads ; just now it is industrials. In a year of prosperity, with a shght tendency toward inflation, prices of all kinds of securi- ties tend to rise. The man who has bought to be in fashion is pleased with the increase in the nominal value of his investment and buys more. Those who are con- nected with the management see an opportunity of dis- posing of some or all of their holdings to great advantage. Before the inevitable crash comes they have converted most of their capital into money ; and the outside buyer is a loser. Prior to the crisis of 1873 the favorite chance for these operations was found in railroad enterprise; but railroad traffic and railroad accounts are now so much supervised that the possibiHty of such transactions in this field is less than it was thirty years ago. And, what is of still more importance, a series of hard expe- riences has made the investing public quite shy of dishonest railroads. In manipulating the stocks of "industrials," the speculator finds these obstacles less serious. The authorities have not learned to exercise adequate supervision ; the pubUc has not accustomed itself to use caution. The buying of industrial securities simply because it is the fashion to do so is bound to come to an end. The speculation now so actively indulged m must reach its own limit in process of time. When the investors as a body discover that the system of first and second prefer- ences is a fatally easy means of putting an individual security-holder at the mercy of a dishonest board of directors, we shall probably witness an apparent stop- page in the rapid process of industrial consohdation. In fact, there may be a reaction, and a reconversion of the 38 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS united companies into separate ones, if, as has happened in other cases, the unreasoning fondness of the public for a particular form of investment is followed by an equally unreasoning aversion of all enterprises of this form, legitimate as well as illegitimate. Such a reaction has taken place more than once in the economic history of the nineteenth centuiy. Over-speculation in English railroads in 1844, in American railroads in 1873, in prod- uce warrants in 1881, in car trusts in 1886, not to men- tion a score of other less important instances, produced in the years inmiediately following an almost absolute stoppage of the issue of what had seemed previously a very promising and important form of investment or speculation. We are safe in concluding that the rate of formation of large industrial companies will be less rapid in the future than it has been in the past. Consohdations which have been formed for selling securities by deceiv- ing investors will cease. But there will always remain a considerable number which are formed for industrial rather than financial pui-poses ; and these will probably be more important twenty years hence than they are to-day. As the world moves on, the relative economy of large concerns makes itself more clearly knowoi. The steady movement in this direction is not confined to the United States. It is just as strongly felt in England ; it is, if possible, even more strongly felt in Germany. If less is said about these industrial consolidations in Europe than in America, it is because they have proceeded more quietly and along more legitimate lines, not because they are fewer or less important. They have not advertised themselves so extensively, because they were not trying to sell their securities. This has prevented the public from knowing so much about them. It has kept them 39 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN in some measure out of the market. But so far from interfering with their prominence in the actual operation of manufacture, it has rather contributed to increase it. The nature of the economy which is reahzed by these combinations has been set forth by so many writers that we can pass over this phase of the subject very quickly. Their advantage is twofold. In the first place, the con- sohdation of all competing concerns avoids many un- necessary expenses of distribution. Under the old system these expenses are very great. The multiphcation of selHng agencies involves much waste. Competitive ad- vertisement is often an unnecessary and unprofitable use of money. Delivery of goods from independent produ- cers, whether by wagon or by railroad, often costs more than the better-organized shipments of a large single con- cern. All of these evils can be avoided by consohdation. In the second place, a consolidated company has advan- tages in its power of adapting the amount of production to the needs of consumption. Where several concerns with large plants are competing and no one knows ex- actly what the others are doing, we are apt to have an alternation between years of over-production and years of scarcity, — an alternation no less unfortunate for the pubhc than for the parties immediately concerned. A wisely managed combination can do much to avoid this. By making its production more even it can give a con- stant supply of goods to the consumers and a constant opportunity of work to the laborers ; and the resulting steadiness of prices is so great an advantage to all con- cerned that the public can well afford to pay a very con- siderable profit to those whose organizing power has rendered such useful service. This is the picture of the workings of industrial con- solidation which is drawn by its most zealous defenders. 40 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS It is needless to say that it represents possible rather than actual achievement ; that where one company has secured these results, five, or perhaps ten, have failed to secure them ; that for one combination which has earned large profits by public service, many have tried to earn large profits by public disservice, and have frequently ended in loss to themselves and to the pubhc ahke. But as long as it is possible for a well-managed con- solidation to do better work for all parties than could have been done under free competition, so long we may expect to see the movement in this direction continue. Where there is a real economy to be achieved, investors will try to take advantage of the opportunity. The attempt to prohibit them from so doing is likely to prove futile. There is no better evidence of the strength of the tendency toward consolidation than is furnished by the multitude of unenforced laws and decisions in- tended to prevent it. When railroads were first intro- duced, people's minds revolted against the monopoly of transportation thereby involved. Statutes were devised to make the track free for the use of different carriers, as the pubhc liighway is free to the owners of different wagons. But the economy of having all the trains con- trolled by a single owner was so gi-eat that people were forced to abandon their preconceived notion of public right to the track. They still, however, tried to insist that the owners of separate raikoads should compete with one another, and passed various laws to forbid the formation of pools and traffic associations. Some of these attempts have been failures from the outset; others have simply hastened the process of consohdation of the competing interests which put them beyond the reach of the special law ; the few which have been ef- fective have done a great deal of harm and almost no 41 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN good. The majority of thinking men have come to the conclusion that raiboads are in some sense a natural monopoly, and have classed them with water-works, gas- works, and other " quasi-pubhc " lines of business, as an exception to the general rule of free competition. But we are now beginning to find that the same possibil- ities of economy which first showed themselves in these distributive enterprises may be reahzed also in produc- tive industry. They are felt to a considerable degree in all kinds of enterprise involving large plant ; and there is every reason to beheve that the tendency toward com- bination will be as inevitable in manufacturing as in transportation. In the one case as in the other, we may expect that laws against pools will contribute to the formation of trusts, that laws against trusts will lead to actual consohdation. On the other hand, we need not expect this process to be a sudden one. There are practical limits to the economy of consohdation, which are more effective than the legal ones. The difficulty of finding men to manage the largest of these enterprises constitutes the greatest bar to their success. Just as in an army there are many who can fill the position of captain, few who can fill that of colonel, and almost none who are competent to be generals in command — so in industrial enterprise there are many men who can manage a thousand dollars, few who can manage a milhon, and next to none who can manage fifty million. The mere work of centrahzed administration puts a tax upon the brains of men who are accustomed to a smaller range of duties, which very few find themselves able to bear. Nor is this all. The existence of a monopoly gives its managers a wider range of questions to decide than came before any of them under the old system of free 42 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS competition. Where several concerns are producing the same line of goods the price which any of them can charge is largely fixed by its competitors. It is com- pelled to sell at market prices. The manager concen- trates his attention on economy of production, so as to be able to make a profit at those prices while his rival is perhaps making a loss. But when all of these concerns are consolidated under a single hand, the power of con- trolhng the prices of the product is vastly greater. The manager no longer asks at what rate others are selling ; he asks what the market will bear. To answer this question intelhgently he must consider the future de- velopment of the industiy as well as the present. The discretionary power wliich tlie absence of competition places in his hands constitutes a temptation to put prices up to a point injurious to the public and ruinous to the permanence of the consoHdated company. Our past experience with industrial consoUdations proves that very few men are capable of resisting this temptation or of exercising the mder power over business which the modern system places in their hands. The name " trust," which is popularly applied to all these large aggregations of capital, was somewhat acci- dental in its origin. It has, however, an appropriateness which few persons reaUze. The managers of every con- soUdated enterprise, whether based on a contract, a trust agreement, or an actual consolidation, are exercising pow- ers to benefit or injure the public which are analogous to those of a trustee. It has been said that all property is, in its wider sense, a trust in behalf of the consmner. But where competition is active, the power of using wrong business methods and unfair prices is so far limited that the chance for abuse of this trust is greatly lessened. It is only in the case of large combinations, with their dis- 48 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN cretionary power for good or evil, that the character of the trust reposed by society in the directors of its busi- ness enterprise makes itself really and truly felt. With these trusts, as with every other trust that deserves the name, it is hard to provide legislative machinery which will absolutely secure its fulfilment. The abihty to handle any trust is the result of a long process of legal and moral education. We cannot make a law which shall allow the right exercise of a discretionary power and prohibit its wrong exercise. But it is possible to modify the existing law in a great many directions, which Avill hasten instead of retarding the educational process. Thus far most of our statutory regulations have been in the wrong direction. We have attempted to prohibit the inevitable, and have simply favored the use of underhanded and short-sighted methods of doing things which must be done openly if they are to be done well. To make matters move in the right direction, at least three points must be kept in view. 1. Increased responsibility on the part of hoards of directors. Where the members of a board are working for their own individual purposes, ignoring or even antagonizing the permanent interests of the investors, all the evils of industrial combination are likely to be seen at their worst, and the possibility of improvement is reduced to a minimum. In the first place, the mere fact that the directors are allowed to ignore their narrower and clearer duties to the investors prevents them from recognizing the very existence of their wider duties to the public. They think of business as a game, which they play under cer- tain well-defined rules. They sacrifice those whom they 44 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS represent in order to win the game for themselves. This wrong underlying idea prevents them from rightly conceiving of any trust which they may handle. In the next place, the temporary interests which the directors pursue in endeavoring to manipulate the mar- ket are not Ukely to coincide with the interests of the outside pubhc, whether laborers or consumers. The interests of the speculator may be furthered by these very fluctuations in price which it is the ostensible object of the consohdation to avoid. If a business like that of the Standard Oil Company is run with a view to the permanent interests of the public, it will generally be found that prices are made relatively low and steady, and that laborers are given constant employment; but in some other cases, where the property has been subject to manipulation, the results have been just the reverse. Finally — and this is perhaps the most important point of all — if the directors are allowed to make their money independently of the interests of the investor and the consumer, the education in poUtical economy which should result from business success or failure is done away with. If a man is managing a business with a full sense of responsibihty to those who put money into the enterprise, a failure to serve the public means, in the long run, a failure of his own purposes and ambitions. If this failure is but partial, he will learn to do better next time ; if it is complete, he will give place to some one else. But if he has taken up the industry as a temporary speculation, buying the securities at prices depressed by untrue reports, holding for an increase of value, and selHng them on false pretences to deluded investors, no lesson is learned by the management of the enterprise ; and the same mistakes may be repeated in- definitely under successive boards of directors. Greater 45 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN strictness with regard to the formation of new compa- nies, increased publicity of accounts, clear recognition, legal and moral, of the responsibility of directors who have made false reports to the stockholders, — these are conditions precedent to any radical and thorough reform of existing abuses.^ 2. A change in the legal character of the labor contract. Here we stand on more doubtful ground. It is easy to say that the present relations between large corpora- tions and their employees are unsatisfactory. It is difficult to say just what should be done to make them better. As matters stand at present, a strike begun on trivial grounds may be allowed to interrupt the whole business of a community. The natural alternative would seem to be compulsory arbitration; but this in practice has not worked nearly as well as could be desired. It is probable that in this respect changes in the laws must come slowly. An obligation of a consoU- dated company to perform continuous service must be coupled with a clearer definition of the obligations of the workman in this respect. Whatever can or cannot be done by legal enactment, society must at any rate 1 Tlio roal objectiou to stock watering — about which so much is said and so little uiulcrstood — lies along these lines. The old-fashioned criti- cism of watered stock was based on tlie supposition that the public was compelled by the practice to pay higher rates thau would otherwise have been charged. There may be a very few instances of this kind ; but the idea that such water has any considerable general effect on rates has been pretty thoroughly disproved. The rates are arranged to make max- imum net returns above expenses, whether the nominal capital be large or small. The evil which really results, all but universally, from stock water- ing is habitual falsification of accounts. If the directors so arrange their hooks as to make it appear that money has been invested which actually has never j^assed through their hands, they are under a great temptatipu to make false reports concerning other parts of the business, and to with- hold from investors and consumers alike that sort of iuformatiou which the public has a right to require. 46 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS recognize that those whom it has placed in charge of large industrial enterprises are not simply handling their own money or other people's money, but are above all things leaders of men ; and it must judge the finan- cier who has through his neghgence allowed the busi- ness of the community to be interrupted by strikes, as it would judge the general who, in his anxiety to secure the emoluments of his office, had allowed his country to be invaded and liis amiies paralyzed. 3. An increased care in the imposition of high import duties. In the past we have allowed the manufacturers in each line of industr}'' a great deal of freedom to suggest what the tariff on the products of their foreign competi- tors should be, knowing that if it was placed too high the internal competition of new enterprises would re- duce profits and prices to a not exorbitant level. Of course mistakes have been made in this matter which have caused serious and unnecessary variations in price ; but as a rule domestic competition has set moderate limits to the arbitrary results of tariff-making. When, however, domestic competition is done away Avdth, the danger is more serious and permanent. It is hardly possible to deal very directly with the tariff question without going beyond the limits of a chapter like this ; but it is safe to say that in those industries which are at all thoroughly monopolized public safety will generally demand that duties be placed on a revenue rather than a protective basis. The fact that an industry can thus organize itself shows that it has outgrown the period of infancy. If it continues to demand a prohibitory tariff on its products, the presumption is that it is trying to make an arbitrary profit at the expense of the consumer. 47 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN Such are the general directions in which private cor- porations must expect increased restriction, as they become more or less complete monopolies. But there is a still deeper question which many are asking, and to which not a few are giving a radical answer. Will such monopolies be long allowed to remain in the hands of private corporations at all ? Is it not rather true that this consolidation is a step in the direction of state ownership of industrial enterprise? Is not a grave crisis at hand in which there will be a decisive struggle between the forces of individualism and socialism, of property and of numbers ? It is quite within the limits of possibihty that many of these enterprises will pass into government owner- ship in the immediate future ; but it is highly improb- able that this tendency toward consolidation is increasing the dangers of a conflict between individualists and socialists. Its net effect is to diminish these dangers by making the question of state ownership relatively unim- portant to the public as a whole. This may seem hke a surprising statement, but there are a great many facts to justify it. There has been of late years, in connec- tion with these movements toward consohdation, an approximation in character between private and public business. Formerly the two were sharply distinguished ; to-day their methods are much closer to each other. Private business can do httle more than pay interest on the capital involved, because of the increased intensity of modern competition. Public business can do no less than pay interest on the capital involved, because of the growing vigilance of the taxpayers; for the taxpayers will not tolerate a deficit which increases their burdens. But obviously the position of the consumer toward a private business which pays less than four per cent is 48 FORMATION AND CONTROL OF TRUSTS not likely to be very different from his position toward a public business which must pay more than three. The distinction from the financial standpoint is thus reduced to a minimum; nor is it much greater, if we look at the matter from the operating standpoint. The officers of a large private corporation have almost ceased to come into direct contact with the stockliolders ; and to a nearly equal degree our public administrative offi- cials who actually do the work have ceased to come into contact mth the voters. The private officer no longer seeks simply to please the individual group of investors ; the pubhc official no longer strives simply to please the individual group of politicians. The man who does so is in either case charged, and rightly charged, with mis- understanding the duties of his office. The more com- pletely the principles of civil service reform are carried out, the closer does the similarity become. The re- sponsibility of public and private officials aUke leads them to the exercise of technical skill and sound general principles of business policy, rather than to the help of influential private interests. Under these circumstances, the character of good pubhc business and good private business becomes so nearly alike that it makes compara- tively little difference to most of us whether an enter- prise is conducted by our voters or by our financiers. The one question to ask is, which method produces in any case the fewer specific abuses. We may look with confidence to the time when the question of state owner- ship of industrial enterprises will cease to be a broad popular issue, and become a business question, which economic considerations may perhaps lead society to decide in favor of public control at one point and private control at some closely related point. There will, of course, always be a conflict between those who * 49 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN have more money than votes, who will desire to extend the sphere of commercial activity, and those who have more votes than money, who will desire to extend the sphere of political activity ; but to the great majority of people, who have one vote and just money enough to support their families, it is not probable that this conflict will ever create a general issue of the first importance. We may sum up our general conclusions as follows : So far as the present tendency toward industrial consoH- dation is a financial movement for the sake of selling securities, it is Ukely to be short-lived. So far as it is an industrial movement to secure economy of operation and commercial poUcy, it is likely to be permanent. Attempts to stop this tendency by law will probably be as futile in the field of manufacture as they have been in that of transportation. The growth of these enter- prises creates a trust in a sense which is not generally appreciated; it gives their managers a discretionary- power to injure the public as well as to help it. The wise exercise of this trust cannot be directly provided for by legal enactment; it must be the result of an educational process wliich can be furthered by widened conceptions of directors' responsibility. As this process of consolidation and of education goes on, private and public business tend to approach one another in charac- ter. The question of state ownership of industrial enterprises, instead of becoming an acute national issue, as so many now expect, will tend rather to become relatively unimportant, and may not improbably be removed altogether from the field of party politics. ^0 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM There is a set of current conceptions as to the rela- tions between political economy, socialism, and legisla- tive refonn which have been fostered by writers like Carlyle or Ruskin, Kingsley or Maurice, which are reflected in many of the most popular novels and sermons of the day, and to which some economists of reputation have more or less inadvertently lent the weight of their autliority. These conceptions may be formulated as follows : — 1. Political Economy makes the individual an end, in and for himself; in other words, it is a gospel of Mammon and a glorification of selfishness. 2. Socialism substitutes collective aims for individual ones. It is the result of a moral reaction against the traditional political economy, — a reaction which is tak- ing hold of the masses, and which they are inclined to carry to an extreme. 3. The only way to prevent matters from being car- ried to such an extreme is for the wealthy and intelli- gent classes to adopt a great many socialistic measures on their o^vn account, before the control of our social machinery is taken out of their hands. The first of these conceptions is an entire mistake. Political Economy does not regard the individual as an end in himself. It does not glorify the pursuit of wealth except so far as tliis pursuit serves the interests of 51 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN society as a whole. The great work of Adam Smith was an inquiry into the causes of the wealth of nations; and subsequent economists have followed in his foot- steps. They have shown that the collective prosperity of a people is far better fostered by the individual freedom and enlightened self-interest of its members than by any comphcated system of pohce government. They have shown that, in the industry of modern civi- hzed nations, the man who serves himself intelligently is generally serving others, even when he has no inten- tion or consciousness of so doing. But in all this the individual freedom is treated as a means to social wel- fare rather than as an end in itself. This development of individualism in economics is part of the general trend of modern thought and modern Ufe. A few centuries ago, the principle of individual freedom was not recognized in law or in morals, any more than in trade. It was then thought that liberty in trade meant avarice, that hberty in politics meant violence, and that liberty in morals meant blasphemous wickedness. But as time went on, the modern world began to see that this old view was a mistake. Human nature was better than had been thought. Man was not in a state of Avar with his Creator and all his fellow- men which it required the combined power of the church and the police to repress. When a community had achieved political freedom its members on the whole used that freedom to help one another instead of to hurt one another. When it had achieved moral freedom, it substituted an enlightened and progressive morahty for an antiquated and formal one. When it had achieved industrial freedom, it substituted high efficiency of labor for low efficiency, and large schemes of mutual service for small ones. Constitutional liberty 52 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM in politics, rational altruism in morals, and modern busi- ness methods in production and distribution of wealth, have been the outcome of the great individualistic movement of the nineteenth century. The Bishop of Durham's statement that " individu- alism regards humanity as made up of disconnected or warring atoms " is not merely untrue ; it is exactly the reverse of the truth. This idea of disconnected and warring atoms represents the traditional standpoint instead of the modern individualistic one. The indi- vidualist holds that, as society develops, the interests of its members become more and more harmonious; in other words, that rational egoism and rational altru- ism tend to comcide. In fact his chief danger lies in exaggerating the completeness of this coincidence in the existing imperfect stage of human development, and in believing that freedom will do everything for society, economically and morally. These mistakes and exaggerations of individualism have given a legitimate field for socialistic criticism, both in morals and in economics. Some of the ablest economists on both sides of the Atlantic have done admirable work m pointing out where the evils arising from individual freedom may exceed its advantages, and when society must use its collective authority to pro- duce the best economic and moral results. Such has been the work of John Stuart Mill, of Stanley Jevons, of Sir Thomas Farrer, of President Andrews, and of the leaders of the German "Historical School." Men of this type recognize that the point of issue between them and their opponents is not a question of ends, but of means. Both sides have the same object at heart ; namely, the general good of society. One side believes that this good is best achieved by individual freedom 53 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN in a particular line of action; the other side believes that the dangers and evils with which such freedom is attended outweigh its advantages. The good and evil are often so closely balanced that economists on either side find the utmost advantage in studyiag the criticisms of their opponents as a means of avoiding or correcting their own errors. But the name " socialist " is rarely applied to a critic of this stamp. It belongs by current usage to a far larger body of people who dislike, misunderstand, and try to ignore the results of economic experience. They are, as a rule, men who see clearly the existence of cer- tain evils in modern industrial society which some econ- omists have overlooked, and others have deplored as inevitable. They rush to the conclusion that economic science regards these evils with indifference, and that its conclusions and purposes are therefore immoral; while they claim for themselves, more or less consciously, a superior moral purpose because they are trying to right visible wrongs by direct state activity. This is no unfair account of a reaction against the teachings of economics, wliich is now widespread and which is thought by its exponents to be animated by a high moral purpose. In actual fact, the reaction is not so much a moral as an emotional one. It is not an indication that the social- ist hates moral evils which the economist of the old school regards with apathy. It is rather the result of a difference in mental constitution which leads the econo- mist to calculate the large and remote consequences of any measure and ignore the immediate details, while the socialist feels the details so strongly that he refuses to work out the indirect consequences of liis action. It is an old saying that men may be divided into two, classes, 54 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM one of which is so occupied looking at the woods that it does not see the trees, while the other is so occupied with the trees that it does not see the woods. The atti- tude of some of the economists toward questions of social reform is not inaptly typified by the former class ; that of their sociahstic critics by the latter. Of course it will not do to undervalue the emotional element in dealing with economic matters, as men of the more purely intellectual type are sometimes prone to do. Reasoning about human conduct is full of chances of error ; and if the outcome of such reasoning is to leave a considerable number of human beings in hopeless misery, society is justified in demanding that every premise and every inference in the chain of reasoning be tested, and every rational experiment be made to see whether such a consequence is really inevitable. Instances have not been wanting when the conclusions of the economists have proved wrong, and the emotions of the critics have been warranted by the event. The factory legislation of England furnishes an historic example. The economists, as a rule, condemned this legislation as wrong in prin- ciple and likely to do harm ; but the results showed that these economists had overlooked certain factors of uu- portance with regard to public health and public morals which vitiated their conclusions and justified public opinion in disregarding them. But while the men of emotion may sometimes be right and the men of reason wrong, the chances in matters of legislation are most decidedly the other way. It is safe to say that the harm wliich has been done by laws based on unemotional reasoning is but a drop in the bucket compared with that which has been done by laws based on unreasoning emotion. The tendency to overvalue feeling as compared with reason is a far greater danger 65 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN than the tendency to undervalue it. Legislation is essen- tially a matter of remote consequences. The man who tries to reason out these consequences will occasionally make mistakes ; the man who refuses to reason them out will habitually do so. The good which state inter- ference does is often something visible and tangible. The evil which it does is much more indirect, and can only be appreciated by careful study. The man who has his mind so fixed on some immediate object as to shut his eyes to the results of such study, is almost certain to advocate too much state action. He may succeed in passing a few good laws, but he will be responsible for a vastly larger number of bad ones. The danger from this source is increased by the fact that so many good people make very little distinction between what is emotional and what is moral. They think that calculated conduct is selfish conduct, and that unselfishness can exist only in the emotional as opposed to the intellectual sphere. Many a man gives charity to a pauper upon impulse and thinks he is doing a good deed, when he is really shutting his eyes to the conse- quences of an evil one. " Virtue," says a French writer, " is more dangerous than vice because its excesses are not subject to the restraints of conscience." There is a great deal of legislation, and a great deal of socialism, to which this remark will apply. Its promoters believe themselves to be actuated by moral ideas, when the chief ground for this belief is the absence of intellectual ones. Perhaps the most plausible argument urged in favor of the superior morality of the socialistic system is that it would teach people to think more than they now do of sympathy as an industrial force, and less of self-interest. It is urged that a belief in the principles of the commer- 56 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM cial world tends to make people selfish, while a belief in socialism tends to make them sympathetic. This view is hardly justified by the facts of history. In Europe, all through the Middle Ages, charity was regai-ded as a right and business as a wrong ; but those ages were marked by strife rather than by sympathy. The attempt to restrict business transactions and to suppress self- interest as a commercial factor stood in the way of mutual service. The assertion of the duty of charity did not produce a better system of social relations, as some of its advocates would have us beUeve. It put intolerable burdens upon some classes — especially the agricultural laborers — in order to support other classes in comparative idleness. Though the ideals of sociahsm may be attractive, its methods have been demorahzing; and this is the really miportant thing to consider in judging the moral character of socialism as an economic system. Let us compare the moral effect of the commercial and the sociaHstic theories of value. The commercial theory is that the value or proper price of an article is based on the needs of the market; that is, upon the utility of additional supplies of that article to the consumers. The sociahsts object that the results of this theory are unjust, and that some people get a large price for what has cost them very little effort ; while others expend a great deal of effort and can command only a small price in return. They would have us adopt a theory of value which should make the price depend on the sacrifice of the producer rather than on the needs of the consumer. At first sight the socialistic theory seems the more just ; and the emotional man is pretty certain to pronounce it morally superior to the commercial theory. But the in- tellectual man, who traces the consequences of the two 57 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN views, finds that the commercial theory leads men to produce what others want in as large quantities as possi- ble, and with the minimum expenditure of labor ; while the socialistic theory leads men to spend as many hours as possible over their work and dole out the smallest possible quantities of what other people want. What- ever may be thought of the assumptions of the two sys- tems, the industrial results of the commercial theory are efficiency, progress, and service to others; while those of the sociahstic theory are inefficiency, antiquated methods of work, and restriction of service rendered. Judged in the hght of economic history, the "high ideals " which, to quote the words of a somewhat over- sympathetic observer, " socialism has placed before the masses of the people, and which they have absorbed," are based partly on erroneous assumptions and partly on demoralizing ones. But there is stiU another point to be considered. Even if we regard the socialistic views as erroneous and de- moralizing, the fact remains that they are held to a greater or less extent by a large number of people — perhaps a majority of the voters in the United States. What is a wise man to do under these circumstances? ShaU he make concessions to this sentiment lest a worse thing befall him? Some economists of high standing expHcitly urge that this should be done. From this view the writer is compelled to dissent emphatically, alike on grounds of moraUty and of pohcy. He believes that the courageous answer to this question is the pru- dent one, and that that answer is. No. Let us not be misunderstood. If, on careful inquiry, it appears to a thinking man that the pubHc good will in any particular case be better served by the adoption of sociahstic means rather than of individualistic ones, 58 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM lie ought to favor their adoption, whether this policy commands five votes or five million. But if he does not beUeve that the public good \vill be served by such a policy, and nevertheless lends his countenance to its adoption because he is afraid to oppose the emotional demand which stands behind it, his conduct is a mis- take from whatsoever point of view we regard it. In the first place, it is likely to strengthen rather than weaken the demand for more radical changes. You can- not compromise \\'ith an emotion as you can with a dif- fering opinion, — witness the difficulties of arbitration in labor disputes. An emotion is stimulated rather than satisfied by concessions. Such concessions are taken as evidence, not of a spirit of accommodation, but of weak- ness, — and, on the whole, rightly so. If the conserva- tives yield to a popular clamor which overawes but does not convince them, the people are justified in assuming that their previous toleration of evils was due to indif- ference and not to an honest conviction that it was im- possible to stop them by state action. In sacrificing their own better judgment, tlie conservatives give up their strongest weapon of defence, and gain absolutely nothing. Nor do we find, except in rare instances, that the failure of an experiment in over-legislation lessens the demand for sunilar action in the future. The failure will be attributed not to the fact that there was too much state action, but too little. Disasters and losses connected with state railroad control are made so many arguments in favor of state railroad ownership. The difficulties and failures of co-operation under the exist- ing system of industry lead to a demand for a "co- operative commonwealth." No socialistic experiment is proved a failure, in the eyes of its promoters, until 69 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN all other simultaneous experiments have been stopped. It is just here that individualism has its greatest ad- vantage for the progress of the community. It tries to leave people free to make their own mistakes ; trusting that the successful experiment wiU. be followed and the unsuccessful one abandoned, and that the community will thereby profit from the errors hardly less than from the successes of its active members. Though tliis ideal of the individuahst is nowhere fully carried out, it is unquestionably true that economic individuahsm has en- abled nations to learn and profit by the success or failure of industrial experiments far more rapidly than any so- ciahstic system with the collective action which it neces- sitated. The world's great inventions and improvements, material and moral, have been made by individual initia- tive, and adopted reluctantly by organized governments of any form whatever. Individuahsm is educational and progressive; socialism in the majority of cases is ' / not. That education which a sociahst government seeks I to foster, represents the wisdom of the present rather ' than the possibilities of the future. Measured by its success in securing these possibihties, sociahsm, whether in economics, in pohtics, or in morals, falls short of that system of hberty of which men like Mill and Morley have been the champions. Such writers do not deny that individual Hberty permits grave mistakes wliich centrahzed authority would avoid. They defend the great principle that each man should be free to make his own mistakes in that group of actions which is char- acterized as " self-regarding," not because such mistakes are few in number, but because their repression involves a repression of the best possibihties of good. They would leave all possible ways open to the reformer, be- cause no man knows by which way he will come. In 60 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM Morley's expressive language, they refuse to root out the tares, not because they thereby leave the wheat a better chance to grow, but because " there are in the great seed-plot of human nature a thousand rudimentary germs, not wheat and not tares, of whose properties we have not had a fair opportunity to assure ourselves ; and if you are too eager to pluck up the tiires, you pluck up with them untried possibilities of human excellence." These are the reasons why the system of the indi- vidualist has given fuller opportunities than that of the socialist for the development of progressive men and methods. It is because of this success in serving the community that individualistic economics holds the position which it does at the present day. It is not because the leaders of industry or the exponents of the traditional political economy are popular, for they are not. It is because their work proves constructive and preservative of human happiness, while that of their opponents is unsuccessful or destructive. It is doubt- ful whether President Cleveland at the time of the Chicago labor troubles was any more popular than President Debs; but President Cleveland represented intellect, while President Debs represented emotion, and we know what came of the contest. A nation must let intellect rule over emotion, whether it Ukes intellect or not. The alternative is political and in- dustrial suicide. The proof of intellect and the con- dition of holding power is success in foreseeing the future. "There is one quality in a general which every soldier understands, and that is success." Whenever a republic undertakes to carry on a war, there is always a popular demand for more vigorous action than the judgment of the best trained officers can approve. An emotional public sentiment mistakes the 61 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN caution of a general for apathy, and stigmatizes his scien- tific foresight as the result of cowardice or treachery. Too often, under the influences of such a sentiment, a Fabius is displaced by a Varro, a McClellan by a Pope, or a Johnston by a Hood. A Gates is allowed to snatch away the well-earned laurels of a Schuyler, and even to menace the authority of a Wasliington. But sooner or later science finds its vindication in a Cannse or a Cam- den, a Manassas or an Atlanta. It is not by yielding to popular demands, as did Burnside at Fredericksburg or Lee at Gettysburg, that generals preserve their authority and their cause. It was a great deed when Thomas held his position at Chickamauga for hour after hour against the assaults of ever-increasing nmnbers, amid imminent peril of destruction ; but it was a far greater deed for himself and for the Union, when, fifteen months later, he held liis position at Nashville, week after week, under increasing popular clamor for premature action, and in the hourly peril of ignominious removal. The statesman who, under the pressure of popular clamor, modifies his cahner scientific judgment to suit an emo- tional demand, barters the possibility of a Nashville for the probability of a Fredericksburg. This illustration -will serve to show why economists as a body look with distrust on those who appeal from the conclusions of history and deduction to those of popular sentiment, and will explain a great deal of their alleged intolerance and exclusiveness. It is not true that economists make the individual good an end in itself. Nothing but ignorance of their writings can excuse this belief. Nor is it true that they reject social- istic means for the promotion of the pubHc welfare. Those who adopt an extreme position in this matter are to-day in an insignificant minority. But they strongly 62 SOCIALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM disapprove the attempt to " popularize " economics by giving too much weight to the conclusions of unin- structed. public sentiment. It is not toward the theories of the socialists that their hostility is exercised, nor even toward their practical proposals, but toward their methods of investigation and the manner of tlieir appeal to the public. For nothing can be more fatal to that efficiency of public opinion on which all good govern- ment rests, than the liabit of fixing our eyes on inune- diate consequences mstead of pemianent causes, or of giving to the emotions of a body of ^vitnesses the dignity of the dehberate judgment of a court. 63 THE RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS In some respects economic science is now at tlie height of its prosperity. At no previous period has popular interest in the subject been so widespread. Our college class rooms are thronged with its students. Teachers in our secondary schools are striving to find a place for it in their curricula. For pubhc lecturers in this domain the demand far outruns the supply. Editors of all our leading journals seek for writers educated in pohtical economy. Large business corporations demand expert statisticians for aid in the solution of their most diffi- cult problems. In education, in journaHsm, or in finance, the trained economist to-day finds a great and growing demand for liis services. But in one vital respect the conditions are far less satisfactory. The influence of our economists on gov- ernment and legislation is not only less than it should be to-day, but less than it many times has been in the past. Our practical politicians, good as well as bad, have for the most part an ill-concealed contempt for a class of men whom they regard as theorists and vision- aries. In individual cases they sometimes ask the advice of economists, and — more rarely — take it ; but they are far from having the habit of asking or tak- ing such advice as an incident to the working of government machinery. The application of civil service 64 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS examinations and other improved methods of filling administrative offices has not mended matters in this respect. Rather has it emphasized the lack of influence of economic science on governmental practice ; for it has filled our public service with men technically trained in almost every branch of knowledge except economics. I am not indeed uimiindful of the valuable work which has been done and is being done by our American econo- mists on problems of cuiTcncy and taxation, on price statistics, on railroad statistics, and other subjects of public moment. We have no small number of trained men who are ready and able to do good pubhc service in these matters. But the very excellence of their work only emphasizes the contrast between the subordinate position and precarious influence which is to-day accorded them, and the commanding places attained by economists of the earlier generation. Where can we find among our younger men those who are succeeding to the inlieri- tance of Walker and Wells, of Charles Francis Adams and Horace White ? One of these economists was given scope for his powers as superintendent of the census; another, as commissioner of the revenue. The record of their work has passed into history ; it is a history of scientific study and practical influence combined which reads almost like romance when contrasted with some of the administrative methods of the present day. The third of these men, as a Massachusetts public official, created a system of railroad regulation which, whatever its deficiencies, has nevertheless left its impress on the law of a whole continent ; the fourth has proved himself the mightiest champion of the cause of sound public finance in the country, and has made the journal which he edits second to none in the world as a power for influencing public opinion and public action. Where $ 65 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN shall we look for their successors? We are learning more about the theory of utility than did our fathers ; but are we doing so much for the realization of that theory in the organized life of the nation? If the economists fail in their influence upon public life, they fail in what is the most important application of their studies, and in what may almost be said to consti- tute their fundamental reason for existence. Even if such failure be only temporary, as I believe it is, it furnishes nevertheless a most serious matter for con- sideration. Let us strive just now, if we may, to get some light on this phase of economic history. Let us see why economics and politics have grown apart in the immediate past, and consider whether there is any hope for their reunion in the immediate future. Our work naturally divides itself into two parts. We must first acquaint ourselves with the history of eco- nomics, and note the changed conceptions of economic study which have successively developed. We must next do the same thing with politics, and note the changes which have taken place both in its underlying ideas and in the method of appljdng them. It is hardly necessary to say that the conception of economics has fluctuated widely from age to age, and that the sphere of economic study has altered corre- spondingly. The history of this science, like that of so many others, begins with Aristotle. In his mind the relations between economics and politics were simple. Economics meant to him the art of ordering the affairs of a household, politics the art of ordering the affairs of a state. Each had its own clearly defined field of inquiry. The two subjects had indeed points of simi- larity ; a man who was famihar with the one was better prepared thereby to deal with the other; but funda- 66 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS mentally their spheres were as distinct as those of geog- raphy and astronomy. As a part and a subordinate part of the science of economics, Aristotle was forced to notice the more unworthy science or rather art of chre- matistics, — the science or art of making money. It is notorious that Aristotle looked upon this part of the subject with disapproval. His idea of business was like that of Mr. Caleb Garth in Middlemarch, to whom it " never meant money transactions, but the skilful appli- cation of labor." But in the minds of Aristotle's suc- cessors the subject of money and money-making assumed constantly increasing importance in the study of private economy. This was in fact an almost necessary conse- quence of substituting the labor of freemen for the labor of slaves. If the householder was able to obtain labor by physical compulsion, he could despise money and all things connected therewith; but if he had to buy his labor, he was forced to pay attention to the means of buying it. Thomas Aquinas had no more love for money-getting than had Aristotle ; but the social conditions of the time of Thomas Aquinas rendered it necessary to take more account of money- getting than did the social conditions of the time of Aristotle. It was also gradually seen that money economy formed a better means of public service than the older system of slave labor. Interest, at first unrea- sonably condemned by economic moralists, was after- wards tolerated and ultimately defended. In the middle of the seventeenth century the term " economy " had come to be associated almost exclusively with the work of money-getting. More than this, the principles of chrematistics, or of economy in its modern sense, were applied to the conduct of public affairs, and gave rise to the study of political economy, in which ideas derived 67 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN from the study of private business were transferred to the work of the statesman. The cameralists^ applied the methods of domestic economy to matters of public finance, — the conduct of the business affairs of the gov- ernment. The mercantilists went yet farther, and tried to apply these same methods to the international com- merce of the whole people. In other words, they pro- claimed the duty of the statesman to assist his people as well as his government in making money. At the end of the seventeenth century political economy was uni- versally understood as an attempt to apply the princi- ples of money-getting to the conduct of national affairs ; and with this practice in view, it was assiduously studied by financiers and by statesmen. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have wit- nessed a reaction. It began with the French physiocrats, who protested against the aims of the mercantiUsts ; combating the idea that national wealth could best be subserved by national money-making; contending that the food of the people rather than the gold or silver in circulation measured the national prosperity. It was carried still further by their English successors, who criticised the means adopted by the mercantilists no less than their aims; showing how individual freedom con- duced to the development of pubhc wealth, in many cases at any rate, far more surely than did legislative activity. A new conception of political economy thus arose, with higher aims and broader foundations than the old. It is hardly necessary to say that the gain, both in scientific truth and in practical utihty, was very great indeed. It is perhaps more necessary to point out some of the dangers which attended the reahzation of this gain. 1 Students of cameralia, affairs of the exchequer. 68 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS In the first place, there was often a loss of concrete- ness. The older political economy expressed its results in pounds, shillings, and pence. They might be true or they might be false, but they were at any rate embodied in a form which was capable of measurement and verifi- cation. Not without good cause did the mercantilists claim for their reasonings the title of "pohtical arith- metic." We may apply to them the words, at once appreciative and critical, which Bagehot applied to George Cornewall Lewis : " Of course he was not uni- formly right, — there were some kinds of facts which he was by mental constitution not able wholly to appreciate, — but his view of every subject, though it might not be adequate, was always lucid. His mind was like a registering machine with a patent index : it took in all the data, specified, enumerated them, and then indicated with unmistakable precision what their sum total of effect precisely was. The index might be wrong; but nobody could ever mistake for a moment what it meant and where it was." In this respect later political econo- mists are at a disadvantage. The new political economy has substituted a vaguer conception of wealth for the more concrete one ; and many of its propositions have suffered a corresponding loss of clearness and precision. The mercantile school of economists had measured wealth in terms of money. The first generation of their critics measured it in terms of food. The second and tliird generation measured it as " commodities." Our own generation measures it in terms of utility. But food is a less definite and tangible measure than money ; com- modities are a less definite and tangible measure than food ; and utility is perhaps the least definite and tangi- ble measure of all. People knew exactly how the j)ropo- sitions of Sir Thomas Mun applied to any concrete case ; 69 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN they knew approximately how those of Turgot applied ; they can make a fair guess how those of Ricardo or Mill apply ; but of the appHcation of those of Sax or Menger they can hardly hazard a conjecture. And in the second place, with this loss of concreteness of conception came a loss of definiteness of aim, — the almost inevitable result of substituting the principles of a science for the practice of an art. This change was hardly noticed in the first generation, when Turgot and Smith and their followers were chiefly occupied in sweeping away old restrictions ; but when it came to the point of building up rather than of pulHng down, the loss was felt very strongly. The old political economy often gave wrong advice, but at the very worst it was explicit and consistent advice. The new pohtical econ- omy, in its anxiety to avoid error, falls into vagueness, and into apparent if not real inconsistency. For a presumptuous claim of knowledge it substitutes either controversies or confessions of ignorance. Fools pro- verbially rush in where angels fear to tread ; but this difference of pohtical method has at times the unfor- tunate effect of lessening the practical influence of angels upon the affairs of this world. As the art of pohtical economy gave place to the science of econom- ics, it was placed at an inevitable disadvantage in deal- ing with those who sought for the easily mastered rules of an art which professed to teach them what they could do, rather than the general principles of a science which too often indicated only what they could not do. This was not the fault of the pohtical economists. It was their fault, however, that, when the problem of se- curing practical influence became harder, they did not always make increased efforts to render their points clear to the statesman, but oftentimes took refuge in the 70 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS seclusion of the schools, and there built up theories of society more interesting and profitable to the scientist than to the politician. The number of students who thronged their lecture rooms increased this temptation. Instead of making it a science for statesmen they were led to make it a science for schoolmen, ^vith all that complex terminology which Giddings so aptly calls its jargon. In many cases this process has gone so far as to render economics a subordinate department of psy- chology rather than of politics ; a theory of motives starting from assimiptions that are never realized com- pletely, and ending in propositions than can never be verified at all. I am far from wishing to cast ridicule on metaphysical methods of poUtical economy. Cournot and Jevons and the Austrian school have taught us a great many things that we did not know before. They have substituted good underlying metaphysics for bad underlying metaphysics. But the very excellence of this foundation has tended to divert attention from the superstructure, which, after all, is the thing with which we have to deal in practical Ufe. I am disposed to think seriously that the excessive use of psychological terms and conceptions, to the neglect of purely commercial ones, has been the most potent cause to weaken the influence of economists among statesmen and men of the world. Meantime popular notions of government, and gov- ernments themselves, were in the midst of a process of evolution which tended to carry them somewhat away from the influence of economic theory, even if that theory had remained the same. The judiciary, the legislature, and the administration were subject each of them to separate influences which made them less ready to rely on the political economist for advice and guidance. 71 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN It might be thought that the judiciary, at any rate, would never have become independent of economic con- siderations ; for the scientific study of the law has had and still has a close affihation with the scientific study of pohtical economy. This affiliation between econom- ics and jurisprudence is manifest ahke in their data, in their methods, and their conclusions. The funda- mental datum of modern economics is property right. This is also the datum and starting-point of a large part of our legal reasoning. The method of the economist is a combination of the historical and the deductive. He studies the precedent by which property right has been established on the one hand, and deduces the con- sequences arising from such property rights on the other hand. This combination is also characteristic of the methods of the judiciary; the chief difference between economists and courts being that the economist considers how the individual judgment will act under the given conditions, while the court considers how the pubhc judgment will act. But this difference of standpoint ought not to lead to conflicting or even to inharmonious conclusions; for the economist shows over and over again how freedom of individual judgment in the pur- suit of its ends results in collective good, and the judi- ciary shows with equal force how the free activity of pubhc judgment, in the pursuit of its ends, leads to the highest measure of individual good. Finally, the char- acteristic conclusions and precepts of the modern pohti- cal economists are summed up in the two words " free competition ; " and this is no less characteristically the conclusion and precept of our law courts. In relying on competition to liberalize commercial practice, econo- mists and lawyers have gone hand in hand, sharing in tolerably equal measure the glory of habitual success 72 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS in its application and the odium of occasional error in its misapplication. But economics and law have to some degree parted company; not so much in hostility as in indifference, not so much in denying one another's conclusions as in isrnorinff them. In the earher times economists and jurists were both concerned to harmonize their conclu- sions with those of pohtical ethics, and each science was thus brought into vital connection with the other. But just as economics gradually assumed the character of a science or discipline by itself, based upon the action of each individual in deciding what was for his own utility — and making this exercise of individual judgment an absolute fact if not an absolute right; so jurispru- dence at almost the same time became an equally ab- solute science, based upon the actions of a public wiU, the judgments of a sovereign who allowed no control except that which his own pleasure deigned to impose. Tliis doctrine of sovereignty as a basis of jurisprudence has a history closely parallel to that of the doctrine of utility as a basis of economics. Until the end of the eighteenth century the authority of the law was based upon the supposition of a social compact. People obeyed the govermnent because the government ren- dered certain services to the people. That such a com- pact or contract ever existed historically the leading exponents of the theory did not believe or even pretend to believe. Rousseau himself explicitly says that it makes no difference with his social contract theory, whether it had any historical basis or not. It was an assumption used to give vitality and concreteness in the conceptions of that natural justice to which eigh- teenth-century writers held that law must conform. Hobbes and Locke and Blackstone and Rousseau, with 73 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN all their wide divergences of opinion on individual points, were united in holding to this theory of a compact. Hobbes might use it to deny the right of revolution, Locke to prove that same right ; Blackstone might use it as a conservative force, Rousseau as a destructive one. But absolutist and revolutionist, conservative and radical, all had before them the conception of a higher law of political ethics, limiting the action of the courts, just as the economists of the same period held to a similar conception limiting the economic action of the individual. It was reserved for Bentham to deal the death-blow to this theory ; to show not only that the social compact had no foundation in history — which was an easy enough task, because nobody really thought it had — but also no foundation in logic ; to insist that so-called natural law was no law at all; that law was what the courts said, just because the courts chose to say it and for no other reason whatever. When a cer- tain court objected to Daniel Webster's logic, " this is not law," "it was law until your honor spoke," was the historic reply. Of the practical gain in clearness of legal decisions resulting from the acceptance of the theories of Bentham there can be no dispute ; but it was a gain which has been purchased at a very serious cost. The courts have been estopped from talking no small amount of non- sense; but they have also lost no small part of their educational influence which they had under the old system. For Bentham may be said to have overthrown a theory which was historically false and prophetically true, and substituted one which was historically true and prophetically false. Things have been law, not be- cause they were just or even logical, but because the courts enunciated them. But it is safe to prophesy that 74 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS this state of things will continue only so long as the courts are respected by the public as being at once just and logical. It is right as well as convenient for the lawyer to assume that whatever the courts command will be law; but only because the courts show them- selves clearer-sighted than the body of the nation. The authority of the English courts, while nominally derived from the crown, has been practically derived from their own good sense and progressiveness. A theory which leads them to rely more on precedent and less on good sense and progressiveness, while it may prevent the more commonplace judges from making an exhibition of them- selves, nevertheless offers a serious bar to the develop- ment of legal authority to meet new circumstances and new emergencies; not to speak of the possibility that it may at times menace the general respect for the judi- ciary and general authority of the law as a whole. As a matter of fact, the courts have made themselves in- dependent of the help of the economists, by withdraw- ing from the consideration of those distinctively modern problems where precedent furnishes no clear guide for action. In making the corpus juris clearer and more consistent with itself, it would seem to a layman as if the courts have sometimes fallen short of meeting the needs of growing industrial communities. Contrast the rapid progress of English law down to the middle of the last century in all economic matters, where judges were among the most enlightened of reformers, with its extremely slow development in the face of modern con- ditions. Take the subject of taxation. Have judicial decisions adapted themselves to facts ? No. They are based on assumptions as to the possibihty of assessment of personal property which may have been approximately true in the eighteenth century, but which are totally 75 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN false in the nineteenth. The courts, while protesting against unequal taxation, nevertheless refuse to look at the cliief practical source of inequality, that source not having been a thing of great importance a hundred years ago. Or take the matter of transportation. For a generation and more our courts insisted on applying to the railroad the precedents derived from the highway. It is not so very many years since they refused to enter upon the most important of all railroad rate evils, the evil of discrimination, — saying explicitly that if one man's rate was reasonable in itseK it was irrelevant to inquire whether another man was charged a lower rate. Such instances of lack of attention to modern facts might be multiphed indefinitely ; but these are enough to show the bad effect of allowing crude attention to axioms and precedents to take the place of intelHgent discussion of economic effects. It is a grave misfor- tune for the public when the legal theory of sovereignty of the court and the economic theory of sovereignty of the individual result in separating from one another and from the needs of practical pohtics two sciences whose best work has been done hand in hand with each other, and in the most sedulous application to those needs. The consequences of this separation have been so serious that efforts have been made to reintroduce a con- nection by means of " commissions " of various forms ; railroad commissions, tax commissions, labor commis- sions, and an indefinite number of others. Such bodies, it is thought, will, like the courts, represent pubhc opinion ; but unlike the courts they will be possessed of technical knowledge which will enable them to look for- ward to the future and not merely backward at the past. On the work of these commissions as a whole, there is no need of passing judgment or balancing their good 76 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS and their evil. Suffice it to say that they have too often proved a wholly extraneous element in the de- velopment of the law, and that in assuming quasi- judicial functions they have antagonized the courts instead of helping them. As a matter of constitutional law, the attempt to supplement courts by commissions, involving as it does a separation of the progressive from the conservative, of the technically instructed from the legally instructed, is questionable in principle and hkely to produce conflicts in practice. As a matter of politi- cal experience, I think it is safe to say that technically trained commissions have proved themselves more valu- able as assistants to the legislature or the administration than as supplements to the activity of the courts. But why did not this conservatism of the judiciary give the economists all the greater opportunity to influ- ence the legislature, either directly or indirectly? If the courts became the exponents of precedent, why could not ParUaments, with the assistance of just such com- missions as have been described, be the champions of progress? Was there not here a field for the activity of economic experts who, seeing farther than their fel- lows, could give advice which should be followed and should stand ? As economists lost the chance to influ- ence judicial decisions, were they not face to face with a wider field for influencino: legislative debates ? For the better part of a century this possibihty existed. In fact it may be said to have lasted nearly as long as legislative debate itself lasted. But the days of legisla- tive debate are numbered, if they are not already ended. Congresses and ParUaments have been compelled to abandon their watchword of free speech, and to adopt in one form or another the principle of closure. The system of representative government, devised originally 77 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN as a check upon the executive, and admirable as a means for giving free discussion to measures of a more or less independent administration, has not proved equally suc- cessful as a means of shaping actual business in its initiatory stages. "Armies," says Macaulay, "have won victories under bad generals, but no army ever won a victory under a debating society." For the practical conduct of public business the legislature is at once an unwieldy and an irresponsible body. It is so, in the first place, on account of its numbers. When the object of a Parhament was to form and impress public opinion, a large body of members was indispensable ; but when the object is to manage the actual business of government intelligently, numbers are a hindrance rather than a help. The difficulty is heightened by the prevalence of the bicameral system. When the object was the creation of pubHc sentiment, two houses secured twice as much pubhcity as one ; but when the object is despatch of pub- he business, two houses result in divided responsibility, with all the consequent delay and chicane. And finally, the system of district representation, at first admirable as a means of giving influence to all the different sections of the community, becomes under present conditions a positive disadvantage. In the creation of public senti- ment, it gave us exchange of opinions ; in the despatch of pubhc business it means exchange of favors. Instead of co-operation in the general interests we have log-rolhng for particular interests. Under the current system of poHtical ethics there is in fact a direct antagonism between the theory of economics and the practical working of representative government. The economist shows how largely the independent action of the parts may be made to conduce to the collective good of the whole. The practical working of representative govern- 78 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS ment, making each member primarily responsible to his district — or one might better say to the members of his own party in his district — means that the collective ac- tion of the whole is made a tool to subserve the sepa- rate wants of the parts, even though the satisfaction of those wants may antagonize the general interest of the nation. The history of every tariff bill and of every river and harbor bill affords illustrations of this ten- dency of our representative system. The economist is at a disadvantage in influencing members of the legisla- ture, because his ends are different from theirs. He is I trying to pursue collective interests ; they are trying — / and under the existing condition of things, necessarily trying — to balance, to compromise, or in some fashion to reconcile divergent ones. This difference of aims, which puts the economist at a disadvantage in deahng with the legislature, ought apparently to put him at a corresponding advantage in advising the executive. For the head of the executive department, be he wise or unwise, disinterested or self- seeking, nevertheless regards himself as a representative of the whole people rather than of small sections of the people. It would seem that such an executive, on whom the nation relies for progress in the face of judicial conservatism and for wise collective action in the face of legislative particularism, would feel more than ever the need of advice from trained economists to guide him in the work of administration. That such need exists and is felt is unquestionably true; and where the administration has power to carry out a poHcy of its own the advice of economic experts is habitually sought and frequently followed. But it is not always the case that the administration has this power to carry out a policy of its own. For centuries 79 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN we have been busy devising constitutional checks of the royal prerogative. We have had so much reason to fear usurpations of power on the part of the executive, that we have not left him with that modicum of power which is needed for good government. If he has to face an adverse majority in the legislature, he is tied hand and foot. Even when his own party is in con- trol he must consult the representatives of the various districts and pay the price which they exact for sup- porting his measures ; and he is too often reduced to the yet more questionable expedient of seeking assurance of his renomination and re-election in order to have time to give his policy a fair trial. Under such circumstances he is repeatedly compelled to be a politician first and a statesman afterward. However much he may desire the advice of economists and even avail liimself of their services, he is often divested of the power to utilize them; and it too frequently happens that the econo- mists, in their encouragement of independent voting on each national issue as it arises, deprive themselves of that influence within the party councils which is neces- sary for carrying any issue whatsoever to its logical test and conclusion. But things are by no means as bad as they recently have been. On the contrary, if we compare the condi- tions of to-day with those of twenty years ago, we see in some places a very marked increase of economic meth- ods and economic influence in the work of government. Particularly true is this in municipal affairs. It was there that the need for a good business administration came most directly home to the citizens. It is there that councilmen and aldermen have suffered restrictions of their power and that real authority has been given to tlie executive. It is there that the credit for good business 80 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS management and the discredit for bad business manage- ment can be most clearly brought home to the offi- cial with whom it belongs. It is there, also, that the advice of economic experts counts for most. It is not an accident that so much of the careful study of prob- lems of finance and administration is to-day dealing with matters of municipal government ; it is a consequence of that increased centrahzation of administrative power which gives the expert a fair chance. But the reform is not hkely to stop at that point. Whatever we may think of imperialism as a sentiment or of national expan- sion as a policy — and I was one of those who looked upon their hurried adoption with regret — these are things to which we are already committed. This policy brings new problems of administration upon us as a nation, and renders it more necessary than before to study the art of national govermnent. When we were only governing ourselves we could leave Congress to make what laws it pleased, and trust to the good sense and poHtical education of the American people to pre- vent irreparable damage. But we now have to deal with peoples who have not this good sense and this pohtical education. More than that, we have to deal with them in the sight of all the world, and in the face of hostile powers who will be only too ready to make our mis- government a pretext for interference. We can no longer content ourselves with the laxness of method wliich has characterized our dealings with the inhabitants of our western territories. The need of an efficient army will of itself make it nec- essary to give more independence to the administration and more opportunity to its expert advisers. The need for a govenunent of our new colonies which shall recog- nize the principle of trusteeship rather than of spoliation 6 81 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN must conduce yet more strongly toward the same results. The need of increased public revenue to meet our larger administrative expenditures will render it indispensable to subordinate the demands of the several districts to the general necessities of the country. With no colonies and a small army we could do what we pleased with our revenue bills. With larger possessions and larger neces- sities for defence, they must be framed by a responsible administration on a sound economic basis. Just how this change of governmental methods will come about no one can venture to predict. That we shall adopt the EngHsh system of cabinet responsibihty seems unlikely; but that we shall adopt some system which will cause the different branches of our govern- ment to operate harmoniously is a foregone conclusion. The alternative is national disgrace, if not national ruin. Here is the opportunity for the younger economists of the country. If their study is worth anything it will give them a broader range of data on which to work and a clearer perception of consequences for the future. It will put them in a position of advantage in giving advice. The more responsible the government the more certain is it to take such advice. I do not say that the oppor- tunity to become advisers and leaders of national pohcy should be sought by economists as their sole duty, or to the neglect of their other pubHc responsibilities. I do not undervalue for a moment the importance of economic theory. I have the highest conception of the work of our economists as teachers of science. But I beheve that their largest opportunity in the immediate future lies not in theories but in practice, not with students but with statesmen, not in the education of individual citizens, however widespread and salutary, but in the leadership of an organized body pohtic. 82 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY IN" the preceding paper, attention was called to the fact that economists do not now exert in the world of poHtics and legislation that influence which ought prop- erly to belong to them ; and certain means were indi- cated, which, if used, would make their poHtical power greater than it is at present. With regard to the fact of inadequate influence, there is Uttle room for difference of opinion. The economists' lack of touch with the practical affairs of government is universally felt. But with regard to the means by which they can recover this touch, now so nearly lost, there is far more diversity of view. Not a few of our American economists hold different, and to some degree antagonistic, ideas with regard to the means to be pursued in order to in- crease the influence of economic science on modern pohtical life. The present paper is an attempt to weigh, as carefully as possible, these divergent views with regard to the methods which " the scholar in pohtics " may properly pursue. It is an endeavor to expand more fully the argument on those points in the previous dis- cussion where the members of the American Economic Association have felt themselves most doubtful. It has been well said that modern political economy contains two distinct parts, — often inextricably inter- mingled in fact, yet always separate in principle, — 83 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN a theory of distribution and a theory of prosperity. The theory of distribution shows how the public wealth is divided among the different members of the commun- ity. It shows the effects of a system of laws or a group of commercial conditions on the relative well-being of the different classes concerned. It tries to predict how changes in those laws or conditions will increase the material comfort of some individuals and diminish that of others. The theory of prosperity, on the other hand, is occupied primarily with the good or evil of the nation as a whole. It deals with aggregate results rather than with individual ones, and concerns itself with the sepa- rate parts only as they must be studied in order to understand this aggregate effect. The distinction between these two sets of theories is not quite the same as that between " static " and " dy- namic " economics of which we now hear so much. It more nearly coincides with the old antithesis between deductive and historical schools of economic study. It may perhaps fairly be said to be an accurate statement of a distinction for wliich the earlier members of the his- torical school were feeling, but which they failed to grasp or formulate in precise fashion, — a failure which reacted seriously upon the influence of this school in matters of economic controversy. Be this as it may, the distinction is a real and permanent one. Men may agree absolutely in their theories of distribution and disagree toto ccelo in their theories of prosperity. Marx in his theory of dis- tribution followed Ricardo implicitly; in liis theory of prosperity he differed from him at every point. It was just because he accepted so thoroughly one part of the Ricardian economics that he was able to dissent so con- sistently from the other, with a directness of opposition born of mutual understanding. It was because each 84 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY assumed so fully the existence of free competition, and carried out that assumption so completely to certain of its logical consequences, that this same power became a demigod to the one and a demon to the other. In the words of the poet: — " Both read the same books, day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white." As far as a man's political economy takes the form of a theory of distribution, it is not sure to be very closely connected with his ethical principles, or even with his pohtical ones. In framing such a theory he is occupied with tracing consequences from observed facts. His political antecedents or his ethical prepossessions may lead Imn to observe some facts more closely than others, or to examine one part of his chain of reasoning more critically than another part. But these variations, as far as they exist, are errors, even from the man's own standpomt, — eri'ors which he is interested in correcting as soon as they can be brought clearly home to him. He can say, in the words of Dunoyer, " Je n'impose rien, je ne propose meme rien : f expose," — I offer neither un- positions nor propositions, but expositions. Nor do his theories of distribution modify his ethics much more than liis ethics modify his theories of distribution ; ex- cept, perhaps, so far as the habitual assumption of a set of facts and laws leads to the habitual assumption of the Tightness of those laws, morally as well as intellectually. On the other hand, a man's theory of prosperity is closely interwoven with his theories of ethics and of politics. Moral and political standards are a determin- ing element in our judgment as to whether a nation's aggregate condition is good or bad. The habit of mak- ing historical generalizations as to national welfare has very important effects upon our moral and political judg- S5 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN ments as to the ordinary affairs of life. It is at this point that the interaction between economics and poli- tics, whether by way of mutual aid or mutual criticism, is most constant. Only occasionally and incidentally do our theories of distribution lead us to intervene in political affairs by showing that certain lines of legis- lation produce different results from those which are contemplated. Daily and hourly does our theory of prosperity lead us to such intervention, when we believe that the aims of a certain group of moralists or pohti- cians are destructive to the well-being of the nation as a whole. Just at this point, where the possibility of influence is greatest, the difficulty which meets the economist who strives to maintain a dispassionate and critical atti- tude is also keenest. In his theory of distribution he can readily remain a passive observer of facts. He can measure and weigh the results of competition, as he can measure and weigh the results of gravitation or of bio- logical selection ; and he can guard himself against error in fact or deduction by the same methods which are used by the physicist or the biologist for the same purpose. But when he comes to measure the aggregate merit of the total result, he has a different task and a far harder one. It was the underlying assumption of the preceding paper that even in this hard task the scientific knowl- edge possessed by the economist enables him to come nearer to its fulfilment than can his fellow members of the community; that in this field of exceptional doubt he should undertake to realize the noblest ideals as a scientific man who stands above the clouds of preju- dice, and therefore sees farther than those about him ; that it is his high mission to be the representative and ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY the champion of the permanent interests of the whole community, in the face of conflicting claims from repre- sentatives of temporary or partial ones. This view of the mission and the duties of the politi- cal economist has been challenged on three grounds : as bad psychology, bad politics, and bad ethics. "We are told, in the first place, as a matter of practical psychology, that no man can make his judgment as to national well-bemg independent of his social antecedents and his ethical training. If he has grown up among soldiers, he will have one set of standards ; if he has grown up among business men, he will have a second; if he has grown up among literary men, he will have a third ; if he has grown up among laborers, he will have a fourth. Strive as he may to dissociate himself from effects of education and environment, he can at best be but partially successful. His political vision suffers not only from near-sightedness, but from astigmatism. The former he may perhaps correct ; no power on earth can enable him to correct the latter, or even to gain an objective estimate of its influence upon his observations. Robert Malthus was a disinterested man, and so was Henry George ; yet in neither case was such disin- terestedness sufficient to protect them from obliquities of moral vision which led to diametrically opposite con- clusions as to the conditions of public prosperity. A man may have the intention to be impartial, and may be perfectly candid in the belief that he has carried out this intention; but that only makes matters worse, because this delusion prevents him from recognizing the need of applying outside correctives to his judg- ment, and often leads him to impugn the fairness of anybody else who suggests such correctives. Why not, under these circumstances, admit freely the difficulty 87 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN under which we labor in making objective judgments? Why not recognize from the first that each of us repre- sents a locality or a class, and that the moral judgment of each observer is sure to be affected and to some degree distorted by his own personal prepossessions? Such a course, frankly adopted, its advocates claim, will keep the bad men from hypocrisy, the good men from self-deception, and the large number of men who are neither very good nor very bad from that mixture of hypocrisy and self-deception which contrives to com- bine all the evils of them both. We are told, in the second place, as a wholly inde- pendent hne of argument, that even if an economist possessed rare mental and moral quahties like those of John Stuart Mill, which enabled him to sympathize with all classes, he ought nevertheless, as a matter of practi- cal politics, to identify his work with the aspirations of some one class distinctively. The assumption by an economist that he represents the total interest of the community rather than the interest of one part or group in that community exposes him to the suspicion of being either a pharisee or a hypocrite, — either a man who over-estimates his own righteousness, or one who pre- tends to a righteousness which he does not possess. If either of these titles is a just one, it is fatal to a man's success as a pohtical reformer. If it is once suspected to be just, it will prove a heavy weight around his neck. Even if a man believes himself to be wholly free from either hypocrisy or pharisaism, it is a wise measure for him to keep out of the company of hypocrites and phari- sees. He will be a more efficient reformer if he claims a little less for liis mission and can get those lesser claims recognized, than if he claims everything and gets no recognition at all. S8 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY We are further told that whether he be considered a hypocrite or not, he will be entitled a visionary, and justly so. The general pubUc whose interests he repre- sents is not a working pohtical force. Its wants are so vague and so remote that there is no means of getting them recognized in the concrete work of legislation and of government. You must appeal to locahties and to classes. Locahties have their representatives, classes have their organs. Each locality and each class has its pubhc sentiment, which in one way or another is a hving power in pohtics. This existence of a coherent pubhc opinion and of a definite interest is a necessary condition for the social reformer who would be more than a pure theorist. Current opinion is liis material, class interest is his tool. No man, however great, can hope to accom- plish his results with neither tools nor materials ready to his hand. Even if you beheve yourself wholly dis- interested you must appeal to classes and secure the partial good wliich is attainable, rather than aim at the greater good which you are from the outset fated to miss. They tell us further that this view of the matter represents not only practical pohtics but practical ethics. Life in a modern free community is an interaction and interplay between the several members of that commun- ity. Each individual is working for ends of his own, distmct from those of other individuals. Each class has standards and ideals of its own, differing from those of other classes. Civil Uberty is but a recogni- tion of these differences, — permission to the various members of the state to pursue their own several ends under the protection of a common law. According to this view, the man who would sink the interest of a class in a supposed general public interest is but depriv- 89 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN ing that class of its own natural safeguard in the struggle for existence. If it works for itself, it gets what it can — sometimes more than it ought, sometimes less than it ought; but in a reasonably well-ordered civil society it takes its chances with the others. If, on the other hand, a single group, in its zeal for the general good, omits to pursue its own group interest, it causes a want of balance between the parts, upsets the conditions of the game, and contributes rather to its own annihilation than to the predominance of those conceptions with which it has identified itself. Let us have fair play; let us have a fair chance for conflicting views to struggle one with another, as a condition of progress for the whole society. This is the cry among no small number of those who think they have studied the conditions of modern prog- ress most carefully. Widespread and plausible as are some of these views, I desire to take fundamental issue with those who sup- port them. The system of political ethics just outlined is an outgrowth of our experience with two important insti- tutions, — competition and representative government. Competition has led people to see how frequently the self-interest of the individual, when given free play, con- duces to the general advance of the public. Represen- tative government has shown how a full expression of opinion by those who speak for the several parts or classes in the community can be made to contribute to an advance which inures to the advantage of all parts and all classes together. In spite of all these facts, I be- lieve that the theory of struggle and compromise as a nor- mal means of progress needs restatement ; and that the man who looks below the surface in the study of these two institutions will be brought to conclusions directly 90 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY opposite from those which prevail in so much of the cur- rent tliought of the world to-day. Does the history of competition give ground for the view that a struggle between different parts for their class interests works out an economic harmony through- out the nation ? Not at all. It shows, on the contrary, that struggles within each class, antagonistic for the mo- ment to the apparent interests of that class, so conduce to the interest of many other parts of the body politic as to promise a generally beneficent result. No economist of any reputation would hold for a moment that an economic conflict necessarily works out a just relation between the conflicting parties. What the champion of competition holds is rather that this conflict under proper conditions may become a means of affording pro- tection and advantage to outsiders. It is not a contest between classes, but a contest within classes, which he seeks to perpetuate ; and he would perpetuate it because he can prove, or thinks that he can prove, that it con- duces to a common interest more wide and more lasting than those which the individual classes, if organized into trusts or trades unions, would seek to pursue. It is popularly said that competition is only the form which the struggle for existence takes in modern civil- ized society. This is at once true and false, — true in form, false in the suggestions to which it gives rise. The fact is that modern civilized communities have so regulated the struggles for existence that they tend on the whole to the benefit of third parties rather than to their detriment. Two cats struggle to eat the same bird ; two bosses compete to employ the same workman. From the standpoint of the bosses, the transaction bears some analogy to the case of the cats. From the standpoint of th6 workman, the transaction bears no analogy what- 91 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN ever to the case of the bird. The more cats there are the worse for the bird, as well as for the cats ; the more bosses there are the worse for the bosses, but the better for the workman. When Adam Smith showed the efficiency of competition as a means of regulating price and of increasing useful production, he furnished a powerful defence for the existing social order. He can- not, however, for that reason, be fairly charged with having been an advocate of the interests of the property owner. The weight and force of his reasoning lay in the fact that he showed the beneficent effects of such free competition of property owners upon all people, whether they owned property or not. He may have exaggerated those good effects and underrated the evils by which they were accompanied. This is a point which I shall not now discuss. But his permanent and deci- sive influence as a social reformer lay not in his identi- fication of the views or interests of any class, but in Ms discovery of a means for preventing the umiecessary development of class antagonisms. The success of com- petition, far from warranting us in the adoption of a system of political morality and a theory of political progress based on advocacy of class interests, proves rather the advantage and even the necessity of sub- ordinating those interests to a "wider common good. With the institution of representative government the case is somewhat different. Here we have a public organization of localities and classes, and a recognition of such classes in the actual work of government. It would therefore seem as if the success of this system were a powerful argument on the side of that theory of politics and of ethics which regards the good of the whole community as best to be reached by a compromise between the aims of different sections of the community. 92 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY But a profounder study of constitutional history leads to an opposite conclusion. It shows that parliaments and congresses, in the really great periods of their his- tory, have been valuable, not as a field of compromise between local interests, but of information as to general ones ; not for the consummation of private bargains but for the creation of pubUc spirit. Down to the end of the last century the Enghsh ParHament, as its name imphed, was essentially a place for discussion. Representatives from different locaUties met at Westminster to interchange views as to the state of the nation. Each member reported to tlie others the feeUngs and wants of his locahty; each received from his feUow members enlightened views as to the condi- tion of the country as a whole, which he was able to report at home and make the basis of practical action in his section of the community. The essential function of the early parUaments was the creation of a united pubhc sentiment. They roused the interest of English gentlemen outside of the sphere of their petty local ex- igencies, and enabled them, by common action, to resist the extensions of the royal prerogative to which, in the absence of such common action, they must separately have fallen victims. It is true that the Houses of Par- liament had large functions in addition to this ; but they all grouped themselves round tliis central work. Even the right of the Commons to originate measures of taxa- tion, so sedulously attacked by the kings, and so jeal- ously guarded by parliaments, had its chief importance not as a means of avoiding the imposition of burdens upon the people, but as a means of compelling the monarcli to call representatives of different parts of the people together for the authoritative presentation of popular opinion. At the close of the last century, when 93 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN other countries adopted institutions modelled on tlie English Parliament, it was intended that they should preserve this same function as debating bodies ; and the most glorious pages in the history of the United States Congress are those in which pubhc opinion was formed and pubhc spirit roused by speeches of such men as "Webster and Clay. Just as in the sphere of commerce competition enabled members of the different parts of the business community to get something wider than a class view point and compelled them to work to a com- mon end, so in the sphere of pohtics did representative government enable and compel members of" the differ- • ent geographical sections to get something wider than the local view point, and to see what was the general sentiment of the nation of which they formed a part. But in the course of the present century our repre- sentative assembhes have ceased to be places for debate. The extension of telegraph and postal service has given the different parts of the community means of informa- tion more rapid, although in some respects perhaps less trustworthy, than that which was furnished by their congressional representatives in the olden time. The press has taken the place of the legislature as a forum for the formation of pubhc sentiment. Parhaments and congresses have become bodies for the makmg of laws rather than for the making of opinions. That tliis change has been accompanied by a loss in salutary influence of legislative bodies is, I tliink, unquestionable. No longer do the members strive to impress their several convic- tions on the whole body of which they form a part ; they strive rather to form a compromise in wliich the inter- ests of the part which they represent shall have ade- quate recognition. This substitution of compromise for conviction as the ideal of legislative activity is perhaps 94 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY the greatest and most pervasive evil under which our pohtical machinery suffers. It shows its effect in the demorahzing principle that the representative should be guided in his utterances and his votes by the opinions of liis constituents, rather than by his own, — a principle which, in spite of all protests, has come to be generally accepted as a datum of practical politics. It deprives the member of the legislature of the educational influ- ence incident to his position. It makes him an agent not only of his district, but of his party within his dis- trict. It manifests its results in the debates on appro- priation bills, where the members who stand up for the general interest of the treasury are increasingly rare, and those who make claims for the expenditure of money on behalf of their locahties — and often on behalf of private interests witliin their localities — become constantly louder. It shows itself even in general leg- islation, where the character of modern statutes as a patchwork of private demands has become only too notorious. AU this has gone so far as to produce a change in the public estimate of parliamentary bodies. The glorifica- tion or idealization of the legislature, so common in gen- erations immediately gone by, is now rapidly passing away. In matters of municipal government we are lessening the appHcation of the representative system — giving more power to the mayor and those persons appointed by the mayor, and less to the representatives of the several districts; because, "svith the amount of business that is done in the ordinary municipality, we cannot afford to let the general interests of the whole be jeopardized in behalf of the several parts. The same tendency shows itself in connection with state legisla- tures, whose sessions are now being made less frequent, 95 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN and whose sphere of action is being narrowed by consti- tutions and other instruments providing for a reference of all important laws to the direct vote of the people. It is not necessary for the purpose of this argument to say whether tliis change be an improvement or not ; it is at any rate a significant sign of the trend of the times. The abandomnent of the duty of debate as to the com- mon interest, and the substitution of the work of nego- tiation as to the private and partisan interests of the several districts, have tended to convert the representa- tive assembly from an object of pubUc confidence to one of public distrust. The causes wliich have prevented competition in busi- ness and representative government in pohtics from fully safeguarding the interests of the community in the days just gone by are Hkely to be accentuated in the near future. Improvements in machinery and in business organiza- tion during recent years have developed to such an ex- tent that competition, in the old sense, is in many lines a thing of the past. It can no longer be utihzed with- out sacrifice of public as well as private economy. We cannot have parallel railroads or competing water-works without a loss, either from increased expense of plant or diminished convenience in service. We cannot, in a great many lines of manufacture, have competition as we had it twenty-five years ago, without disastrous fluctuations in price and the danger of commercial crises due to irreg- ular investments of capital. AH these facts are so famiUar at the present day that it is useless to enlarge upon them. Business has become a trust, in a sense far different from that which the accidental application of this word has carried with it, — a thing involving a dele- gation of power by the pubhc to the hands of a few men; 96 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY a delegation of power which these men can misuse to the detriment of others without being immediately over- taken by any legal or commercial penalty. That they will themselves suffer in the long run from such misuse of powers intrusted, is very probably true; but tliis adverse effect is so remote and obscure that we cannot rely upon it as a protection to commercial society in the way that we could rely on every-day competition in the smaller and more individualized business of fifty years ago. The correctives to the abuse of individual selfishness in the commercial world to-day are so much less immediate and automatic than they once were that very few persons now preach unlimited competition as a means of promoting the general good. So marked, indeed, is this reaction that there is danger of our having too httle confidence in individual initiative in the imme- diate future, and of regulating these trusts by an exer- cise of pubHc authority which may prove in the long run less wise than private enterprise itself. A similar change is taking place in matters pohtical. Our municipahties are giving examples of combined action in the way of pubhc works on a scale wliich would have been regarded as unpossible a century ago. Our country as a whole is undertaking yet larger combina- tions in the shape of colonial empire. What will be the ultimate result of this last change of national character it is far too early to predict. But one thing is certain. It will necessarily be accompanied by a recognition of the fact that pubhc office is a pubhc trust more fully than it has been recognized in the past. A federation of states of approximately equal strength may govern one another on a principle of separate pursuit of selfish interests; and although there will be some aggregate loss through the preference of local interests to general ones, there is 7 97 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN likely to be at least a relative fairness when each mem- ber of the federation is strong enough to secure its own share of the plunder, and to protect itself from undue imposition. But when we come to administer the affairs of a weaker nation to which we do not and cannot give pohtical autonomy, the evils of the old system become so obvious and the need of ideals in politics becomes so exacting, that even those who in their past public life have scoffed at the conception of a higher law than their own selfishness are, under the new conditions, compelled by very shame to appeal to such a higher law. The more completely our undertakings, whether private or public, industrial or pohtical, take the character of trusts, the more impossible does it become for those who are placed in authority to represent personal or class interests with- out gross violation of what we, in our every-day life, recognize as fundamental dictates of sympathy or of justice. If it were true that each man's mental horizon were bounded by his class interests ; if the man who claimed to look beyond them were sure to be regarded as a visionary or a hypocrite; if we were constitutionally inaccessible to any political motives higher than those of rational egoism, — this would simply mean that we were fundamentally unfit for the task that is before us. It would mean that the trusts which were placed in the hands of our citizens by the new conditions of business and of pohtics were of a kind which we could not fulfil. It would indicate that the largeness of our problems would ruin us morally and politically, as Rome was ruined by her imperial problems two thousand years ago. But I have faith to beHeve that this is not the fate marked out for us to-day. I believe that the Amer- ican, people and the modern civihzed world in general 98 ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLITICAL MORALITY will solve these problems, as they have solved other problems which have come up in the successive phases of their history ; that we shall meet the new collective needs of industry and government with a true collectiv- ism of spirit and purpose. Not with that superficial collectivism or sociahsm which, hke the individualism which it strives to supersede, often makes too much of mere poHtical machinery, and believes that men are to be saved by their institutions rather than their charac- ters ; but with a public spirit which demands, as a part of the national ethics, that men shall shape their course on the basis of conviction rather than of compromise, and that pubhc discussion shall look toward a common understanding rather than a bargain. Because the poht- ical and commercial methods of the past have led to compromise rather than conviction, or because the suc- cessful man of affairs must be ready to compromise when he fails to convince, let us not say that all politics and all commerce is but a tissue of compromises, and that a political or commercial science which pretends to be something broader and better than this is an illusion. Let us as economists take the opportunity that Hes before us, in the face of new conditions for whose treat- ment the old methods are proving themselves inadequate. Let us employ our understanding with regard to public needs as a means of evoking public spirit. Let us use whatever special knowledge we have with all the breadth of purpose which it is in our power to attain, and make ourselves, as becomes men of science, representatives of nothing less than the whole truth. L.ofC. 99 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE During the last hundred years there has been a dis- tinct progress in the study of legal and political institu- tions. The methods of investigation have become more scientific, the results more sound and more permanent. But in the study of moral sentiments, and of the ethical framework of society, the advance has been far less marked. The ethical science of to-day, in its assump- tions and its processes, bears a strong resemblance to the pohtical science of a century ago. It is the aim of these papers to apply to the investigation of morals those modes of analysis which have proved most fruitful in the study of political institutions ; and to see whether the advance in method which has actually been accomplished in the study of politics cannot be achieved in ethics also. Down to the beginning of the present century, the students of political science were pretty sharply divided into two classes. One group started from the assump- tion that there must be somewhere a sovereign unlimited in authority. Another, and in the eighteenth century a more influential group, started from the assumption of an absolute right of individual liberty. Each con- ception was abstract and metaphysical rather than his- torical. For the time being, the representatives of liberty made more impression than the representatives of sov- ereignty, because practical men in the eighteenth century 100 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE were resisting the abuse of authority on the part of absolute monarchs, and were quite ready to accept any theory of politics which seemed to justify such resist- ance. The signers of the Declaration of Independence based their theories on their practice, not their practice on their theories. They assumed that all men had equal and inahenable rights to hfe, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ; but they would have been far from ready to push this assumption to the logical conclusion which tlie anarchist would draw from it. They believed in liberty, because more liberty, under the existing conditions, seemed a desirable tiling, and absolute sovereignty an undesirable one; not because they were prepared to carry their avowed principle to its extreme development. In the same way those who were most vigorous in asserting the centraHzed authority of a sovereign were governed by practical considerations in so doing. When Bentham averred that law was the expression of a sov- ereign will, and that whatever the sovereign commanded was law, it was because he saw the confusion wliich would result if the judges attempted to take any other ground.^ He rejected doctrines of liberty and natural rights, because doctrines of liberty and of natural rights produced bad legal decisions. Bentham himself was anything but a partisan of absolute monarchy. He recognized clearly enough that, even in states where the sovereign might theoretically command anytliing he pleased, such an exercise of power would in practice often produce a revolution.^ Bentham's fault lay not ^ The Fragment on Government was an answer to certain theories broadly stated by Blackstone, and concerned itself directly with the im- possibility of carrying out those theories in judicial practice. 2 Bentham failed to recognize that nullification, rather than revolution, is the practical check on the power of the sovereign, and that the habitual obedience to a determinate superior, of which he has so much to say, is 101 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN in his views, but in his method. He formulated a meta- physical standard of sovereignty wliich was useful for certain purposes ; but he was unable so to set the terms of that standard as to avoid its apphcation in cases where it was worse than useless.^ There was one man in the eighteenth century who held nineteenth century views on the relation of liberty and law. This was Edmund Burke. But even in the case of Burke, these views were the result of intuition rather than of reasoned judgment. They appear in the form of flashes of insight, and not as a consistent scien- tific system.^ It was left for John Stuart Mill to lay the groundwork for the development of such a system. It was left for writers like Morley, who combined the views of Darwin with the political knowledge of Mill, to carry this development to its logical conclusion. To them, and to the whole school of modern historical investigators, liberty and sovereignty are not incom- patible. To such men, hberty is not a mere postulate of logic, nor an assumed state of nature, but a political an obedience within limits. If the sovereign transgresses these limits, " passive resistance " follows ; and this phrase, however much ridiculed by a certain school of jurists, marks a historical fact of the utmost im- portance. Compare A. L. Lowell on The Limits of Sovereignty, Essays on Government, pp. 189-222. 1 Actually, Benthara did a great deal to prevent his legal system from being carried to dangerous extremes. His doctrine of utilitarianism taught men to judge of the law without reference to what the sovereign had commanded. Sir Erederick Pollock, in his History of the Science oj Politics, has pointed out that the English doctrine of absolute sovereignty is greatly modified by the English practice of resisting a policeman, and that on the continent of Europe, where their theories are less absolute but their policemen more so, the net result is much less favorable to free development than in England. 2 It is a great merit of John Morley to have brought out these points in Burke's writings with a clearness which would probably have surprised Burke himself. 102 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE institution which forms part of a national life. They trace authority and liberty to one and the same cause, — the necessity of self-preservation for the social organ- ism. Authority exists because the peoples that recog- nized authority have lived, while the peoples that insisted on anarchy have perished. Liberty exists be- cause the peoples that allowed authority to be despotic perished from the rigidity of their political organism, while those who were able to find a place for individual freedom as a part of their scheme of authority learned to adapt themselves to new conditions, and continued to hve where the others died. It is a lesson of history that a nation must combine discipline and freedom in order to reach the plane of modern civilized life. Substitute moral authority for legal authority, private judgment for personal liberty, and it will not be hard to apply the parallel to ethics. Here too we find a conflict between the champions of an abstract moral sovereignty inherent in the church, and the champions of an equally abstract liberty of judgment inherent in the individual ; the latter being to-day stronger than the former, because the practical men of to-day want to do their thinking for themselves, instead of having others do it for them. Yet those who assert the right of private judgment as a principle, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred shrink back in horror from the moral anarchy which would be produced by its logical application. The theory of an absolute and unbounded right of private judgment, occa- sionally postulated by Protestants of every shade, but consistently carried out only by extremists like Pro- fessor Clifford, is in fact a purely abstract assumption, as unhistorical as Rousseau's natural right to liberty.^ ^ A curious example of inconsistency of political and ethical theory is furnished in the first six chapters of Austin's Jurisprudence, where an 103 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN There has never been a case where a large body of people really carried the postulates of Protestantism to their logical conclusion. The nearest approach to it perhaps occurred in Greece in the fourth century before the Cliristian era, at the very time of the downfall of the vitahty of Greece as a nation, and in intimate con- nection therewith. The right of private judgment can be admitted as the right of civil liberty can be admitted, as a privilege of those peoples and those individuals who will not exercise it destructively. But the man who makes it a starting-point in his logic has apparently no means of so limiting its application as to stop short of moral anarchism. On the other hand, those who make authority their starting-point or postulate have no means of stopping short of despotism nor of avoiding the practical conse- quences which despotism involves. The Catholic theory of ecclesiastical sovereignty may be more logical than the Protestant theory ; but in the attempt to apply that theory the Catholic church has repeatedly obstructed progress, moral as well as material. The efforts of enlightened Catholics in the direction of reform, whether successful or unsuccessful, have served to show how strong is the resistance to such reform which their philosophical system offers. Nor is the difficulty of combining authority and progress confined to those who have written and acted in connection with the Roman church. It is one which besets every thinker who lets the collective judgment of society overshadow that of the individual. It is one from which neither Hegel nor Comte could wholly free himself.^ Each of these absolute doctrine of sovereignty in law is brought into contrast with an equally absolute doctrine of private judgment in morals. ^ Compare Mill, The Positive Philosophy ofAuguste Comte, pp. 68-74. 104 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE writers was thoroughly imbued with the idea of prog- ress. Each sought to trace in history a continuous onward movement, and to make the presence or absence of such movement the standard of good or evil. Yet each was hampered by his own conception of authority as residing in society and not in the individual ; for the morals which society would at any given time prescribe were those of the present, not those of the future. The man who would be the instrument of moral good must be for the moment, according to the definition of Hegel, immoral in thought, if not in act. He could only help society to continue doing right by himself doing what society considered wrong. When Lassalle asked how there could be any reform without a revolution, he asked a question which, from the Hegelian standpoint, was unanswerable. Yet it is a question which every nation must answer both for its pohtics and for its morals. In the exist- ing stage of civilization it is inadmissible for a people either to be stationary or to be revolutionary. In the former case it will be left behind. In the latter case it will be wrecked. There must be some workable means of reconciling authority and liberty. It was because the English first wrought out a practical reconcihation of this sort, however unsystematic, tliat England took the lead in European political development. The application of Darwinian methods to the study of morals has opened the way to a theoretical solution on the same lines as the practical one. To a consistent Darwinian Lassalle's question presents no insuperable difficulty. To the Darwinian neither moral authority nor moral hberty is based on a metaphysical standard, but on an historical one. Each is justified in so far as it preserves the race that holds it. Authority, in 105 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN morals as well as in law, has grown up because without submission to such authority a race inevitably perished. Liberty has grown up because, if the authority was carried to the point of despotism, progress was wholly impossible ; and the race without progress perished as surely as the race without authority, even though it took a longer time to do it. In the mind of a Dar- winian, repression of error is not necessarily or generally a clear gain to society ; for the repression of all error necessarily involves the repression of all change, and the toleration of a score of errors does less harm than the prevention of a single piece of permanent good. IntUvidual cases of error are self-destructive, individual cases of good self-preservative. That system has the best chance of long-continued life which allows the highest degree of individual variation without destroy- ing authority as a whole. ^ When an organism, a spe- cies, or a nation has ceased to vary, it has ceased to grow; and any such total cessation of growth is worse than a dozen instances of growth which is useless or misdirected. The man who has accustomed himself to make sur- vival a test of right has much in common with the upholders of authority on the one hand, and with the upholders of liberty on the other. He unites the logi- cal vantage ground of the Catholic with the practical vantage ground of the Protestant. Yet comparatively little use has been made of the survival test in dealing with questions of moral judgment. The science of ethics has been regarded as a branch of psychology rather than as a branch of history or of sociology. Its study has been divorced from the study of law. We have accustomed ourselves to think of law and morals 1 Morlej, On Compromise, pp. 266-281. 106 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE as subjects wholly separate. We have been taught to look to our feeling, to our conscience, to our reason, as sources of moral authority ; to the courts and to the legislatures as soiirces of legal authority ; and above all, as a matter of cardinal importance, to keep these two things sharply distinguished. In the decision of most of the practical questions which come up in every-day Hfe, this separation is most salutary. But in judging the past history of morals, or in formulating theories of moral development, we are in danger of carrjdng this habit of mind too far. The practice of drawing a hard and fast line between law and morals is something pecuhar to the nineteenth cen- tury ; and even in the nineteenth century it has not been quite so universal as we have supposed. The separation which we deem to exist as a matter of neces- sity is more or less confined to our o"\vn time and to our own country. There is less of it in Europe than in America ; less in Catholic nations than in Protestant ones ; less and less of it as we go farther back in the world's history. Even in our o^vn country to-day the ruder communities show a tendency to revert to the time when law and morals were not thus separate. The justice of the half-savage tribes in earher stages of history finds its parallel in the justice of the vigilance committees of the frontier towns. This savage justice is based on something which according to modern con- ception is neither law nor morals, — a body of tribal customs, of which we can hardly say whence they derive their authority. Their sanctions are of such a character that we know not whether to call them religious, legal, or ethical. These ancient customs are certainly not law in the modern sense ; for they de- pend for their force not upon any organized authority, 107 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN but upon the collective feeling of a community, every one of whose members is ready to punish any trans- gression. Yet they are equally far from being morals in the modern sense ; for they are kept up, not by the conscience of the individual, but by a system of organ- ized terrorism, an ever-present lynch law, ready to be put into execution upon the slightest provocation. It is not necessary for our purpose to look in detail at the process by which this body of tribal customs was evolved. Much of it can be only a matter of conjec- ture.^ But taking these customs as our starting-point, we have the means of tracing with a fair degree of com- pleteness the subsequent course of events by which they were separated into two parts, out of which grew law and morals respectively .^ First, with the development of military organization the work of punishing infractions of the tribal morality, ^ Considering the date at which it was written, Bagehot's Physics and Politics shows marvellous fertility in this form of conjecture, and his con- clusions may be quite generally accepted as working hypotheses, in the absence of anything better. There are certain parts of early law and mor- als for whose history we have more definite evidences. McLennan, Primi- tive Marriage, makes an attempt to trace the institution of the family through successive stages from the time when the horde first introduced the practice of female infanticide as the crudest and most obvious means of limiting population. For the early development of property right the detailed evidence is also fairly decisive. In the hunting stage we find only rights of possession ; in the pastoral stage which followed it we find cer- tain ideas of collective ownership of land and separate ownership of cattle ; while with the agricultural stage the permanent settlement was marked by the beginnings of individual property right, contemporaneous perhaps (though this may be fanciful) with the beginning of individual responsi- bility in morals. 2 This separation, in the form here described, which is characterized by Comte as "Military Polytheism," seems to have been peculiar to Europe. The law of the Semitic nations has taken a more purely theocratic form ; and the same result, though not without a struggle, was reached among the Aryans of Asia. 108 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE instead of being the indiscriminate duty of every one was gradually delegated to particular individuals. In this stage we find certain customs enforced, no longer by pure democracy and simple lynch law, but by some more organized system of government, however imperfect or arbitrary. In the next stage of development we find not merely a determinate set of ofiicials to secure compliance with certain customs of the tribe, but a definite procedure by which this compliance is attained. In the oldest sys- tems or codes of law nothing is more noticeable than the disproportionate space which is given to procedure. These codes aun to state the method of obtaining redress for a wrong, rather than the nature and content of the right whose infraction constitutes a wrong.^ The law, to put the matter in modern terms, was adjective before it was substantive. The definition of the means of getting one's legal rights was antecedent to the definition to those rights themselves. The third and final step to- ward the formation of law in its modern sense was taken when the authorities, charged mth the duty of enforcing the various rights and customs, began to state definitely which rights and customs would be enforced by them as political ofiicers, and which rights and customs would be left as a residumn, if one may so put it, for the authority of the church or of reason, of rehgion or of ethics. In this stage we have a gradual process of separation of cer- tain principles whose infraction would be punished by the organized force of the community, from the remain- ing body of customs for whose violation the remedies were less determinate and the procedure wholly indeter- minate. The authority of tliis residuum rested primarily on the feehngs of the tribe or nation rather than on any particular set of public ofiicers. 1 The Twelve Tables furnish a good instance. 109 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN In any growing legal system we find this gradual pro- cess of definition, by which matters, previously left to one general conscience and reason, are made determinate parts of the law. Perhaps the best known instances are to be found in the prsetorian jurisdiction in Rome and the equity jurisdiction in England, — two things which have a close analogy with one another. The prse- tor at Rome was a public officer with authority to sup- plement, by his decisions, the law of the Twelve Tables in cases where that law was not sufiiciently explicit, or where its direct apphcation would work hardship. He decided what was equitable by liis own common sense ; and this, when matters were simple, was likely to be pretty nearly the common sense of the more educated part of the community. But, inasmuch as one praetor might differ from another in his views of equity, it be- came a matter of great importance for people to know how this undetermined part of the law was going to be administered. To meet this necessity the praetor, upon taking office, would issue an edict, stating what he would do in certain cases which were likely to arise. With each successive election the forms of this edict became more and more stereotyped; and in the more highly developed stage of Roman law each prsetor would begin by stating that he would uphold the same traditions that his predecessors had upheld, and would then perhaps add a few new provisions to meet new difficulties that might arise. What had been at first left to the prsetor's moral sense was gradually systematized, until it ulti- mately became as expHcit as the older system which it had supplemented. The same history was repeated in the equity jurisdiction of England, and it seems likely to repeat itself in another form in the jurisdiction of bodies like the Interstate Commerce Commission in the 110 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE United States, — bodies which in theory have not the character or authority of courts, but which are designed to give voice to the intelHgent sense of the community on matters at first thought to be extra-legal. The deci- sions of such a commission, though not law in the tech- nical sense, may gradually come to have the force of law and to be recognized as such.^ All these things are but instances of a general process of formulation of succes- sive parts of what had previously been morals rather than law. There has been, in other words, a continual and progressive separation of those things which the courts will enforce and for whose infraction determinate remedies are provided, from those things whose enforce- ment must be left to the sense of the community at large. Law, in this view, is created by a gradual delegation of certain parts of morals to the political authorities for enforcement. But it must not be supposed that the residuum could remain unchanged while this process was going on. The moral system was developed and altered in its character as constantly as the law itself. The separation and definition of those rights whose infraction was punished by the government could not ^ The work of courts of equity may seem to be radically different from that of commissions in two respects : first, that such courts had power to execute their decrees, while commissions have not ; and second, that courts of equity applied the moral sentiment of the community to remedy clear cases of injustice, while commissions apply abstruse reasoning to the ex- planation of complex ones. The difference is in either case more appar- ent than real. A purely advisory body, under the settled legal system of to-day, may have as much power as a court of equity in past centuries, whether for the enforcement of rights or for the creation of precedents. And the morality of the present day is so distinctively rational that a new exposition of the effects of certain lines of action to-day may repre- sent moral force just as clearly as did a new application of moral senti- ments five hundred years ago. Ill THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN possibly come to pass without radically affecting the spirit of the remainder. So long as pubhc authorities could give remedies for only a few among the many evils under which we suffered, so long must right- minded men do their own fighting. The vigilance com- mittees of the frontier towns or the rough codes of morals of school boys bring this state of things before our sight in the midst of the existing civilization. But with the addition of each new domain which law con- quers for itself, the necessity for extra-legal force grows less and less. The law-abiding spirit grows with the growth of civilization, not because people are more ready to submit to insult, but because they have new means of seeking redress. The case of duelling is a last remnant left from the tune when law and morals were not defined, and when large groups of offences lay on the border-land between the two ; where the combatants sought a remedy in extra-legal force, rather than in the courts on the one hand, or in public opinion on the other. Where duelling prevails to a large extent, it is notoriously impossible for modern conceptions of law to hold good ; and, what is still more to our present pur- pose, it is equally impossible for modern conceptions of morals to hold good. There is a story that an Eton head master who ha- bitually rehed on the use of the rod, once expounded Scripture as follows : " ' Blessed are the pure in heart.' Mind that, boys. The Bible says it 's your duty to be pure in heart. If you are not pure in heart I '11 flog you." To modern ideas the absurdity of the story lies in the supposition that the domain of morals can be narrowed down to the limits of the master's rod ; but to the ancient mind there would have been no such absurdity whatsoever. To our ancestors of three thou- 112 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE sand years ago it would have seemed unreasonable to suppose that any precept could have much force unless it had the power of physical compulsion behind it. When law and morals were indistinguishable, the domain of moral precepts was coextensive with that of judicial ones. The community appears to have re- quired of its members conformity to certain definite cus- toms, and to have punished with indiscriminate severity all violations of any such customs. For every offence there was a religious penalty threatened against the whole tribe that permitted it, and swift physical ven- geance was executed by that tribe on the offending member, by whose action its well-being was thus endan- gered. But when determinate remedies were provided for certain violations of law, the duty of physical pun- ishment was delegated to the government; and the people were led to lay more stress on the religious or ethical sanctions for those precepts to which the sovereign could not in the nature of things secure obedience by physical force. The moment this separa- tion was made, it opened the possibihty of widening the field of moral authority. Public opinion was not forced to limit its precepts to those matters where its violation could be instantly punished. It learned to depend for its power in no small measure upon the superstitions or the reasonings of the individual mem- bers of the community. When conscience and the police were undistinguished, the sphere of the authority of conscience was very different from what it became when the two were separated. The people that relies on its conscience as a means of enforcing public senti- ment, and is able to maintain that authority stoutly and strongly, can do hundreds of things impossible to the tribe which can conceive of no law except one whose 8 113 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN infractions are repressed by violence. The history of this development of moral authority, though less often formulated than the history of law, seems hardly less clear. In the rudest stages of society concerning which we can secure evidence, the authority behind the moral law seems to have been the fear of an undefined and vague supernatural power, — magic pure and simple. As society advances a little, a more personal shape is attributed to these powers. To this stage belongs the development of tribal and family religion, of the idea of association of gods with men, of collective tribal respon- sibility, and of the honorific sacrifice, — the symbol, not of expiation, but of brotherhood with the gods of the tribe. In the period next following this the idea of sin first makes its appearance. A crime is no longer an offence against the gods of the tribe, involving all mem- bers of the tribe alike and punishable only by instant death, but an individual act which can, to some extent at any rate, be expiated. To tliis period belongs the idea of expiatory sacrifice or atonement; the sin offer- ing of the Old Testament, as distinguished from the thank offering. With the sin offering there develops a set of conceptions of infinite importance for modern ethics. Hawthorne's favorite idea of sin as an educator, however strained it may be in its application to indi- viduals, is a most fundamental truth as applied to nations. It is the germinating spot in the develop- ment of the modern conscience and the whole system of ideas connected with it. The conception of sin marks the beginning of moral responsibility. The community has ceased to judge the outward act alone, and takes into account, however crudely, the intention of the man who performed it. The conceptions of merit and free will have their origin at this point. Inexplicable and 114 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE irrational 1 to the psychologist of to-day, whose view- point is bounded by individual consciousness, they pre- sent no difficulty whatever to the historian. Theories of free will and of merit had the clearest historical justifi- cation, because they were necessary elements in the de- velopment of individual responsibility, without which responsibility no progress from the oldest tribal system of morals was possible. During this stage sin was conceived as an individual personal offence against a supernatural power. Just as, under Oriental laws, any disregard of a despotic author- ity was punished or expiated, so sin was punished or expiated also. An act was regarded as sinful because it offended some god ; and that was the end of it. It was expiated in a certain way, because some god had pre- scribed of his own pleasure that particular form of ex- piation ; and that was the end of it also. The earliest systems of morals are almost purely ceremonial, just as the earhest systems of pohtical law are almost wholly occupied with procedure. But as a substantive civil law developed out of judicial procedure, so in a similar fashion a substantive moral law developed out of sacri- 1 For example, T. H. Green (Philosophical Works, II, 319) speaks of the free-will difficulty as a " question to which there is no answer because expressed in terms which implj/ that there is some agency beyond the irill which determines what that will should be." Schopenhauer, though he at times comes very near to the historical method of treatment, ends by wholly missing it. " Jedes einzelne Act hat einen Zweck, das gesammte Wollen keinen." ( Weltals Wille, I, 106.) But perhaps the most marked instance of failure to use historical methods in the treatment of this sub- ject is found in Leslie Stephen's Science of Ethics. His standards are historical, but his explanations are not; in other words, his psychology is not brought into line with his ethics. Instead of saying that the com- munity has taught free will to its members as a means of securing re- sponsibility, he apparently holds that each individual develops theories of free will as a result of his own uncertainty (p. 428 ; compare Schopenhauer, 'der Begriff der Freilieit is eigentlich ein negativer"). 115 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN ficial procedure. As this development progressed, the content of the moral law became more important, and the ceremonial at any rate relatively less so. The Mo- saic code marks a point where this moral law had already acquired large substance and stability. It is hardly nec- essary to add that such a development of moral codes necessitates a progress, partial or complete, towards monotheism. Under conflicting lawgivers there could not be one authoritative code. It is not long before we come to a transition from the stage where law derives its authority from God to one where God derives his authority from being a lawgiver. A community which formulates and obeys a set of moral laws knows God primarily as revealed in those laws. To a nation with a conscience the Gods of mythology give place to the God of righteousness. From this point it is but a short step to rationalism itself; to a time when men begin to judge God by his own laws. A people which had reached the stage of Jewish morals in the time of Nehemiah could not wait very long before developing the Pharisaic rationalism of the centuries before the Christian era. The obvious inequalities of justice that troubled them forced them to the doctrine of immortality as the only means by which the goodness of God could be vindicated, — not the vague immortal- ity of the tribal religions, but a system of immortal rewards and punishments, whereby the glaring injustice of this world should be corrected in another. With each successive stage of progress, the authority of fear becomes less and less a determining factor in conduct, the authority of conscience and reason a larger one. It is no wonder that as moral conceptions widened and were separated from purely legal ones, people be- lieved this separation to be more fundamental than it 116 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE really was. The most astute reasoners, concerning law and concerning conscience alike, mistook the exponent of political or moral law for its ultimate source; mis- took the authority on which the community relies for the execution of a judgment for the final power which hes behind that judgment itself. It is no wonder that systems of jurisprudence and ethics were formulated which reasoned thus: "If whatever the courts say is law, the courts can say anything, and it will be law. If whatever the conscience says is morally right, the conscience can say anything, and it will be morally right." But the conclusion is in each case wholly wrong. Neither the court nor the conscience has the free will or independence here supposed. The form in which the court exercises authority and the form in which the conscience exercises authority are fixed by the past history of the community. The courts camiot declare themselves independent of precedent and work out a new line of decisions apart from the moral sense of the people and the traditions which have guided it. The individual conscience cannot work out a new line of judgments and a new system of right and wrong apart from the traditions under which our ideas of law have grown up. Behind the courts, behind the legislatures, behind the church, behind the conscience, there is some- thing larger and wider which has developed in the progress of centuries, and which fuids its embodiment in national law and national character. II In a meeting between two armies, both strong, brave and well equipped, the issue of the contest is usually decided by superiority of discipline. That army which 117 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN can best obey the general's orders, which is most fully trained to act in effective masses, and which has most thoroughly merged the individuality of the citizen in the self-devotion of the soldier, is reasonably sure to win. But though the question of discipline seems to decide almost everything, there is more than this behind it. The highest and best of modern armies must have something better than mere disciphne. With each gain in the range of weapons, each gain in the numbers handled, each gain in the complexity of the tactics, the necessity for this additional something makes itself more imperatively felt. Between forces otherwise equal, the decision will rest in favor of the one where individual thought and individual responsibihty permeate the col- lective thought and the machine-like precision with which the orders are obeyed. As between the re- publicans and the imperiahsts in the campaigns at the close of the eighteenth century, as between the Germans and the French at Worth or Mars-la-Tour, the issue was not decided by numbers alone, by discipline alone, or by generalship alone ; but by the possibility of seizing unexpected advantages of ground, detailed points of supe- riority not foreseen in the plan of the battle or con- templated in the general orders, for which one army was ready and the other was not. It is comparatively easy to train a body of soldiers to advance in column toward a perfectly well-defined object. It is harder to persuade a regiment or a group of regiments to advance in line without mechanical support behind them. It is hardest of all to teach the officers and the men of a company to advance individually. Yet at critical moments this last possibihty must decide the fate of the engagement. To- day more than ever before victory depends not upon intelligent generalship and impHcit obedience alone, but 118 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE upon the independent activity of the company officers and the independent bravery of the men. And to-day more than ever before the superiority in morals rests with the nation that depends, not on its authority alone and not on its generals alone, but upon the individual responsibility of the subordinate leaders and upon the power of the men in the ranks to preserve their direction. In morals as in war we must have, in the first place, discipHne, authority, self-devotion, sub- ordination of the individual to the whole. Nothing will take the place of that spirit which enables and compels the soldier to march right straight to death for the sake of plain duty. But as the times are now, we must also have a power of the individuals to decide upon their duty for themselves; to see what needs to be done without orders, and to take their own chances in doing it. We must have our collective authority supplemented by in- dividual responsibility, individual judgment, and indi- vidual sense. Discipline and self-devotion are underlying principles of all ethics. The nation that does not have them goes to pieces irreparably. Judgment and sense are the dis- tinctive characteristics of modern etliics. The nation that does not have them is left behind in the race of historical progress. But is it possible to have a thorough exercise of judg- ment and sense without a loss of discipline and self- devotion? Will not the development of the one, in morals and in tactics, inevitably lead to the destruction of the other? Is not a man selfish as soon as he begins to reason out the consequences of his action? Is not all heroism impulsive heroism? Is not all calculated conduct in the last analysis selfish conduct? Can we have both the heroism and the calculation, the collective 119 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN end and the individual judgment? We must not un- derrate the real difficulty which lies at the root of these questions. We must not overlook the fact that in the passage from centralized authority to individual liberty there is danger that the underlying discipline, absolutely essential to all, should pass away. It is the hardest problem that a nation has to face, thus to decentrahze its moral authority without at the same time losing it altogether. But by nations as well as by armies, this problem must be faced and solved. Under modern con- ditions, that nation which can farthest push its ration- alism without allowing it to degenerate into egoism — which can farthest push its individual freedom without losing its collective strength — is the one that must prevail in the long run, and the one whose moral system has in it the element of permanence. The old principle of tribal responsibility secured dis- cipline at the expense of independence. It secured effective authority over conduct, but it prevented such conduct from being rational, at least in any unforeseen emergencies. It secured comphance with the letter of the moral law, and sacrificed its spirit — if, indeed, in those rude days, it can be said to have had a spirit. The substitution of individual responsibihty for collective responsibility, the development of the conception of sin and of merit, and, above all, the recognition of intention as an important element in morality, made a radical change in this respect. People were taught to assume the existence of a choice between good and bad conduct, and to use their reason in directing their conduct to more or less rational ends. This freedom — or perhaps we should say this assumption of freedom — made it necessary for standards of conduct to become either much better or much worse than they had been pre- 120 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE viously. If the standard of the community, under the new system, remained unselfish and far-sighted, the use of freedom and intelligence was a clear gain ; if on the other hand the first use of freedom was to overthrow discipline and unselfisliness, the gain was many times outweighed by the loss. The attempt to substitute moral responsibility for moral compulsion was like the attempt to substitute free labor for slave labor. If the freeman would work at all, their work was better than that of slaves ; but there was always a danger that they would use their freedom as a pretext for doing no work whatsoever.^ When it was believed that the gods punished the tribe for the sins of its members, this belief was not only effective in practice but substantially true in theory,^ But when the priests attempted to modify this behef to suit the development of individual responsibility, and taught that the gods punished the individuals for their o^vn sins, the formula lost so much of its truth as to lose nearly all of its effectiveness. That the gods always rewarded the good man and punished the bad man, was not true, in this life at any rate. The future life might set matters right; devout men, in aU ages, beUeved that it would; but the future life was not a strong enough motive to make the bulk of the com- munity moral. Its remoteness rendered it ineffective with one class of minds, its uncertainty \vith another class. On the races of antiquity, the general effect 1 In actual history, fatalism has gone hand in hand with slavery, rationalism with property. The troubles of Greece in developing ra- tionalism side by side with slavery, and those of Russia in developing emancipation side by side with fatalism, show the difficulty if not the im- possibility of ignoriug the connection. 2 The belief differs from Darwinism only in the process by which it is reached and the form in which it is stated ; not in the substance itself. 12J THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN of reasoning about conduct was distinctly demoralizing. The Athenian public was substantially right in its estimate of the work of Socrates as affecting social order at Athens. The course of events proved the truth of the pubUc judgment; and indeed the successors of Socrates, by the form which they gave their philosophy, vitually confessed the correctness of this judgment. For the loss of popular belief in the gods, they offered nothing which could serve as a substitute. They might talk of the honestum and the utile and the interaction between the two, and show that nothing could be useful or advantageous which was not honorable and rational; but they got astonishingly httle hold on the masses of mankind. Rationahsm, to those tribes that had been brought up under the older mythologies, meant self- ishness; selfishness meant disruption of all authority, followed by revolutions and barbarian invasions. Those who had any effective moral restraint left when their mythology was gone, were very few in number. Plato, and nearly all his contemporaries and successors, were careful to restrict the study of ethics to the favored class of citizens who would get the most benefit from the development of the state, and who could therefore take this collective development as an end. Wise under- standing of justice was to be the prerogative of a few philosophers and statesmen who were to be maintained by the rest of the community. Courage was to be the distinctive virtue of the soldiers who were to carry out the decrees of the philosophers and statesmen. As for the rest, let them practise self-restraint, let them learn to mind their own business. This was the sum and substance of ancient philosophy ; authority over the many, collective egoism, if we may so call it, for the few. But we all know how it turned out, — that 122 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE the many would not be thus repressed ; would not mind their own business ; would insist that if it was useful to the community for Socrates to drink all night, it was also useful to the conununity for the " base mechanicals " to drink all night ; and the Macedonians came in and conquered. The Romans did somewhat better with their rational- ism ; for the Romans had what the Greeks had not, a well-developed system of legal ideas, and certain liabits of action and feehng which carried the influence of those ideas beyond the narrower sphere of law. When their mythology went away there was something left besides pliilosophy. The ideas of this period are em- bodied in the great work of Lucretius, De Rerwn Natura — in some respects the most modern poem of classical antiquity. It reflects the state of mind of one who attempted to be seriously and soberly a rationahst and at the same time a reverencer of authority. It reflects the hopeless conflict between the old morality founded upon a mythology which the author could no longer beheve, and the new morality founded on Grecian philosophy wliich offered relatively weak motives for good conduct. The two could not be reconciled ; yet the hard effort at reconciliation still continued, and by its persistence showed a vitality in Roman morals and Roman religion and a possibility of development in Roman thinking which the Greeks, with all their acute- ness, had failed to attain. It siiowed a possibihty of maintaining some of the discipline of the old Rome with some of the freedom of the newer philosophi- cal thought. To understand this state of things more clearly we have only to look at the New England thought and New England feeling of the last hundred years. How many men have we known whose minds 123 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN were in a hopeless conflict between two duties that they saw and felt, — the duty of believing in the authority of the traditional religion on the one hand, and the duty of exercising their sense independently and fearlessly on the other. How many persons have been clouded by despondency in the hopeless attempt to reconcile these two co-ordinate obligations, to follow traditions which their sense could not accept, and to use their sense to an extent which must burst the bonds of old traditions. How many times in New England history has the experience of Lucretius been repeated ; and how many men who could not put it into poetry have put into action the despair of the conflict which breathes through the hues of his verse. Wherever this conflict persists — wherever the con- servatism of feeling among the best men of the nation is not swept away by the flood of rationaUsm — we have a field for the work of religious reformers, and for the new systems of ethical ideas incident to such reform. It is extremely difficult to find words to indicate the nature of this work and this change of ideas, or to characterize, without risk of misunderstanding, the com- mon element in the influence of Buddlia and Confucius and Mahomet and Jesus. We are hampered by a psy- chology which treats the individual as self-determined ; by crude theories of inspiration, and yet cruder theories of reason and reality, which have prevented the develop- ment of a terminology to suit the needs of the case. The religious reformer, in distinction from the philoso- pher, appeals primarily to the emotions rather than to the reason of those whom he addresses. Perhaps it would be better to say that he appeals to unconscious reasoning (if we may do violence to psychological usage) rather than to conscious. He avoids the absurdi- 124 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE ties of the older mythology so far as they have pre- vented that mythology from keeping a lasting hold upon the people ; he creates a new theology having its evi- dence and its warrant in the feelings and conduct of those who adopt it. It may be open to criticism on the narrow set of data accessible to contemporary philoso- phers, as early Christianity was open to the criticisms of Celsus ; but when Celsus claimed that Greek philoso- phy was better than Christianity, he overlooked the fact that Greek philosophy could not take hold of the masses of mankind and influence their conduct, while Christianity could ; and so in their several places could Confucianism and Buddliism and Mahometanism. It is one of the most important facts in any scientific study of psychology that in httle over a thousand years the whole civilized world could pass from the dominion of tribal mythologies, based on tribal war and tribal responsibility, to broader theologies, based on individual responsibihty, on moral sentiments, and on national if not on human brotherhood. Nowhere is the dilference between Christianity and tribal religions brought out more clearly than in the course of the rationahsm of modern Europe, as distinct from that of Greece or Rome. The process of religious criticism, which wrecked Greek piety and Greek morals in little over a century, has gone on for the last four hun- dred years without any such destruction. The active questionings which the ancients would have confined to a few philosophers are now the common property of the masses; yet those masses are probably on the whole more unselfish and more law-abiding than ever before. Though we cannot avoid anxiety for the future we have at least no cause to condemn the past. That which to the ancient world proved a speedy revolution has to the 125 THE EDUCATION OP THE AMERICAN CITIZEN modern world not yet lost its character of a reformation. The protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies has paved the way for the utilitarianism of the eighteenth and the materialism of the nineteenth, with- out the downfall either of social order or of practical morality. The leading conditions which distinguished the ration- alism and the ethical development of the last four cen- turies from those of the ancient world fall under three heads : the separation of law and morals which made it possible to change the theories of conduct without dis- solving the foundations of social order; the institution of private property, which had trained people to work for a remote end intelligently and without compulsion ; and the feehng of sympathy and human brotherhood which found so large a place in the Christian doctrine that it withstood alike the perversions of that doctrine and the attacks which attempted to undermine its influence. Where moral authority and legal authority were but slightly distinguished, any change in the one was sure to endanger the other. But when the two stood apart in men's minds we could alter our theories of conduct without wrecking the whole structure of civil society. It was owing to the separation of legal and moral ideas that the work of Luther could stand, independently of that of Gotz von Berlichingen. Protestantism could appeal to the masses without making its success or fail- ure dependent on the success or failure of the Peasants' War, and without causing the excesses of the fanatics of Miinster to be paralleled in every town that rejected the old faith. The separation of church and state, in short, allowed the defenders of social order to range themselves on the side of moral progress. 126 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE Of no less importance for rational conduct was the institution of private property and the training which it had given. Property taught people to do disagreeable things for a remote reward, and thus made them more capable of directing their efforts toward a distant moral end. It prevented freedom from degenerating into inefficiency and vice. It also did far more than this in a wholly different direction. It taught people to see in how many ways their own interests were to be sought in promoting those of others. When trade was thought to be a kind of robbery, there was no sin more unsparingly condemned than the desire to make money. But as tune went on, it appeared that legitunate trade was not robbery but mutual service ; that a man could habitually do well for himself by doing well for others ; and that where the superficial observer saw only a con- flict of interests, the really far-sighted business man could find a mutual harmony. It taught men, in other words, how often rational self-interest and rational unselfishness might closely coincide. But the most vital point of advantage of modern rationahsm lay in the existence of a kind of unselfish- ness which Christianity had been the chief agent in creating. This unselfishness was a feeling to which the moralist could appeal, either as a source of individual action, or as a basis of public sentiment. The church, in building it up, had paved the way for its own reformation. It was tliis feehng which gave power to the Protestant appeal to the Scriptures, because it enabled them to awaken a quick echo in the hearts of their readers. It was this which caused those Scriptures to be interpreted more and more by the fight of reason, until Christian morality became at last frankly utilita- rian, making happiness a standard of right. So univer- 127 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN sal has been the tendency to accept this standard, even where the theology under which it had grown up was more or less completely lost, that philosophers of the most divergent schools, like Kant and Mill, have not hesitated to treat it as a self-evident ethical principle. But the course of events in the last few years is beginning to show that it is not thus self-evident. Utilitarianism, as a habitual working hypothesis, is giv- ing place to rational egoism, both among philosophers and among the mass of mankind. This change brings us face to face with the dangers which proved too much for ancient morality and ancient freedom. We can no longer rest content with that philosophy wliich would treat altruistic happiness as a self-evident standard, and make such happiness the ultimate criterion of moral right. Such a theory of ethics is no better than the crude theories of law which prevailed a century ago. Nor can the effort of Spencer to strengthen utilitarian- ism, by showing that enlightened selfishness and enlight- ened unselfishness tend to coincide, be deemed a wholly successful one. It is chiefly significant as a confession of the popular hold which egoistic ethics has secured. It is not because utilitarianism coincides with egoism that we are to accept it ; but because utilitarianism as a habit of mind in the nation means liberty and progress, while egoism means destruction. Utilitarianism is to be defended historically, as the form in which organized society can permit and prescribe the exercise of private judgment without moral suicide. It derives its author- ity, not from general grounds of natural right, but from the fact that the community is preserved by the exercise of private judgment, and finds it best that this private judgment shall be based on utilitarian standards. These standards are not necessary moral elements in every 128 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE moral system, as Mill would have assumed; but they are characteristic and distinctive elements in the liigher civilization and the higher morality of all the nations of America and Western Europe for the past hundred years. How comes it that this utilitarianism which has in modern times by common consent been made a standard of morals and a criterion for the exercise of private judg- ment was all but unknown to the world of classical an- tiquity ? It was because the rehgions of the Greeks and Romans had not educated them, either as individuals or as nations, up to a point where sympathy became a com- mon feeling and an admissible assumption. Just as in constitutional law the possibiUty of liberty is dependent upon a law-abiding spirit in the community, upon a legal education which permits the exercise of individual re- sponsibility, — so in the case of morals, the possibiUty of private judgment is dependent upon a spirit of sym- pathy in the masses of mankind, whose historical devel- opment is due to Christianity. Proclaim liberty on the South Sea Islands, and the inhabitants will run amuck. Proclaim private judgment to a band of robbers, and they will at once exercise it in a manner which the com- munity could not tolerate for a moment. Civil freedom is dependent upon the legal education of those who hold it ; freedom of judgment, in like manner, upon the moral education of those who hold it. Modern America and modern Europe have been able to carry private judg- ment further than has ever been done before, without loosening the bonds of cohesion of society, because modern America and modern Europe work on the basis of such previous religious training that utihtarianism can be taken as a common standard and as an almost self-evident motive on which mankind can agree. Under » 129 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN a religion whicli preached only law and not love, only power and not altruism, as did so many of the ancient mythologies, the exercise of private judgment meant anarchy and destruction. A few, like the Stoics, could conceive of a general or collective utility ; more, like the Epicureans, could develop a rational egoism and at least make some effort to practise it ; but to the great majority of those educated under the older religions, the failure of these religions meant the substitution of an irrational egoism. It is because we have this historical basis of sympathy on which to work, that we can develop liberty of judgment in morals as we have developed liberty of action in law. It is thus that, with the fall of so many of the older moral sanctions, the whole system, though endangered in the apprehensions of the more conserva- tive, has not fallen, and still shows vigor and strength. In the Christian precept of love, and in the education which that precept has given, we still have something wliich can take hold on the hearts of mankind ; some- thing which can enable them to exercise their judgment without making that judgment entirely selfish, or losing it in the hopeless maze of philosophical discussion. It gives them something to work for and to fight for, which still appeals to their sympathies; something more tan- gible than the social utility of the Stoics or of Leshe Stephen. It enables the moral battle to break up into regiments and companies and skirmish lines, without cowardly retreat or short-sighted self-seeking. If our minds have been educated to feel the happiness of others as a strong motive, we need not make shipwreck be- tween the vagueness of the Stoic's ideal on the one hand, and the demoralization which has attended that of the Epicurean on the other. We have something suffi- ciently strong and tangible to appeal to the mass of 130 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE mankind, sufficiently rational to be made a basis of indi- vidual responsibility and individual judgment, and in virtue of both these quahties bound to stand where other systems fall. But, the rational egoist will object, is not all reasoned action selfish action? Are not all motives selfish? When you calculate the results of a course of conduct, do you not in fact present the different motives as they appear to you, and choose the strongest of them ? And if you apparently choose an unselfish motive, is it not that you have been so trained that your own individual happiness is affected by the feelings of others ? This is an argument which has overwhelming weight with many ; an argument wliich has deceived, to a greater or less ex- tent, almost every thinker who has approached this sub- ject as a pure matter of individual psychology and has not looked at it from the wider standpoint of the sociolo- gist. But if this reasoning is sound it proves too much. If a man always obeys the strongest motive, this strong- est motive being determined by Iris own happiness at the instant, it is liis own happiness at the instant which affects his action and nothing else.^ The reasoning of the rational egoist destroys his own theories of morals as well as those of the altruist ; for it makes far-sighted conduct as illusory as unselfish conduct. In a certain sense it is true that every man is always affected by his own happiness at the instant ; but it is also true that his happiness at the instant can be affected by other people's happiness, just as much as it could be by his own happi- ness at some future instant. The claim of the rational egoist, that all motives are, in the last analysis, selfish, 1 Strength of motive and quantity of happiness are as incommensur- able as a linear mile and an acre. Strength of motive is a matter of pur» intensity; quantity of happiness involves both intensity and duration. 131 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN would only be practically true of a community in which self-consciousness was developed to an enormous degree and sympathy not at all ; but such a community would have gone to pieces long before there was any time for it to apply the finer theories of rational egoism. It is probably true that as civilization advances the conflict between rational egoism and rational altruism grows less and less. To a savage untrained in habits of law or of sympathy or of reasoning, the antithesis be- tween selfishness and unselfishness is an absolutely irreconcilable one. Develop him to a higher level of education, and they become less and less antagonistic. Let him be thoroughly trained, a man of fine sympatliies and far-sighted judgment, and he will see as a matter of reason that we are members one of another ; will see that by pursuing selfishly his own course to the dis- regard of others he would do as the individual soldier would do, who should selfishly pursue his safety by running away in the battle, — would injure his own safety as well as the safety of the whole army and the general issue of the conflict. He will see that only by helping one another can we intelligently carry out the system which should help ourselves. But we must beware of relying too implicitly on this harmony of interests. Such rationalism and such fore- sight, for the majority of people at any rate, are far re- mote ; and the danger inherent in rational egoism is that it will make them put the selfish reasoning in advance of the clear vision and high education which alone can make such reasoning innocuous. It is this which gives force to the famous passage of Burke, that many men of thought prefer to preserve ancient prejudices, rather than to trust everything to reason, lest haply short-sighted reasoning should destroy all things and wreck the whole 132 ETHICS AS A POLITICAL SCIENCE nation itself. It may be true that intelligent selfishness and intelligent unselfishness tend to come closer and closer to one another and may ultimately coincide. Yet, with human institutions as they are now, the connection is not always clear; and with human foresight and human intelligence as it is now, there is not one man in a thousand, perhaps not one man in a million, that can trust his intelligence to take the place of unselfishness. There may come a time when the whole community will see that rational conduct means readiness for self-devo- tion ; but this time has not yet arrived. For the present we must not rely wholly or primarily on rationahsm, but largely on tradition and feeling. It is the force of per- sonal love and personal magnetism and the various un- selfish impulses which tend to keep men together, that is strong enough to be made the basis of a moral author- ity by which the community can Uve. The really serious danger which we have to fear is, that by too quick development of a system of rational egoism as the ultimate aim of morals, we may expose ourselves to the fate by which Greece and Rome fell, and from which we, by our Christian traditions, have thus far been able to save ourselves. The importance of a sound science of ethics lies in the fact that it mil enable our minds and our consciences to work together instead of separately. It may be true, as Leslie Stephen says, that a theory of motives is not itself a motive. But it is one of those truths which are more than half untrue; for it is unquestionable that the absence of a theory of motives tends to weaken, on the part of the individual and the community, those motives which are left unexplained. If in our own secret hearts we cannot find logical grounds for those feelings of unselfishness in which we have been trained, and those acts of self- 133 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN sacrifice to which we have become habituated, or if we are afraid to analyze our grounds too closely lest haply the test may prove too much for them, it is inevitable that these feelings should grow weaker, these acts less automatic. What is of even more importance, we must transmit them weaker to those about us and to those after us. If the community will save itself from the destruction of the rational egoist, it must find a rational theory that is not egoistic. It is this which makes the application of the methods of political science to morals most imperatively necessary. The effect of no small part of the psychology of the present day is immoral, because the science is based upon an assumption which is immoral in many of its practical effects, — the assump- tion of independent workings of individual minds. Only when we analyze the conduct and character of individuals as part of the general history of a race, only when we cease to take superficial phenomena of consciousness as ultimate data of science, only when we have learned to explain private judgment in morals as we explain consti- tutional liberty in politics, can we hope to understand either our own conduct or the conduct of nations. 134 POLITICAL EDUCATION Among the many demands which are made upon our schools and colleges at the present day, none is more universally voiced than the demand for a fuller course of poHtical education. And for this there is good rea- son. With the growing complexity of modern hfe, the difficulties of social organization and government are in- creasing. With the growing pressure toward speciahzed training for varied spheres of usefulness, the danger that we shall sacrifice the general basis of higher education which will enable us to cope with these difficulties is also increasing. It is not enough for our schools to fitl? men and women to be parts of a vast social machine ; it must prepare them to be citizens of a free common- wealth. If our educational system fails to do this, it\| fails of its fundamental object. But in thus recognizing the importance of training for citizenship, there is danger that we shall make mis- takes as to the particular kind of training which will secure the results desired. A true political education is a very different thing from much that passes current under this title. To begin with, it is not a study of facts about civil government. A man may possess a vast knowledge with regard to the workings of our social and political machinery, and yet be absolutely untrained in those things which make a good citizen. This distinction is of special importance at the present 135 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN day, because these topics have so large a place in many of the schemes of education which are now being urged by social reformers. We hear on every side calls for more teaching of sociology and politics and civics and finance, and all manner of studies intended to inform the young American concerning the mechanism of the political world in which he lives. I shall not undertake to judge the value of these studies from the pedagogical standpoint. I shall not try to estimate whether the un- doubted advantage which they possess in awakening interest is more than balanced or less than balanced by the danger of cramming which connects itself with their use. But when the plea is urged, as it so often is, that they constitute a necessary and valuable training for citizenship, we are justified in making a direct protest. Except within the narrowest limits, they do harm rather ' than good. As ordinarily taught, they tencT'to fix the attention of the pupil on the mechanism of free govern- ment rather than on its underlying principles. They exaggerate the tendency, which is too strong at best, toward laying stress on institutions rather than on character as a means of social salvation. They tend to prepare the minds of the next generation to look to superficial remedies for political evils, instead of seeing that the only true remedy lies in the creation of a sound public sentiment. I would not underrate the value of knowledge of political fact to the man or woman who is first well grounded in political ideals. But the en- deavor to cram mth facts as a substitute for the de- velopment of ideals is at best an inversion of the true order of education, and may easily become a perversion of its true purpose. For the sake of a plentiful and im- mediate crop of that mixture of wheat and chaff which is kno^\^l as civics, we run the risk of unfitting the soil 136 POLITICAL EDUCATION for the reception of that seed which should result in the soundest and best gro\vth of which the field is capable. Nor is it right to conceive of political education as being primarily a training in those scientific principles which regulate tiie activity of govermnents. It is true that the teaching of science is a far higher ideal than the teaching of facts, and that the pupil who has re- ceived tliis training enjoys a position of inestimable vantage in judging social events of the day. But it is also true that the study of political science is an ex- tremely difficult one; and that if we depended for the success of our poKtical education upon the truth of the abstract doctrines of politics which have been taught, the outlook would be dark indeed. One political sci- ence, and only one, has reached a high degree of ex- actitude. This is jurisprudence ; and just because it is an exact science, people have ceased to pretend that it is easy, and do not attempt to teach it in the schools. Next to jurisprudence in exactness comes poHtical econ- omy, certain parts of which have been developed in the hands of experts to a satisfactory stage of clearness and precision. But that which is taught as political economy in the majority of institutions is very far from having this scientific character. And what is true of the cur- rent teaching of political economy is, I think, true in even liigher degree of the various branches of sociology and politics, as they are presented in tlie classrooms of tlie present day. As a rule, the teaching of sociology is better when it is called by the plain name of history, the teaching of politics better when it is made an inci- dent in the unpretentious study of geography. Under the old-fashioned name of history or geography, the description of social phenomena arrogates to itself less 137 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN claim as an exact science than its enthusiastic devotees desire. But the really essential elements in science are truthfulness and precision ; and I fear there can be no doubt that the substitution of the new names for the old has been accompanied by a loss in these respects. Next to an education in poHtical facts without ideals, I can imagine no worse training for the future citizen of the country than an education in political principles wdthout exactitude. It must constantly be borne in mind that the training of the free citizen is not so much a development of cer- tain lines of knowledge as a development of certain essential quahties of character and habits of action. Courage, discipline, and loftiness of purpose are the things really necessary for maintaining a free govern- ment. If a citizen possesses these qualities of charac- ter, he will acquire the knowledge which is essential to the conduct of the country's institutions, and to the reform of the abuses which may arise. If he does not possess these qualities, his political learning and that of his fellow-men will not keep the state from destruc- tion. If he has not the courage to exercise his political rights in the face of possible intunidation, no amount of acquaintance with constitutional theory will save his vote from suppression or prevent popular government from becoming a mere shadow. If he has not the discipline to subject his will to the restraints of law, no amount of knowledge of the beneficent effects of these restraints will save the people from that revo- lution and anarchy which invite tyranny from within or conquest from without. If he does not possess a measure of political idealism and disinterestedness of aim, no amount of knowledge of the needs of the coun- try and the ways of meeting them will lead to the for- 138 POLITICAL EDUCATION mation of an active public sentiment, or prevent the institutions of the nation from degenerating into a more and more rigid formahsm. If there is one thing which distinguishes the great writers on politics from the petty ones, it is the recog- nition of this overwhelming importance of character and pubhc opinion, as compared with the particular institu- tions in which that character and public opinion may choose to embody its organized activity. Unfortunately, their words on this matter do not always find ready hearing. The details of the organization are so much more visible than the underlying spirit which gives it life that everybody looks at the former, and few have the sense to see the latter. Every one knows that Aris- totle divided governments into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Very few know that Aristotle said that there was a more fundamental division of govern- ments into those which were legitimate and those which were not ; the former being based on the consent of the governed and acting in the interest of the whole, while the latter were based on the authority of a class and exercised in the interests of that class. Every one knows that Rousseau's Social Contract was a powerful means for the promotion of democracy in Europe, and identifies his name with the doctrine that majorities should rule. Few know that Rousseau protested against the abuse of this doctrine with which his name is thus connected ; that he said emphatically that the majority of the people was not the people and never could be ; and that he only called for the determination of the public will by majority votes as being a better means than any other which had been devised of approxi- mating to that real public sentiment which, after all, was the only legitimate power. Let us not adopt a line 139 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN of education whicli shall emphasize in the minds of our children those details which were trivial in Aristotle and those which were pernicious in Rousseau. Let us rather impress upon them their responsibility as mem- bers of a body politic in the formation of that sentiment running throughout the whole body, which is behind the laws of a free state, and without which all law becomes either a mockery or a means to the tyranny of some over others. But what is this public sentiment, about which so much is said and so little understood ? " Man," says Aristotle, " is a political animal." Many attempts have since been made to reinstate this propo- sition in an improved form, but on the whole none is so good as the original. The instinct for forming com- munities which shall be the unit and centre of action is a distinguishing mark of the human species. In the formation of these communities, the thing which holds them together and marks them out from those about them is not so much a distinction of physical character, or even of mental quahty, as a distinct system of politi- cal ethics. A man under the influence of this code of political ethics imposed by the community will do things which may seem to militate, and sometimes actually do miUtate, against his self-interest as an mdividual. Under its influence he will encounter personal danger to promote public safety. He will submit his passions and desires to the restraints of irksome discipline. Hardest of all, he will often perform disinterestedly as a trustee in behalf of the community those powers which the voice of that community has intrusted to his charge. On that feeling which gives effect to those pohtical virtues we have bestowed the name of public sentiment. 140 POLITICAL EDUCATION It may be said to perform the same functions in the world of political morality which the individual con- science performs in the wider domain of personal moral- ity. And just as codes of private morals are unmeaning or formal unless there is a sturdy conscience to give them effect, so legal regulations and police discipHne are but a vain reliance unless public sentiment stands behind them and comes to their aid. We may carry the anal- ogy one step further, and say that just as in private morahty there is an alternative between self-government by one's own conscience and the compulsion of external authority, so in public morahty there is a similar alter- native between self-government by public sentiment and the tyranny of a dominating power. It will be readily seen that public sentiment, as thus described, is a very different thing from much that passes under that name. If a large number of people want a tiling, we not infrequently hear it said that there is a public sentiment in its favor. It would be much more correct to say that there is a widespread personal interest in securing it. The tenn " pubUc sentiment " can only be applied to those feelings and demands which people are willing to enforce at their own cost, as well as that of others. The desire for better municipal government on the part of the man who is not willing to labor for that end, the effusive patriotism of the man who hopes thereby to lead other people to enter upon a war of which he may celebrate the glories and enjoy the fruits, the denunciation of trusts by the man who has tried to do what they do and has not succeeded, can never be regarded as expressions of public sentiment in any true sense. They are but instances of the self- ishness, the vaingloriousness, and the enviousness of large sections of the community. There is perhaps 141 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN nothing which more severely cripples economic reform than a failure to distinguish between a disinterested condemnation of that which we should despise in our- selves no less unsparingly than we denounce it in others, and the interested outcry of those who object to an evil, real or alleged, simply because some one else happens to be its beneficiary. There is just as much need for the training of this public conscience or public sentiment, by whatever name we choose to call it, as for the training of the individual conscience in the affairs of private life. In fact, there is all the more need for such training, because the functions of the public conscience are less perfectly understood and the matters with which it deals are much more complex. In the practice of ordinary per- sonal virtues a man or woman cannot go far astray with- out being brought up with a round turn by social disqualification, if not by the police or the reformatory. But in matters which concern the public interest, the transgressor, under our present system, is often entirely safe from the condemnation of the law, and largely so from any active exercise of social disqualification on the part of his fellow-men. The greater the complexity of our social phenomena, the less clear are the applications of some of our standards of personal morality in their conduct, and the more does this education of public morality become an indispensable thing for the com- munity that would preserve its integrity. The means for this education have not kept pace with the need. In some respects we have actually gone back- ward. Grand as is the work which is done by the courts of the present day, it is doubtful whether their function as public educators stands where it did a cen- tury ago. Partly on account of the increasing dijB&culty 142 POLITICAL EDUCATION of the cases with which they have to deal, partly on account of a theory of legal authority which dates from the beginning of the present century, our judges have contented themselves more and more with the appUca- tion of precedents, and have been less and less con- cerned with the elucidation of reasons which should appeal to the non-technical mind. Add to this the fact that the performance of jury duty, once an all but uni- versal educator in the principles underlying some of the most important branches of the law, has now become a burden which men seek to avoid, and we see how the judiciary has been largely shorn of those educational functions which in the history of the human race have been even more important than the purely technical duties of the office. A still more serious retrogression has perhaps taken place in the educational influence of our pubhc orators and debaters. It is hardly more than a generation since the utterances of political leaders in and out of Congress were a mighty power for the shaping of public opinion. Callioun and Clay, Webster and Lincoln, formed by their speech the sentiment of large bodies of men on matters of public duty. We may differ in our judgment as to the rightness or wrongness of the conclusions which they drew. The man who agreed with Callioun will disagree with Lincoln. But, now that the clouds of strife have passed away, all can agree that Calhoun and Lincoln alike appealed to something higher than per- sonal interest, created something with more cohesive power than a mere enlightened selfishness, — that each, in short, was inspired by a lofty ideal of the public con- science, and helped the whole American people to real- ize that ideal. To-day, on the other hand, it is almost proverbial that the effective speeches are those which 143 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN voice a prepossession already felt, and give a rallying cry to partisan or personal interests. The system of district representation has gone far to make legislation a series of compromises between the interests of the several parts concerned, rather than an attempt to meet the needs of the whole. So far as this change has taken place in our legislation, it has become inevitable that the debate by which such legislation is preceded should be not so much an attempt to discuss the interest of the whole and to subordinate thereto the interests of the several parts by an appeal to self-sacrifice, as a skilful conduct of a ne- gotiation where each speaker represents his sectional demands, which he strives to enforce by his superior adroitness as one among many players in the game of politics. It is a common saying, and on the whole a true one, that newspapers have taken the place of orators as the educators of public sentiment. That the change has been attended with some advantages, none but tlie blind- est pessimist would deny. The average citizen learns more facts through his newspapers in a day than he learned from his public speakers in a month. Materials for judgment are thus brought home to him far more promptly, and on the whole, I am inclined to think, rather more truthfully, than they were under the old regime. But whatever advantages the modern news- paper offers, it does not, with some honorable exceptions, recognize the duty of educating public sentiment as a paramount one. From the very circumstances of the case, the daily newspaper is under a strong pressure to emphasize what is ephemeral as compared with what is permanent ; to throw into high relief what is crude rather than what has been thoroughly digested ; to make more use of that which is sensational than of that which 144 POLITICAL EDUCATION is sedative. Too often it is compelled by pressure of necessity to subordinate everything else to partisan ends. Even where the editor himself has a high ideal of the possibihties of his vocation, he finds himself hindered by a lower conception of journalistic duty which prevails among the pubhc at large. Whatever the reason, and wherever the blame, we cannot rely on the average news- paper of the present day to furnish that training in dis- interestedness which is the essential basis of a really powerful public sentiment. All these facts increase the responsibility which is placed upon our institutions of learning. The more inadequate the means for forming a disinterested public opinion in other ways, the more urgent is the need that our colleges should make this one of their chief functions. It will not do to have our higher education a purely technical one. However completely the citizens of the next generation may be fitted for the exercise of their several callings, our Constitution will not be safe unless they are also trained in the principles wliich enable them to govern themselves and their fellow-men. It is an interesting thing to see how the higher educa- tion of different countries reflects in its organization and character the political institutions of the nations con- cerned. In France and in Germany, where the citizen is( part of a pubhc machine, university life is occupied with' an almost purely technical training, which fits each man for his place in that machine. In England and America, I on the other hand, where the citizen is regarded primarily as part of a governing body, we have had a system of college education less closely adapted to technical needs, but more efficient in the creation of public sentiment. England and America have a system of hberal education in a sense which France and Germany have not, — an 10 145 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN education whose liberality consists not in the superior quantity of knowledge, but in the relation of that knowl- edge to civil Hberty. How shall our colleges continue to give the education which is liberal in this higher sense, — education in the virtues of the freeman as distinct from those of the slave ? In the answer to this question is bound up the whole future of the American college as an institution ; not only its form, but perhaps its very existence. Its course of study, in the first place, must deal with subjects which are non-professional. The student who begins at too early a period of his education to occupy himself with matters pertaining to the gaining of bread and butter is from that very fact in danger of losing sight of his broader privileges and duties as a citizen. The moral influence of having the student's mind fixed, dur- ing some of the most plastic years of his mental life, on things whose value is independent of their money-making power for him individually is a thing of incalculable value. In the second place, the course of study must deal with things which are permanent and not ephemeral. The man who would govern a nation and lead its pubhc sentiment must not be swayed by the misjudgments and distortions of the moment. There is no power which in the long run has more commanding influence over the people than the power of a strong man to adhere to fixed standards where weaker men are unbalanced and unset- tled by momentary confusion. It is this quality of per- manence, I believe, more than any other, which has given to classical literature its commanding place in the edu- cational systems of countries like England and America. I would not confine the term " classic " to the literatures of Greece and Rome ; but I would insist with confidence 146 POLITICAL EDUCATION that the education of free citizens should be grounded in the study of those works wliich have proved their great- ness, not by the appeal to a single generation or even to a single country, but by living long enough and spreading far enough to serve as a permanent basis of thought amid the shifting views and ideals of different communities. In the third place, it must deal mth large affairs rather than small ones. In some of our modern methods of work there is a real danger that this need may be dis- regarded. Controlled as our studies are by persons who see in every brilUant scholar a possible candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, there is a tendency in some quarters to substitute thoroughness and minute- ness of detail for breadth of view ; and to use, in those general studies which are intended to enlarge the mental horizon, methods of training which are more fit for those who would pursue them for technical purposes. It cannot be too strongly impressed on the teaching force of the country, in these days of speciahzation, that a hberal education has in view purposes different from those which control the specialist, and in some degree opposed to them. Original research, of wliich so much^ is said, is a valuable thing in its place ; but it will not) do to have the citizens of our republic regard the muck- rake as the chosen instrument of higher learning. I would not undervalue for one moment the unportance of hard and thorough work ; but unless our teachers can find methods of securing this work on broad lines instead of narrow ones, the collegiate education of the country, in its older sense, is bound to pass away, because it will no longer be fulfilling its distinctive function in the training of the citizen. But by no means the largest part of the education in public spirit which a college ought to give is to be sought U7 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN in its course of study. There is an equally important education given by the students to one another, and re- sulting from the spirit of the place. On this we must rely for the development of loyalty and self-devotion and those moral elements which are necessary as a basis of public sentiment in a self-governing community. This fact has an important bearing on the choice of studies to be taught in the college course. For the right selec- tion of studies attracts the right kind of student material. The school which is purely technical, which enables its graduates to get large salaries at the sacrifice of breadth of character, inevitably attracts, as the years go on, those persons to whom money-making is the prime object. The school whose course is crammed with things of momentary rather than of permanent interest attracts those persons who value the superficial or transitory rather than the profounder things of life. The school whose methods of instruction are microscopic rather than telescopic attracts the minds that are narrow instead of broad. But with a course of study arranged in- dependently of preparation for professional Hfe, dealing with the things of all time more than with the interests of the moment, and aiming to give all possible breadth of intellectual interest, we are reasonably sure of attract- ing a student body capable of educating one another in disinterestedness, in stability of purpose, and in that sense of proportion which goes with largeness of vision. Nor is the influence of such students confined to those who are immediately associated with them. A few suc- cessive classes of this kind can build up a system of tra- ditions and of sentiments which are hard to explain to those who have not come under their influence, but which, to those whose privilege it has been to feel their power, constitute the prof oundest element in the political 148 POLITICAL EDUCATION education furnished by a college course. This influence is not confined to any one department of college activity. It is manifested alike in the classroom, in the society, or on the playground. It carries those who feel it out- side of themselves, and makes them part of a college life whose freedom trains them for the freedom of the larger national life into which they are just entering. Taking our boys — and in the present generation our girls also — from different sections of the country, it makes them acquainted with their fellow men or women in a broader and more national sense than is possible in the secondary school, and under circumstances which contribute to the development of wider ideals than are possible in a system of technical training. May the time be far distant when these elements in our college life shall be crowded out by the pressure of professional studies, or weakened by schemes of education which lay more stress on the things which lie immediately before us as individuals than on those which fit us to be mem- bers of a free commonwealth and makers of the world's history ! 149 HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE PUBLIC WELFARE In these days of progress and reform, when no institu- tion is allowed to pass unchallenged, the higher educa- tional system of the country must be prepared to prove its usefulness if it would expect a continuance of pub- lic support. What does it do for the community ? Is it worth what it costs ? Which parts are most valuable ? These are questions wlhch must be squarely faced and satisfactorily answered. I think that there are three distinct ways in which higher education helps the community, and by which it proves its right to exist. First, it makes our people better workers in their several occupations. Second, it makes them better members of the body poHtic. Third, it makes them better men morally and spiritually. And I also believe that those good results of higher education which are least obvious and least easily measured in dollars and cents are the very ones which have most fundamental importance to the nation as a whole. How does education make a man a better worker in his profession ? Partly by teaching him to do in the school or the laboratory things which he would after- wards be compelled to learn more slowly in practical life, whether on the farm, in the shop, or in the office. This is what is known as technical training. Partly by teaching him, in his school or college days, theoretical 150 HIGHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC WELFARE principles which in the experience of practical life he would not be likely to learn at all. This is the idea of scientific training. The distinction between the two ideals is a radical one. The former aims to save the tune of the student and to put hun as quickly as pos- sible into a position to do his work and make his money. The latter aims to increase the range of the student's conceptions, and to give him command of theories which will enable him to advance the methods of the business which he undertakes. The advantages of purely technical training are so obvious that very few people are blind to them. In fact, those who object most to the cost and the results of higher education as a whole are the very ones who wish the amount of technical training to be increased. " What is education for," they say, " if not to make a boy a worker and to save him the necessity of learning his trade after he leaves school ? " In spite of this fact, however, the general tendency of education in tliis country has been to become less technical and more scientific, — less occupied with exercise in details and more with teaching of ideas. A hundred years ago the young man who desired to enter a profession prepared himself in the ofiice of some lawyer or doctor, or in the study of some minister. There he learned the way in which tilings were done, — how to collect a note, to write a prescription, or to compose a sermon. When professional schools were established in connection with our universities, in the early years of this century, they at first aimed to do on a large scale just what individuals had been doing on a small scale. They tried to give instruction in the details of a man's life-work. But as time went on, it was found that they could do more good to their pupils in other ways. Not by telling the student 151 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN how to do particular things could he be made a good lawyer or doctor, but by teaching him those principles of legal interpretation and of scientific physiology which should enable him really to understand the cases that might arise, and to use the books which bore upon those cases. A similar development, though less marked, has taken place in many of our best schools of technology. No longer are they places for shopwork, but places for the training of thinkers ; of men who may not know how to do the specific things which will first be wanted of them, but who are in possession of that general knowl- edge which will enable them to learn more thoroughly the real bearings of any new problem as it arises. They have become less technical and more scientific. The student who goes out of a school of the more modern type seems for the moment less well equipped than his rival who has studied in an office or in an old- fashioned school of the strictly technical character. He does not know the daily routine of the business. He cannot turn his hand and his tongue from one thing to another with the quickness which the technically edu- cated man possesses. But as time goes on this disad- vantage ceases; and soon the balance shows itself on the other side. For the man who has devoted his school life to the learning of details of office work or shop work soon finds that he has a great many things to unlearn. No college can anticipate accurately the con- ditions of actual practice. The man whose hand has been trained to meet one specific set of conditions is sometimes worse off than the man who has not been trained at all. Far better equipped is he whose educa- tion has been really scientific, and whose mind has been trained more fully than his hand. Has an important process been developed anywhere? His knowledge of 152 HIGHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC WELFARE books, if it is worth anything, will enable him to find it out as soon as possible, and to understand it as fully as possible from descriptions and suggestions. He will thus be in condition to make progress in the line of work that he has chosen. His assurance of immediate attainment of a third-rate position may be less than that of the man who is educated only in technical details; but his chance of ultimate attainment of a first-rate position will be indefinitely greater. This is no mere theory; it is supported by the testimony of large em- ployers in different parts of the country and different lines of industry. But the chance of gain to the individual is not the only thing to be considered in estimating the relative value of scientific training, as compared with that wliich is purely technical. Its advantage to the nation as a whole is inestimably larger; for it is upon this higher scientific training that national progress is largely de- pendent. The man who has been educated to be a creature of routine generally clings to old methods ; the man who understands the theory of his business can develop new ones. The gain to the nation in having its industry progressively directed and conducted is some- thing which cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It is a primary condition of national efficiency. It is just because America enjoys pre-eminence in tliis respect that she holds her present place among the nations of the world. But it wiU be a mistake to suppose that the profes- sional skill which our people receive from the best scien- tific training constitutes the country's whole gain from collegiate education, or even the major part of it. A man is something more than a mere producer. He is a member of the body politic, living in constant and 153 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN complex relations with his fellow-men. The right ad- justment of these relations between man and man is a more difficult and important thing than the development of technical skill. National education, if it is to be really national and not individual, must prepare the way for this adjustment. It must teach people not only to make the most of themselves, but to do the most for others. They must learn how to communicate their ideas so that others will understand them, to arrange their labor so that others can enjoy its fruits, and to take part in the work of govenunent so that the community as a whole shall be directed by pohtical intelligence instead of political ignorance. In order to insure clearness of communication, our higher education must teach proper use of language. Without such power over the means of expression, a man's thoughts are of no profit to any one but himself. He becomes a theorist in the bad sense of the word, — a person whose ideas cannot be made to help others. It is just because of deficiency in precise expression that theoretical training has been so often brought into con- tempt. The Greek word from which " theory " is derived means " breadth of view," In this sense the more we have of theory the better. But a man who makes his real or alleged breadth of view an excuse for his inability to tell other people about the details which they want to know becomes an intolerable nuisance. Nay, he may often become a self-deceived impostor ; for the man who cannot put his thought into language which others will understand is generally not sure of understanding it himself. In contributing to this clearness of communication, we have use alike for education in English, for education in other modern languages, and for education in the classics. 154 HIGHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC WELFARE If we had to choose between the three, there is no question that English is the most important. It is the language in which our work is done. The man who is a master in its use possesses a power of control of those about him which can be obtained in no other way. He has an unrivalled command of synonyms which give exactness to his thought ; for there is no language which is nearly so rich as English in words to designate the different subjects of modern interest. But this does not mean that it ought to be taught to the exclusion of everything else. Every one recognizes that we have so much need to use French and German that no man can be called fully educated who fails to have some knowl- edge of both these languages. Our national problems may perhaps be solved by English alone ; our inter- national relations involve the knowledge of many other tongues besides. The reason for the study of the classics is at first sight less obvious. The time spent upon them is so great, and their tangible usefulness seems so small, that many people regard the whole matter as a waste of labor. Such reformers would have our schoolboys read Homer or Cicero in translations, and would have the time for grammatical drill spent upon Enghsh sentences instead of Greek or Latin. The chief difficulty with this plan is that we have at present so few teachers who are compe- tent to give good instruction in English except through the medium of Latin or Greek. Over and over again have I heard men argue for the extension of English teaching in place of the classics, when the speakers showed by their diction, their grammar, and their rheto- ric, that they had not the least conception of what good English expression really was. No man thinks that he can teach Latin without having studied it. His knowl- 155 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN edge of Latin may be defective in a great many ways, but he at least knows liis deficiencies. On the other hand, there are thousands of men in the country who have never thoroughly studied Enghsh, but who would be insulted at the suggestion that they did not know it well enough for all practical purposes, including those of instruction. The marvellous grammatical system of Latin or of Greek, coming to us in a foreign language, arrests our attention and makes teachers and scholars feel that it is something to be seriously studied. When we have a body of teachers who are ready to teach Eng- hsh with equal seriousness, and are able to suppress that vastly greater body who handle it mechanically or carelessly, then, and not till then, shall we be able to talk of superseding the classics in our educational sys- tem. Under present conditions they remain vitally im- portant to the welfare of the country as a means to accurate expression and clear thought in the communi- cations between man and man. Nor is it enough that our educated men should be able to communicate their own ideas. They must also have the necessary intellectual basis for understanding the ideas of others. A body of men of whom each is interested exclusively in his own separate pursuits is in no sense an intellectual society. As a means to the highest progress of the whole body, the student of htera- ture must know enough of science to be inspired by scientific achievements ; the expert in science must know enough of litera-ture to feel the benefit from the best works of poetry and fiction. If there is any one characteristic which distinguishes the liberally educated man from his fellows, it is that breadth of view which prevents him from being absorbed in his own pursuits, to the exclusion of the wider range of human interests. 156 HIGHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC WELFARE But this is not all. Our students must learn not only to conununicate ideas to others and to receive ideas from others, but also to adapt their work to others' wants. They must know how to suit their products, whether material or mtellectual, to the needs of those about them. A well-arranged college course provides for this m two ways. It does sometliing toward this end by the teaching of pohtical economy and sciences allied to it. By showing the places which different men hold in the business organism, it enables many of us to avoid mis- judgments and mistakes which might render our best work futile. But there is an indirect way in which a college course contributes more surely toward the same result. By allowing the student the choice of serious studies in a wide range of subjects, it enables him to make experiments which help him to decide upon the line in which he is best fitted to serve his fellow-men. The man whom nature intended for a doctor, but whom fate has driven into a la\vyer's office, does not find out his mistake until years of preliminary work have made it irrevocable. The farmer who is spoiled by trying to be a minister, and the minister who is spoiled by trying to be a farmer, have both gone so far in their ill-chosen call- ings as to be in many respects unfitted for the career for which nature designed them. But if the student has, during his college course, studied physiology and consti- tutional law side by side, or has had the chance to make experiments alike in providing for men's bodies and in saving men's souls, he can see far more clearly where his talent hes, and can let the experience of a single year determine rightly what otherwise could only be decided too late for repentance. A college course, if properly directed, must also train its students in the obligations of citizenship. This func- 167 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN tion is more important in America than anywhere else. An American does not fulfil his whole duty if he is only a skilful specialist, or even if he is a good business man and nothing more. He has a broader duty as part of a sovereign people. He must know the constitution of the country and the spirit of its laws ; not in that per- functory way which is obtained by the acquisition of a few facts, but by a severe training in those principles of ethics and politics which are needed for the preservation of a free commonwealth. He must understand the in- direct effects of legislation no less than its direct and obvious ones. He must be familiar with the political liistory of his own nation and of other nations beside his own, in order that he may be a leader who will enable his fellow-men to look beyond the passions and preju- dices of the moment, and help them to see what is the probable bearing of the issues, as they arise, on the future welfare of the community. Rightly to accomplish this, the college must give its students sometliing more than mere training of the in- tellect. Much as intelligence is needed in the conduct of our business and our politics, we have learned that intelligence alone "will not accomplish everything. The higher education will do little toward making more efficient citizens unless it makes at the same time broader and better men. It must so inspire those who come under its influence that they shall apply, in the conduct of the larger affairs of the community, those principles of morals which are recognized as obligatory upon us in our relation to our families and our neighbors. All intelligent study of science, whether it be physics or biology, psychology or historj^, should train a man in that respect for law which is the best antidote to capri- cious self-will on the part of the individual. The stu- 158 HIGHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC WELFARE dent learns that he is in the midst of an ordered world. If he has the root of the matter in him, he thereby gains increasing respect for that order, and readiness to become himself a part of it. It was the idea of the best of the ancient philosophers that virtue consisted in placing one's self in harmony with the universe. To him whose idea of the universe is narrow, the conception of such harmony will be narrow also. The one broadens with the other. And if, with this enlightened study of naV ural and moral law, there is combined at the same time the restraint of a healthful discipline and an enforced regularity, the student becomes gradually fitted for the highest duty of citizenship, the acceptance of self- imposed burdens in the interest of a general system of moral government. And there is a yet higher form in which this ideal may be realized. Tlie duties that are a burden, how- ever cheerfully performed, do not represent our full- est character development ; nor is the man who does his work in that spirit the most efficient contributor to his country's moral welfare. Far better is it if the per- formance of civic duty can be the result of an inspira- tion which makes it a joy and not a task. The teacher who is fitted for his calhng has the opportunity to im- part this inspiration through the study of great works of hterature and great deeds of history. There may be other ways in which his contribution to the well-being of the community is more direct and obvious ; but there is, I think, no way in which he can really do so much toward bringing out what is best in a nation. The boy or man who, at the most impressionable period of his Ufe, lives in company with heroes, whether of history or of fiction, has every chance to realize his own possibili- ties of heroic devotion. Of course this privilege, like 159 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN every other, can be abused. There will be some who will become dreamers instead of heroes, — who will take the enjoyment furnished by the past, and give nothing in return. But fortunately, the atmosphere in our bet- ter colleges is not favorable to the dreamer. It offers a strong stimulus to work. This work may not always be directed on the Hues which teachers, or even parents, would most approve. It may manifest itseK on the foot- ball field or on the river with far more spontaneity than in the classroom; but as long as those who seek their glory in athletic sports are subjected to rigid training rules, we need have little fear that the power directed into these channels will prove a total loss. That a university, as to-day constituted, gives opportunities for waste of time, none can deny; but that such waste is habitual I beheve no one who has studied the facts would be disposed for a moment to admit. If what has been said in the preceding paragraphs is true, those very parts of our collegiate education which are less immediately practical, and winch seem to give the most opportunity for misdirected energy, are the ones which have their highest usefulness in the preparation for the citizenship of the commonwealth. 160 THE DIRECTION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT Of the many distinctive features of American life there is none which more forcibly strikes a keen observer than the habit of private munificence in the foundation of universities. Other aspects may seem more noticeable to the man who looks only at the sur- face, — our material prosperity, our fertility in mechan- ical invention, our progress in business organization, our achievements in applying, on a large scale, the principle of political equality. But none of these things has the fundamentally distinctive character which is possessed by our system of university endowment. Each is but the reproduction on broader lines of things which the Old World has done before, and still is doing. Our system of higher education has character- istics of its own. The European observer has been accustomed to see colleges that were founded under ecclesiastical control, and colleges that were founded under political control. He finds in the experiences of older countries a counterpart, more or less complete, to the early history of Harvard and of Yale, of the Uni- versity of Michigan or the University of California. But he can find no parallel in Europe to our great movement of the last forty years toward the private endowment of free educational institutions, — that move- ment which has resulted in the establishment of Cor- 11 161 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN nell, of Johns Hopkins, and of Chicago ; that movement which has, by its indirect influence, modified the char- acter of other institutions, so that the old denomina- tional and partisan control has become in many cases a thing of the past. It is now more than thirty years since this series of foundations began. Their extent and their success have more than realized the expectations of the most sanguine. The number and magnitude of private gifts to higher education increases year by year. The insti- tutions founded by these gifts have had careers of great prosperity; and each, as it in turn attains its majority, can point with satisfaction to the honorable realization of the general purpose with which it was created. But the specific direction which has been taken by these institutions has been in many respects different from what was expected. It was confidently predicted that the results of these endowments would show themselves in one of three ways : either by an increased populariza- tion of learning, which should make the university thus founded a vast lyceum; or by a development of new facilities for technical training, which should equip the student to make a better living by modern methods than he could by old ones ; or, by the establishment of more numerous places for the endowment of scientific research and discovery, where a relatively small number of specialists should be encouraged to prosecute, in learned isolation, those studies whose results should form a basis for the progress of mankind. Not one of these three ideals has been realized. On the contrary, the education furnished by the colleges and universities under new methods of endowment has been singularly like that which was given by many of the older institutions. Not that the new universities 162 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT have slavishly patterned their methods and courses upon those of their predecessors ; but that all institu- tions, new or old, ecclesiastical, political, or springing from private endowment, have been compelled by force of circumstances to approximate toward a common type more or less independent of the wishes of those who established and controlled them. That this process has been on the whole a salutary one I think there can be no doubt. Whether the founders of these several institutions foresaw the gen- eral lines of their future history — as in some cases they undoubtedly did — or whether they builded better than they knew, the type of the modern American university has in it profounder capacities for public service than would be furnished by any lyceum however broad, by any group of technical schools however practical, or by any aggregation of scientific specialists however dis- interested in their devotion to their several pursuits. It is the purpose of this address to discuss these three conceptions of a university: as a popularizer of knowl- edge, as a training place for professional experts, and as a home of scientific specialists ; to show wherein the modern American university type differs from each and all of these three ; and to indicate the reasons why the type which has thus developed itself is a natural out- growth of the profoundest needs of the American people. The conception that the American university reaches its highest usefulness in popularizing knowledge is a favorite one in many quarters. Those who look at the matter in this way reason somewhat as follows: It is the function of a university to give knoAvledge of sci- ence and art. The exigencies of the American people, its democratic government, its theory of equality of 163 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN mankind, require that such knowledge should be as widely diffused as possible. The public schools are able to do this during the early years of life and in the more elementary branches of instruction. The univer- sity ought to do this, and to find its widest scope of usefulness in doing this, for persons in more advanced years wishing to continue liberal studies on a higher scale. Those who hold this view think that the uni- versity, within its own limits, is a place where any man can pursue any subject of learning which he de- sires ; and they further believe that it should go outside its own limits, and furnish lecture courses which will bring within the reach of the whole community the results of most modern investigations in science, in art, and in history. Each of these conceptions has in it much that is noble. Each is good in its own place. I would not for one moment undervalue the zeal of those who strive to supplement the deficiencies of early training by attendance on courses of lectures at the university or under its auspices; but I should be disposed to warn them and to warn the public against overestimating the value of education which can be obtained in this way. Speaking broadly, lectures do a great deal less good than is popularly supposed. Very few men or women gain as much real mental benefit by hearing a lecture as they gain by reading a book. The personal magnetism of the lecturer carries the members of his audience with him, and leads them to believe that they possess the real knowledge which the}^ seek ; but this belief is too often a delusion, worse than useless in its results. In reading a book or a magazine the serious student can stop and think over the difficulties as they arise, in order to be sure that he understands each proposition 164 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT before he passes on to the next. It is true that he has not the advantage of making inquiry of the author concerning his own special difficulties ; but the superior chance of making inquiry of himself many times out- weighs the inferior chance of making inquiry of another. It is a misconception to regard the university of to-day as being primarily a centre for the diffusion of learning. That work of diffusion is mainly done, and, on the whole, better done, by the printing-press. What a man is anxious to communicate to the public speedily he now puts into a newspaper or magazine ; what he is ready to communicate to the public deliberately he puts into a book. In either case he lays down his points just as clearly as he possibly can. If the reader cannot follow them, it is either because the subject is too diffi- cult for him, or because he lacks the power of concen- trated attention which is necessary for mastering any abstruse subject whatever. So far as lectures mask the difficulties of the topic treated, or lead people to expect others to do the work of riveting their attention, instead of relying upon themselves for this prime necessity, so far they are likely to prove a positive harm. The true function of a university is the creation of knowledge rather than its diffusion. It must be a centre of thought where old and young, leaders and followers, are working together in a common line, learning those principles and making those discoveries which are trans- mitted to the public through a variety of agencies, of which the lecture platform is but one, and in no wise the most important. Widely different, and in some respects sounder, is the position of those who regard the university as a group of schools for technical training. These men recognize the force of all that has been said concerning 165 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN the necessity of class work and the value of hard study- by men organized in groups. They hold that this classroom work and study should be so ordered as to give the utmost advantage to those who are fitting themselves for various lines of professional life. They would have matters so arranged that in the briefest time possible a man might become an able lawyer, or engineer, or physician; they would, in short, offer facilities whereby a man should learn to pursue each important calling — commercial, manufacturing, or agri- cultural — by the best scientific methods. In this way, we are told, the efficiency of the citizens of our republic would be greatly increased, the time of preparation for their lifework would be kept within reasonable limits, and their productivity, whether in earning a living for themselves or in serving those about them, would be raised many times above its present basis. All this is doubtless true ; yet it does not represent the whole work which a university ought to do, and perhaps not the largest part of it. Consistently carried out, this plan tends to fit a man to take his place as part of a social machine ; it does not educate him to be a fully developed citizen of a commonwealth. In fact, its effect in the latter respect may be positively bad. Education which is too exclusively technical exagger- ates the tendency, already too strong at the present day, to measure things solely by their commercial value. Anything which tends to exalt professional skill as an ideal in education, and ignores the need of wider ideals, both in intellect and character, fails to train a race of freemen. I would not for one moment depreciate the work of a good law school or a good scientific school, of a good medical college or a good agricultural college ; but I would insist most emphatically that a college of 166 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT American citizens must be something more than any of these, or than all of them put together. The third of these partial or imperfect conceptions of a university is that of a place exclusively devoted to scientific research. Those who hold this view have much that is right and noble in their ideal. They understand that the creation of knowledge is a greater and more difficult work than its diffusion; and they recognize the duty of the university to assume this work, with all the difficulties which it involves. They also have the merit, doubly important in these days, of insisting on non-commercial standards. They would inculcate the pursuit of truth for its own sake, inde- pendent of the question of its economic productivity to the student. They advocate and develop one of the noblest parts of university life. But, in spite of all this, they are far from having grasped the full concep- tion of what universities can do for the country. The scientific specialist, so long as he remains a specialist, is something less than a whole man. A university whose teaching force is composed of such specialists, and which stimulates the development of such special- ists throughout its student body, is imperfectly fulfil- ling its functions in training the coming generation for the responsibilities of their life. It is simply a peculiar kind of technical school; exceptional in its character, indeed, because it teaches its students to make dis- coveries instead of to make money, but, nevertheless, occupied with the training of a particular class rather than with the education of the body politic. Valuable as are the services of that class, and important as it is to endow the research of those who are serving the public in non-remunerative lines, we cannot regard the scientific specialist as the consummate flower of 167 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN American education, any more than is the specialist in law or in medicine, in engineering or in theology. The most profoundly important work which falls to the lot of the American citizen is his work of guiding the destinies of the country. It is at once his greatest privilege and his heaviest duty. If we train the mem- bers of the rising generation to do this well, all other things can be trusted to take care of themselves. If we do not train them to do this well, no amount of edu- cation in other lines will make up for the deficiency. The founders of our nation saw that free men must have the knowledge necessary to enable them to use that freedom to the public advantage. The American public school system owes its origin to this perception. It was intended to give our citizens the intelligence necessary for the performance of their political duties. As the degree of enlightenment necessary for the fulfil- ment of those duties has increased, the scope of public school education has also widened. But we are grad- ually coming to perceive that we need a change in the quality of our training even more than in its quantity. Mere intelligence on the part of the voters, however great, is not sufficient to secure wise administration of the affairs of the country as a whole. Each change in industrial and political methods makes it clearer that they must have also a sense of trusteeship; and the training of this sense of trusteeship is at once a more difficult and a more important thing than the develop- ment of mere political intelligence. Without this sense we can have no public sentiment, in the true meaning of the word. Without it we may perhaps be capable of dealing with small things, but we are helpless in the presence of great ones. Without it we find ourselves each year less competent to handle either our industrial 168 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT or our political problems in the interest of the common- wealth as a whole. The task of creating this sense of trusteeship is so great as to require the co-operation of many agencies. But there is no one part of our national life where there are so many opportunities for its development as in our colleges and universities. Their members are still at an impressionable age. They are living in communi- ties, each of which has its traditions, its collective sentiment, and its loyalty which carries the individual outside of himself. Here, if anywhere, we have free- dom from that excessive commercialism which domi- nates most other departments of American life. Here, if anywhere, we have the opportunity for the study of those things which are broad instead of those which are narrow, of things which are permanent instead of those which are transitory. Here we have, as it exists nowhere else, the opportunity to make men acquire the habit of thinking and living in an atmosphere purer than that of their own selfish interests. It is impossible to say in detail exactly what studies and arrangements of the course will best conduce toward these ends. Different men and different localities re- quire a certain degree of difference in the education which is required to train them in public spirit. It is, however, possible to lay down certain general principles which are of service in this respect, and whose impor- tance is gradually being recognized by leaders of higher education ; who, starting from widely divergent stand- points, are gradually coming nearer one another in principles and in practice. It must be recognized, in the first place, that a large part of the education which is obtained by the students of the university is that which they themselves give to 1.69 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN one another. This is true to a large degree in matters of intellect. It is true to an overwhelming degree in matters of sentiment and public spirit. However great may be the value of the instruction obtained in the classroom, and of the facilities which a college offers by its libraries and its laboratories, it is probable that only a small minority of the students finds its chief profit from this source. The thing which makes college life of the greatest value to the citizenship of the country is that the men and women who come under its influence get a larger acquaintance with different types of char- acter and with different lines of human thought, as exemplified by living people. Book learning alone tends to have a narrowing effect on the intellectual vision. In order that it may become a means of char- acter building, it is of the utmost importance that it should be pursued in the midst of a community with collective interests and activities, which take its mem- bers outside of themselves. Those collegiate authorities who deem their responsibility to be ended when they have provided books and apparatus, lectures and classes, take a fatally incomplete view of their duties. Upon them rests the further responsibility to do all that they can to preserve the traditions and sentiments in a place of which they themselves are the permanent population, amid shifting generations of students. Upon them rests the responsibility for the preservation of standards of public order in the community about them ; for the maintenance, as far as lies in their power, of athletic purity and fairness in the dealings of each university with its rivals; for the fullest development of those religious sentiments of reverence and self-devotion without which churches are powerless, and creeds are but empty forms. 170 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT In order that our collegiate courses should thus furnish means of mutual education, their studies must be so arranged as to attract the kind of students who are capable of giving this education to one another. For this there is one prime necessity, without which all else is useless. The course must be one for workers and not for idlers. It must furnish hard tasks, not only for the effect of those tasks upon the individual, but still more for their effect in making the college a place for students who are not afraid of difficulties. Poor as was the curriculum of our colleges at the begin- ning of the century, it had this cardinal merit, that it admitted no loafing. The men who lived for four years in its atmosphere might obtain a narrow conception of learning, and go forth into the world scantily provided with practical equipment for the details of life; but they had obtained that habit of determination in the face of difficulties which does more than everything else to make a body of men powerful in their several spheres. The problem is no longer so simple as it was in the days of the early New England colleges. Modern educators have given us new methods of teaching; modern life has given us a new range of interests; modern technical training claims its share of the time of the student in his collegiate years no less than in his years of professional study. We must see to it that we offer our students the benefit of all these things, without sacrificing those fundamental characteristics which made the colleges of the earlier generation great. Our course must be sufficiently modern to attract liv- ing men and women, yet it must not deal with things so exclusively modern that it is a distraction instead of a means of cohesion. It must deal in proper proportion 171 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN with the classic literature of different nations, not simply because of the effect of those classics, whether ancient or modern, in forming the judgments of the students themselves, but for the sake of attracting a student body which cares for something profounder than the novel or drama of the day, for something wider than the present in literature, in art, and in his- tory. Our course must deal with matters sufficiently practical to prevent the students from feeling that they have wasted their time ; but, on the other hand, it must avoid the far greater danger of becoming so exclusively practical that it does not teach theory. It must admit of a sufficient degree of specialization to allow those students for whom time is money to share in its advan- tages as a basis for their professional careers; but if this specialization goes so far as to make the course attractive only to those students whose interests are special rather than general, and to confirm them in their withdrawal from the broader aspects of life in the college and in the world, so far does it defeat our purpose of training citizens in public spirit. Finally, in the later years of university life, when the foundations of general interest have been laid, and specialized work of professional preparation has become the dominant aim, we must see to it that the students are educated in broad aspects of professional action rather than narrow ones. It is a mistake, on every ground, if a school makes its work a mere anticipation of the teaching of the office or the shop; for in after life the things which it thus teaches generally have to be learned over again, while the things which it thereby fails to teach are generally not learned at all. In thus emphasizing the broad instead of the narrow sides of professional study, and the importance of trains- 172 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEVELOPMENT ing in theory rather than training in practice, I do not for one moment mean to depreciate tlie value of the work which is done in laboratories, in individual inves- tigations, and in all those things which make a man master of the applications of the science or art which he is studying. But they should be regarded as appli- cations rather than primary objects. The laboratory should be a thought-shop rather than a workshop. It should be an auxiliary to the understanding of prin- ciples rather than a preparation for the doing of details. So soon as the man values the shopwork for its own sake, rather than as a means of education, he starts on the wrong road. One of the ablest and largest employers of labor in the transportation industries of the country has said that there is no evil so hard to correct as that overvaluation of mere mechanical work to which some of the misdirected professional schools conduce. Nor does the harm stop with the individual. It affects his attitude toward his fellow men. It tends to make the professions of our country mechanical in their worst sense, reducing their members to the level of parts of a machine, instead of raising them to their responsibilities as independent members of a body politic. There was a time, not so many years ago, when these great principles seemed in peril of being forgotten ; when there was danger that general training would be sacrificed to technical training ; that breadth would give place to specialization ; and that, in the furtherance of the education given by professors in their classrooms, we should neglect to consider that wider education given by the students to one another. But with the problems which have been forced upon us as a nation, we have come to consider more seriously the means 173 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN which are needed to meet them ; and the result of that consideration is showing itself in the direction of uni- versity development to-day. Without sacrificing their thoroughness, the older colleges have expanded their sphere of interest. Without sacrificing their character as public institutions, the state universities have allowed new sentiments and traditions to grow about them. The recent private foundations, under wise and able leadership, have striven with marked success to select what was best in either type, and to add their own con- tribution thereto. Now, as never before, the leaders of college education in this country, while differing in the detail of their methods, are animated by a common purpose. It is not enough for them to popularize learn- ing, to train professional experts, or even to furnish laboratories for scientific research. All these things they do; but all these things they use as a means to the greater end of training the citizens of the republic to assume the new trusts and obligations which the future has in store. Not in the promotion of different churches, not in the development of different sections, not even in the elevation of different callings, do our universities place their ideal ; but in the service of one learning, of one country, and of one God. 174 FUNDAMENTAL EEQUIREMENTS IN SCHOOL EDUCATION Feom the time of De Quincey onward, it has been a familiar thought that good teaching aims at two distinct objects: the imparting of knowledge and the evoking of power. Only when it combines both these achieve- ments can a school system claim to have accomplished its purpose. It should give its pupils, before they go out into practical life, sufficient knowledge to enable them to move intelligently among the men and things which surround them, and sufficient power to use that knowledge in the various emergencies which are likely to arise. The old educational system was almost entirely occu- pied with the production of power. Whatever knowl- edge it imparted was incidental, and was confined within very narrow lines. Every boy or girl was ex- pected to learn the three R's, — reading, writing and arithmetic. If the school children of past generations pursued their studies faithfully, they found themselves equipped with these three tools of trade, and with little else. If, in the course of their efforts to learn to read, they had caught some knowledge of history or science or literature, this was a fortunate accident, in which they had the advantage of most of their fellows. Even if they went on from school to college, the same narrow- ness of training was continued. Their time was de- 175 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN voted chiefly to classics and mathematics, with a little metaphysics, — • all valuable as exercises for the mind ; all capable, in the hands of a good teacher, of helping the student to obtain power of expression for his thoughts; but all conveying very slight knowledge of literature, still less of art, and none of modern science. Within the last fifty years there has been a reaction. Our discoveries in the world of nature have been so important that they have secured increasing recognition of their results in school courses. This widened study of modern science has been attended by an increased attention to modern literature also. The pupils have been given the opportunity to know things which were worth knowing, and to read things which were worth reading. This movement has resulted not only in the addition of new subjects of study, but in a radical change of m^hod of teaching the old ones. Arithmetic or geography, as now handled, is a very different thing from what it was fifty years ago. It is full of illustra- tion adapted to the needs and interests of each child. It is rendered pleasant and easy instead of hard. These tendencies have made themselves felt alike in the col- leges and the high schools, the grammar schools and the kindergartens. In place of a curriculum designed for mental discipline, through which all were compelled to pass, we have an educational system intended to give knowledge and the enjoyment connected with the acquirement of knowledge; taking account of the vari- ous tastes of children in the successive stages of their progress, and branching, at a comparatively early date, into an elective system, whereby each student can choose those subjects which he most needs or appreciates. There can be no doubt that this reaction from the excessive narrowness of the old-fashioned courses of 176 FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION study has been in many ways a salutary thing. We may, however, fairly raise the question whether it has not gone too far; whether, in meeting the increased demands for knowledge, we are not sacrificing the assurance of training in power; whether a generation of children which has been taught to read a few inter- esting works of literature and to know a number of important facts in natural science, but which is not over-strong in arithmetic and is distinctly weak in spelling, is quite so well educated as it claims to be. In asking this question we do not cast ridicule on modern methods of teaching. Some of those who are to-day propounding it most seriously are the very men who twenty years ago were most active in the introduc- tion of these methods. Just because they understand the need of a really liberal education, they feel the necessity of seeing that this education shall l)e placed upon a solid basis. They are not arguing against giv- ing modern classics, especially those in our own lan- guage, a full recognition side by side with ancient classics, nor against letting modern science take the place of ancient philosophy; but they are arguing for such care in the introduction of these changes and in the pursuit of these studies as shall prevent them from becoming a mere distraction and shall allow them to remain a discipline. There is good reason to raise a voice of warning against one-sided absorption in modern educational ideals, to the exclusion of everything else. We are in the presence of a combination of causes which produce a real danger that our teachers will lay too much stress on knowledge and too little on power. In the first place, the pupils, with few exceptions, enjoy being taught knowledge, and do not enjoy being 12 177 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN taught power. The teaching of knowledge satisfies their curiosity; and anything which satisfies curiosity is a pleasure to the average child no less than to the average adult. The teaching of power fatigues their mind; and the average child dislikes mental fatigue almost as much as the average grown person. There is an apparent spontaneity in the study of facts, especially when it is varied to suit the immediate tastes of the children. There is an apparent irksomeness in the study of principles which are intended to give future power. It too often happens that the active and enter- prising teacher, who desires spontaneous manifestations of life on the part of his pupils, is thus led to give undue preference to the less important part of his work. In the next place, the teacher likes to see tangible results; and the imparting of knowledge gives those results. When a pupil has mastered a fact, this can he made evident immediately; while it takes days and weeks to be sure that he has mastered a principle. Moreover, the teacher, unless he be a very exceptional person, is likely to overestimate the amount which he has achieved when he has taught the child a few facts. He thinks that he has trained the attention of the pupil, when really he has only given that pupil things which he liked, and made him less capable rather than more capable of attending to things which he does not like. Many a student in our modern schools has been simply stuffed with the sugar plums of education. By offering a child a pound of candy you can very rapidly increase his weight by one pound, and can produce all the external symptoms of a vigorous appetite ; but any sensible man or woman knows that the weight thus gained is transient, and the appetite thus evoked worse than illusory. 178 FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION Unfortunately, there are a great many people who are not sensible in judging educational effects ; and these people aid and abet the teachers in their desire to show tangible results in the form of gratified curios- ity and acquired knowledge. The parents are pleased to have the pupils interested in their studies. The committees are pleased to have the pupils acquainted with so many facts of modern life. Not until the value of studies is tested by their effects upon working efficiency does the public find how imperfectly it has measured the relative importance of different kinds of education. This test begins to come as soon as pupils pass from schools of a lower grade to those of a higher. It is too often found that the studies which have aroused the srreatest immediate interest and attention are bad rather than good as a preparation for further pursuit of school work. The high school feels this in taking students from the common school ; the college feels it in taking students from the high school. While the teachers who have charge of the pupil at an earlier age are pressing for variety of studies and knowledge of many kinds, those who have charge of these pupils in sub- sequent years are disposed to insist on the necessity of stricter previous training in a relatively small number of fields. They see that much which is regarded as a variety of intellectual stimulus is really a sort of in- tellectual dissipation; and they say that those pupils alone are prepared to go on with higher studies who have learned to do hard work without the artificial stimulus incident to such dissipation. It is quite possible that the teachers in our colleges are wrong in laying too much stress on the preparatory side of the high school course ; for the majority of 179 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN pupils in high schools do not and cannot enter college. It is in like manner possible that the high school teachers are wrong in insisting that the grammar school studies should be arranged with a view toward preparation for high school needs ; for only a part of our grammar school pupils can ever hope to attend the high school. But it is quite certainly an error to go to the opposite extreme ; to say that the grammar school course must be so arranged as to give the maximum development and enjoyment to the grammar school pupil, and that the high schools must arrange to fit their work upon it ; or to say that the high school course must be adapted to the general needs of high school pupils alone, and that the colleges must take as a preparation for their students the thing which proves best for those who are not going to be their students. We may as well recognize the fact that there is a real conflict of inter- ests, in each grade, between the pupils who are not going any further and those who are. If a pupil, whether in the grammar school or the high school, is near the end of his course of study, he doubtless needs to get a good deal of descriptive science at that point ; because if he does not get it then, he probably never will get it at all, and in this age of the world no one can be called educated who has not some general knowl- edge of science. But if some other pupil who is laying the foundation for years of subsequent study is thus allowed to substitute descriptive science for arithmetic, or algebra, or trigonometry, according to the stage of development which he may have reached, it is not simply a waste of time ; it may readily prove a positive harm. Many a boy has suffered actual injury by study- ing too extensively into the phenomena of force before he has mastered the mathematical principles which 180 "^ FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION regulate them. His apparent knowledge of fact, com- bined with a real ignorance of underlying principle, has produced in his mind such an inversion of the true order of things, and destroyed so much his power of really reasoning about those things, that it proves a handicap for many years afterward. Nor is it in theoret- ical studies alone that these difficulties and losses are felt. Leading employers of labor in the more complex branches of mechanical engineering tell me that those students who have allowed their laboratory practice to degenerate into shop work, and who have treated their experiments in the scientific school not as means of mastering principles, but as things valuable in their own sake, have almost fatally undermined their power of rising to the higher walks of the profession. In like manner it is of great consequence that the pupils in every stage of school life should have as much knowledge of literature as our teachers can give them ; but if those who are expecting to pursue literary studies in connection with their professional work — whether in the ministry, the law, or the field of journal- ism — allow their enjoyment of books to interfere with accurate study of expression, and with that mastery of language which can only be obtained by hard work over individual words, we have purchased a small gain at an incalculable price. Ruskin has said — nor is he alone in saying it — that the apparent culmination of the art of a people is the beginning of its decadence. When a school of artists begins to branch out into the full enjoyment of its powers, it indicates that the underlying development of power is drawing near to its close. This analogy holds good, to a large degree, in the life history of each indi- vidual. That stage of education where the boy or girl 181 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN is allowed to reap the largest tangible fruits in the way of enjoyment of science and literature seems to be, in nine cases out of ten, precisely the time when hold on concentrated power is being relaxed instead of tightened. An illustration from another field of education, which is not officially recognized as part of our school system, will serve to make this point clearer. The inexperi- enced trainer who attempts to develop a football team usually begins by teaching his men an extensive knowl- edge of the game. He shows them formations which they can employ and tricks which they can practise. Those formations and those tricks will cause them to win against inexperienced opponents. But after a few days of that kind of play they will find that they have reached the limit of their development; that they can- not go on, and are almost sure to fall back. On the other hand, the experienced coach or captain will, in the first days of his season, teach his men to play foot- ball, — clean, straight, hard, uninteresting football. Not until a few days before the final trial will he teach those details of formation which to the student of the game are matters of such surpassing interest. So well known has this principle become that the success or failure of a team during its season is dependent on the observance or non-observance of this principle. The teaching of details must be reserved for the culminating stage of training, instead of being advanced to the prepara- tory one. It will perhaps be said that these suggestions are vague and general, and that they need to be made much more specific before they can be put into practice. I acknowledge the justice of this objection. What has been thus far said is intended to afford a point of view 182 FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION rather than to present a detailed scheme of education. But there are certain practical consequences that follow the adoption of this point of view which are sufficiently clear to be formulated in detail. One of these has already been plainly implied. If the views thus far advanced are correct, we must, in the educational scheme of the future, look forward to a separation of groups of students, not so much on the line of their different tastes as on the line of probable duration of the educational course. I am aware that this idea is not in harmony with the general tendency of the moment. That tendency is to have the students divided into groups according to their different mental tastes. In those colleges which have the elective sys- tem this idea is completely carried out. In the high schools it is being developed to a considerable degree. There is a demand in certain quarters for its introduc- tion into the grammar schools. But the difficulties and the evils attendant upon this movement have become so manifest that voices are being everywhere raised in protest against its further extension. It is seen that the apparent tastes of the pupil, at any rate in the earlier stages of his education, are a very unsafe guide in determining what education he really requires. I am inclined to think that different kinds of pupils in our secondary schools need not so much an opportunity to pursue different groups of studies as an opportunity to pursue the same group in different ways; the differ- ence being determined by the question whether the course in any subject is intended to be a finishing course or a preparation for something more thorough. In the former case it will need to be made as extensive as possible, with a view of imparting the necessary minimum of knowledge. In the latter case it will need 183 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN to be made as intensive as possible, in order that the student may attain that maximum of power which shall enable him sucessfully to use and apply the knowl- edge which he will subsequently acquire. Take a concrete instance from our experience in teaching law to college classes. It is extremely desirable that our graduates, as they go out into the world, shall have a general knowledge of legal principles and their applica- tions to problems which confront the citizen. It is possible in a course of two or three hours per week to give the student this general knowledge. To the man who does not expect to be a lawyer this is invaluable. But to the man who looks forward to the law as a career it has surprisingly little use. The whole matter has from the necessities of the case been so superficially dealt with that no foundation is given for the closer and more thorough study which is required of the specialist. To reach the needs of these two distinct sets of men we have to arrange two courses of instruc- tion, — one broad and relatively superficial, the other narrow and profound. Such a separation doubtless has its inconveniences ; and it may well be that these incon- veniences are greater in the schools than in the colleges. But I think there can be no question that it would be salutary in its effects, both on those who were complet- ing their school course and upon those who still had years of study before them. And if it is thus salutary, its adoption as a principle will in the long run produce economy rather than waste. In the next place a very heavy duty rests upon those in charge of our high schools and colleges so to arrange their examinations that teachers in the earlier stages of the educational system will be helped rather than hin- dered in their efforts to insist on the necessity of train- 184 FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION ing for future work. Entrance examinations should be made tests of the power to go on with what is before the pupils rather than tests of acquirement in what is behind them. With the pressure that is placed upon our common school teachers to secure immediate results — pressure coming alike from their pupils, from their own ambitions, and from the outside public — the very least that the authorities in schools of higher grade can do is to lend their aid in resisting such tendencies. Above all things, let us not yield to the fallacy that a great amount of knowledge can be allowed to make good a deficiency of power as an indication of fitness to proceed further. The boy or girl who knows many things superficially and nothing systematically had bet- ter be advised to go out into practical life at once. The subsequent school life of such a boy or girl is likely to be illusory in its benefits. The college course which attracts such persons operates as an incentive to waste of time. Students of this type are the ones who bring upon our colleges the reproach of inefficiency; and those colleges who, by their methods of admission and instruction, lay themselves open to this reproach, are guilty of the gravest dereliction of their duty. In whatever studies we may select for our school course, we should lay emphasis on training in principles K rather than on attention to details. Modern educational authorities insist that teachers should be as concrete as possible in all their statements, and should enforce them by illustrations which will appeal to the imagination. This concreteness has great value in its proper place ; but it may sometimes be car- ried too far. In many cases the illustration is the one thing that remains in the mind of the child, and the principle which it is intended to develop is lost sight 185 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN of. The pupil's natural tendency to lay stress on accessories and incidents is so great that it needs no artificial encouragement. I can testify personally that, though I spent nearly a year in the study of Arnold's Latin Prose Composition, the salient facts which re- main in my mind are that Balbus built a wall, and that it makes no difference to Balbus whether he drinks wine or water ; while the methods of translating these things into Latin have passed wholly out of mind. I can also state from experience that three men of my own age, who compared their recollections of Green- leaf's Common School Arithmetic, all remembered that A. Atwood can hoe a certain field in ten days, and with the assistance of his son Jerry can hoe it in seven days, and with the assistance of his son Jacob can hoe it in six days; and that the further question was asked how long it would take Jerry and Jacob to hoe it together; but what the answer was to that question, or what were the means by which the answer was obtained, were things of which they professed no recollection. The true function of the concrete illustration in arith- metic or in any other study is like that of the concrete experiment in physics. Whether it is a help or a hindrance to teaching will depend upon the spirit in which it is used. Attention to the detail of the illus- tration is good up to a certain point ; beyond that point it causes the illustration to be remembered for its own sake, and not for the sake of what it proves. A mere difference of emphasis, repeated fifty times a day, will make all the difference between good teaching and bad teaching. Many a time have I gone into a primary school and heard the question, " Two apples and three apples make how many apples ? " Li dealing with the subject of the sentence the stress upon apples is allow- 186 FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION able enough ; but in the predicate the legitimate thing to emphasize is the phrase "how many," and any departure from this emphasis is bad teaching. It leads the child to think too much of the apples and too little of the number. The temptation to make this mistake is strong, because the child cares more about apples than it does about numbers; but the consequence of this misdirected attention is a diversion from the under- lying principle involved. The real teaching is not nearly so great in amount as the apparent teaching, nor so good in quality. This is a fact which the teacher often overlooks, and which is also overlooked, I am sorry to say, by some of the authorities in our normal schools. In these days of material progress and of specializa- tion in detail there is more need than ever of emphasiz- ing general principles. Plato was not wholly mistaken in his theory that the idea, the concept, the law, are the really fundamental things, and that the specific details which come before our eyes have their chief importance as manifestations of some underlying law or concept. It is setting a high ideal before a teacher to insist that he shall realize the meaning of this truth; and even if he has realized it in his own mind, it is a difficult thing for him to impress it upon the minds of his pupils. This represents the highest development of the art of education. Mark Hopkins in the past generation realized it in almost unrivalled fashion; William Graham Sumner exemplifies it conspicuously among the teachers of the present day. To be thus clear and concrete, so that the student shall understand what you say, without letting your concreteness with- draw his attention from the general principle, is an extremely difficult combination to attain. But it is 187 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN a confession of weakness if our school authorities let themselves be daunted by this difficulty. It is a grave mistake if our teachers allow themselves to be content with second-class work because first-class work is so much harder. It is an absolutely fatal error if we shut our eyes to the existence of the best because this represents a higher good than most of us can readily attain. Those who hold these high ideals of education must be constantly on the watch for new means and methods which shall add to the range of the pupil's power with- out degenerating into mere acquisition or intellectual dissipation. "More kinds of ability" must be our watchword, if we are to resist the ill-judged demand for more kinds of knowledge. One of the most impor- tant among these modern methods is to be sought in manual training. This is as yet in its infancy; but already the graduates of manual training schools on both sides of the water show by their proficiency in subsequent work the admirable results of the system. The Boardman School at New Haven is only a few years old; but its graduates, in their careers in the Sheffield Scientific School, have already proved that they have been trained in principles, and can master principles better than most of those whose work has been with books alone. If we insist that manual edu- cation shall be really a training, as its name implies, we can avoid the danger, always near at hand, that it shall be allowed to degenerate into a dissipation. It is of the utmost importance to make, at as early a stage as possible in the introduction of this education of the eye and hand, that distinction between the de- velopment of power and the imparting of knowledge, which is so important in matters intellectual. When 188 FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS IN EDUCATION we have once recognized that precisely the same antith- esis exists in matters of hand work which has been seen in matters of brain work, we shall be able to utilize the new methods on lines conservative instead of destructive. Finally, I believe that one of the most important applications of this idea of power-training is found in its extension to the moral side of education. We hear a great deal in these days about preparation for citizen- ship, and much effort is made to instil into the pupils the knowledge necessary for the performance of their civic duties. All this is good as far as it goes ; but we must remember that in this particular field of education every American pupil is preparing to graduate into a high school which is coextensive with American polit- ical and social life. The whole activity of the citizen is a course of higher education in morality — an educa- tion which may be rightly directed or wrongly directed, used or misused, but in which the citizen is engaged as long as he lives. If this is true — and there is no question of its truth — any attempt to make informa- tion take the place of discipline is a menace to our national life for a generation to come. As a prepara- tion for the school of national politics, ten hours of training in civics are not the equivalent of one minute of training in order and obedience. It will be fatal if, in our anxiety to develop the one, we should lose sight of the paramount necessity of the other. Let us then, in our capacity as teachers, never forget the importance of power as compared with knowledge. Let us not allow the public overestimate of details to blind us to the paramount necessity of training in prin- ciples. Let us arrange our courses and our examina- tions with a view to prevent, rather than to increase, the danger of intellectual dissipation. In all the de- 189 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN partments of our life — the intellectual, manual, and moral — let us be true to our primary duty of educating not only men and women who know the truth, but men and women who have strength to pursue it and determi- nation to stand by it under all conditions. 190 THE USE AND CONTROL OP EXAMINATIONS Every practical educator knows that an examination has two aspects, — one looking toward the past, the other toward the future. It is a means of proving the student's attainment in that which has gone before ; it is also a means of testing his power for that which is to come. It protects our schools against waste of time in the days which precede it, by setting a mark which the pupil must reach. It protects our colleges against waste of time in the days that follow it, by giving us a basis on which to group our classes and arrange the tasks which are imposed. It is at once a measure of proficiency in what has been previously learned, and of power for what as yet remains unlearned. Unfortunately, these two qualities do not always coincide. We have all had experience with pupils who have been faithful in the performance of their duties, and have acquired that kind of knowledge which enables them to pass a well-conducted examination creditably, but who do not possess that degree of mental training which fits them to go on toward higher studies side by side with those whose acquirements may be less, but whose grasp of principles is stronger. Pro- ficiency in subjects studied during the few months previous to the examination is largely a matter of memory; and it not infrequently happens that such 191 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN memory is most highly developed in those very pupils who have done comparatively little real thinking for themselves. This difficulty may be lessened by skill in arranging the examination; but, strive as we may, it can never be wholly eliminated. On the contrary, it is a thing which is increased by many of our modern changes, both in courses of study and in methods of examination. In many of the older subjects of study the difficulty hardly exists at all. Take mathematics, for instance. In this group of sciences proficiency in one grade is almost synonymous with power to go on with the next. There may be a few children with minds so peculiarly constructed that they are accurate "lightning calcula- tors," and of very little use for anything else; but such children are the exception and not the rule. In gen- eral, the boy or girl who has mastered the simple operations of arithmetic is competent to go on with the more complex ones ; while the boy or girl who fails in these simple matters shows corresponding unfitness for what is more advanced. Similarly, knowledge of arithmetic as a whole is a test of fitness to study algebra; knowledge of algebra a prerequisite to ana- lytical geometry; knowledge of analytical geometry a necessity for the student who would go on into the differential calculus. What is true of mathematics is also true of grammar, and of those older forms of linguistic study which were based upon grammatical drill as a foundation. With proficiency in the elements advanced class-work was made possible and profitable ; without it the pupil wasted his own time and that of his fellows. But with new subjects and with new modes of teach- ing this necessary sequence is less marked. In study- 192 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS ing literature, or history, or descriptive science, even by the methods which are regarded as most modern, there is no such connection between attainment in what is past and power over what is to come. It is not certain that the pupil who remembers the answers to the questions which are asked in most of our literature examinations thereby proves his fitness to read with profit the works which are to follow. It is not suj-e that power to remember the facts of history which are taught in elementary classes connotes a corresponding power to use those facts in advanced studies. It is even less probable that the results of a course in descriptive science pursued at an early age show any indication of power to pursue this subject farther. I do not wish to be understood as objecting to modern methods of science study. For those who are not going to carry these matters to a point where power in scientific research is needed, they are a very valuable means of general information. But for that minority which does need to develop power in research such premature acquirements are often a hindrance rather than a help. One of the few men in the country who combines high attainments in theoretical and practical physics — a man eminent alike as an investigator, a teacher, and an inventor — is authority for the statement that you cannot make a really good physicist out of a boy who has been put through a full course of descriptive science before he has studied the mathematical principles which underlie it. I do not know whether this broad generali- zation can be proved. I am inclined to think it an over-statement. But the fact that such a statement can be made by a responsible man shows that there is no necessary connection, but rather a conspicuous ab- sence of connection, between acquirements in elemen- 13 193 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN tary science as now taught, and power to go on with that science into classes which do work of a really advanced character. Side by side with this change in subjects, there has been a change of methods of examination. Two genera- tions ago a large part of our tests were oral. To-day the increased size of the classes has necessitated the use of written examinations. That the change has been on the whole a salutary as well as a necessary one I do not question. In an oral examination the personal element is so strongly accentuated that it is almost impossible to have a guarantee of fairness in its administration. However good may be the intentions of the examiner, he cannot always keep himself free from his own pre- judgments ; while the absence of any permanent record to which appeal can be made prevents us from applying a corrective to the wrong impressions of the moment. But the effect of the change has been to make the examination more exclusively a test of proficiency in what is past and to render it less available as a measure of power for what is to come. In the oral method, if it was well conducted, the examiner found some branch of the subject with which the pupil was familiar, and there proved or disproved the thoroughness of his knowledge. By so doing the examiner could find out what the pupil really thought about the subject rather than what he more or less mechanically remembered. But the written examination, even in the best hands, is apt to be a proof of the range of a student's proficiency rather than of its thoroughness. In the majority of the subjects on which we have to examine, it is almost impossible to construct a paper which will test the student's reasoning power as adequately as it tests his memory. It too often becomes a mere inquiry as to 194 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS the extent of the pupil's knowledge. Whenever this is the case, it loses the major part of its value as a measure of fitness for anything which is to come afterward. The evils thus far described are felt in all examina- tions, no matter by whom they may be conducted. But they show themselves with peculiar force whenever the student passes out of one school or one stage of his educational work and into another. In rising from class to class within the limits of a single institution, the pupil remains under the charge of a head master, who can, to a large degree, correct the evils inherent in the examination system. He can direct his subordi- nates to base their scheme of promotion on records of special work and other matters outside of the scope of the examination itself. He can so arrange the course of study that entrance to higher grades depends upon merit in particular lines rather than on general pro- ficiency or faithfulness. When, however, the student passes from the control of one authority to another independent one, it is very hard to carry any such policy into effect. The difficulty is seen at its worst in civil service examinations, where a candidate's entrance into government employment is made to depend upon tests of past acquirement which can, at best, very imper- fectly indicate his fitness to serve the country in the line which he has chosen. I would not for one moment undervalue the good which has been done by the adop- tion of the examination system as a basis for appoint- ment in our civil service; but I believe it to be generally admitted, even among the friends of that system, that its value depends upon its effect in elimi- nating the grossly incompetent, who rely on political influence alone, rather than upon its accuracy in deter- 195 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN mining the applicant's probable usefulness as a public servant. The same difficulty exists, though in less degree, in the transition from one grade of educational institution to another. It is felt in the passage from grammar school to high school, from high school to college, and from college to professional school. In going from grammar school to high school, or from college to pro- fessional school, the difficulty is to some extent lessened by the fact that there is often a common board of con- trol which makes co-operation and consultation easy between the authorities of the two parts of the educa- tional system. In the passage from high school to col- lege, on the other hand, the evil is felt most seriously because of the complete separation of control and the remoteness of location which so often makes a system of personal consultation impossible. It is in this application that the problem of examina- tions gives rise to the most acute controversy. How shall we order our tests of the student's proficiency in what is behind him in such a way as to assure ourselves of his power to go on with what is before him ? How can we arrange to give to the school the necessary free- dom in its methods of instruction, to give the college the assurance that its pupils will be well prepared for their work, and to give the students themselves, as they pass from one grade to the other, the certainty of reasonably fair treatment ? This is the question which is before us. With so many conflicting requirements, it is no wonder that there is divergence of opinion with regard to the proper answer. Three distinct methods have been devised for meet- ing this difficulty : — First. To make the range of examination questions 196 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS wider, so that the student shall have every possible chance to show what he knows. Second. To supplement the written examination paper by other tests, such as certified note books, objects produced by previous work, etc. Third. To depend on certificates given by the teachers who have previously had the candidate in their charge ; thus taking the work of entrance examination out of the hands of the college authorities and relegating it to the preparatory schools. The first of these methods has a certain amount of merit. A skilful examiner can make a paper so broad in its scope that a candidate who knows anything what- soever about his subject will find some topic on which he is at home. He thus reduces the element of chance and renders real help to those candidates who under- stand one part of the subject better than another. But, unfortunately, this increased range of inquiries may prove almost as helpful to the undeserving candidate as it does to the deserving. The multiplicity of ques- tions gives a great opportunity to the coach who makes a specialty of preparing candidates for a particular series of tests instead of educating them for their life- work. Knowing how wide a range of topics the ex- aminer must cover, he can predict, with reasonable certainty, some specific things which the paper is likely to contain. The chances are that his pupils will do well on these questions for which they have been specially prepared; and thus the deserving but unskil- fully prepared candidate, even though he makes a better absolute showing under the system of long papers than he did with short ones, finds his relative position even worse than it was before. Moreover, the inevitable hurry and confusion incident to the attempt to deal 197 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN with a long paper hurts the deserving student far more than it hurts his competitor who has been skilfully- crammed for this particular trial. These evils are clearly exemplified in the English civil service exami- nations. The amount of time and thought which is spent on the preparation of papers for these examina- tions is very great indeed. There has been an honest effort on the part of those in charge to get the very best aspirants for the public service of the British Empire. Yet, in spite of all these things, it has be- come proverbial that success depends upon skilful coaching far more than upon intellectual merit or good general training. What is true of the English civil service examinations is true in only less degree of many other European examination systems; and the same evils are making themselves felt in this country wher- ever we approximate toward the English practice. The plan of accepting certified note books to supple- ment and correct the results of examinations is essen- tially a compromise. It has at once the merits and defects which are incident to a compromise system. But the arguments which can be urged in its behalf can for the most part be urged even more strongly in favor of a frank adoption of a certificate system as a whole. There is something quite illogical in accepting the pupil's record of his own past work, and not accept- ing the master's judgment as to the efficiency of that work; for, unless the master is a clear-headed and honest man, the record is practically worthless, and if the master is thus clear-headed and honest, he can decide far better than any examining board the degree to which the pupil has profited by lectures and experi- ments. When once a subject presents such character- istics that the examiners confess their inability to judge 198 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS of the student's work by the paper which he writes under their direction, it certainly seems a rather unnec- essary waste of time and strength for them to insist on having any paper at all. The third method — admission to college on certifi- cate instead of on examination — has many advocates. I shall not here attempt to discuss its merits and de- merits in full. It is a subject which would take for its full analysis more time than we now have at command. It is unquestionably true that a good preparatory school teacher can, in nine cases out of ten, judge of the fitness of his pupils to enter college far better than any college examining board can possibly hope to do. It is also true that the right of admission by certificate allows such a teacher a freedom in the choice of methods which is of great advantage both to him and to his pupils. In spite of these facts, it has disadvan- tages which have prevented some of our leading insti- tutions from adopting it, and which cause the present trend of movement to be away from the certificate system rather than toward it. In the first place, to take the most obvious objection, by no means all of our secondary school teachers are good ones. A large number cannot be trusted to give certificates. An equally large number — and a more difficult class to deal with — are not so good that we can safely trust them, nor so bad that we can safely refuse to trust them. Under these circumstances the colleges have only shifted the seat of their perplexities. Instead of selecting their students by an examination, they select the teachers whom they are to trust by a process less automatic and more invidious than any scheme of examinations. In the second place the abandonment of an exami- 199 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN nation system by the colleges takes away an impor- tant stimulus for keeping up the standard of admission requirements. The competition between masters of different schools in preparing their pupils to pass examinations has the same sort of mixed effect that competition has in any other form of business. It causes methods to be adopted which are not always of the very highest type ; but it at the same time brings out an amount of initiative and energy in teachers and pupils which can be attained in no other way. Even the college authorities who admit by certificate say frankly that they would be very reluctant to have that practice become universal. They are free to confess that the influence of those colleges which require exami- nations is the thing which keeps our best schools up to that standard which enables other colleges safely to admit their students by certificate. Finally — and this is the decisive argument for the retention of the old plan — those colleges which insist on examinations think that they get a better class of students by that means than they would by any other. They get those boys who do not shrink from a trial of intellectual strength; boys who welcome the chance to measure their power with that of their fellows in enter- ing college, as they will inevitably be called upon to measure it if they seek first-rate successes in later life. We all remember the fable of the choice between the doors : on the one hand, " Who chooses me shall get what he deserves ; " on the other, " Who chooses me must hazard all he has." The certificate system at- tracts those who would go to the former door; the examination system calls to those who are willing to venture the latter. We all know the two types and their relative merits. 200 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS If each of these alternatives thus proves unsatisfac- tory, is there not some possible combination which may be suggested? I venture to believe that such a possibility exists, and that it may be found in a classification of collegiate requirements into different groups, susceptible of sepa- rate treatment. If we look at the requirements for admission into any of our larger colleges, we shall find that they naturally fall into three classes: first, those subjects which are required because the student must know them in order to have the power to go on with his subsequent studies ; second, those which are required because the college authorities believe them to be desirable means of attain- ing such power; and third, those which are required because the men in the secondary schools desire them and ask for the moral support of the colleges in pro- moting their study. As a notable example of the first class we may take mathematics. In our scientific schools, and to a less degree in all our colleges, some knowledge of mathematics is an absolute necessity for the successful pursuit of studies included in the course. The pupil must know a certain amount of algebra in order to study trigonometry; he must know a certain amount of trigonometry in order to be able to pursue successfully the arts of railroad surveying or of bridge design. The same characteristic holds good of most of our language requirements. Every student, whatever he desires to make of himself, needs to understand something of the use of the English language, because without such use all his communications of thought, if not his underlying thoughts themselves, are sure to lack precision. Any benefit which is expected from complex ideas by a man or woman who does not know 201 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN how to express them, is likely to prove illusory. And every student who is to pursue foreign literature in his college course must first have a knowledge of the ele- ments of the language in which it is written, because without such knowledge he will waste his own time and that of his fellows. Side by side with these requirements which are indis- pensable come others of a more auxiliary character. Not content with requiring a knowledge of English expression, the colleges prescribe the reading of certain books in English literature. Not stopping with the test of power to read and parse individual passages in Latin, the colleges prescribe a certain quantity of Latin reading as essential to the purpose in hand. They also require with each year an increasing knowledge of modern languages, not because the student is neces- sarily going to use both French and German in his college studies, but because no man is regarded by them as fitted for higher education unless he has a certain reading knowledge of both these languages. There is also a third group of studies required not as a necessary basis for subsequent work but as a part of the general scheme of secondary education in the coun- try, to which it is desirable to give fair recognition. So many men in our schools desire to teach histor}^, and can teach it well, that they wish this subject to be recognized in the college requirements; lest, by a failure to recognize it, its position in the schools should be degraded. What is true of history is true of a great deal of that descriptive science which has so large a part in our school courses at the present day. It is put in the scheme of requirements for admission to col- lege, not so much because of a direct need of the college student, nor even because of its indirect bearing on 202 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS meeting such a need, as because of a desire on the part of the colleges to co-operate with the secondary- school teachers by giving due emphasis to all those things which they desire to include in their course. It is obvious, however, that the attempt to put all these different classes of subjects on the same basis is quite illogical. The student who by a fair and sound test is found radically deficient in studies of the first class has no business to go on further. No pupil who is ignorant of arithmetic can study algebra without injuring himself and his fellow students. No pupil who is ignorant of elementary algebra and geometry should be allowed to go on with the scientific school course, no matter what may be his attainments in other lines. In like manner, a knowledge of the essentials of English expression and of certain fundamental points in those other languages which the student is likely to use in his college course is a matter of vital necessity. No amount of acquirements and attainments in litera- ture can logically be allowed to make up for a deficiency at this central point. It is on these subjects that the case for college examinations is strongest. This is the point at which any deficiency of preparation on the part of the candidates will hurt them most. It is also the point where an examination system is most feasible; where cram counts for least and power for most; where the school teacher with high ideals of education has least reason to complain of the requirement that his pupils should be examined by an independent authority, because no method of education which falls short of meeting this test can possibly be considered good. On the second group of studies — those which are auxiliary to the attainment of this power — greater lati- tude can be allowed. I should be in favor at once of 203 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN putting all examinations on the extent of knowledge in these auxiliary subjects into the hands of a common examining board, in which different groups of educa- tors were represented. Whether it would be wise to go one step farther and introduce the certificate system in subjects of this group, is a matter which I should hardly like to prejudge at present. In the third group of studies the certificate system could be allowed from the very outset. It is just here that the arguments for that system are strongest, for in this group the possible variety of methods is greatest, the difficulties of examination most unavoidable, and the reasons strongest for preferring the teacher's judg- ment to that of an independent examiner or examining board. If a phrase is needed to describe the principle on which this whole system of division rests, I should for- mulate it as follows: Divide our requirements into three groups of subjects : first, prerequisites for power to go on with collegiate study ; second, attainments aux- iliary to such power ; third, attainments chiefly useful in the general scheme of education. Let the tests of power as to what is to follow be in the hands of those who are to have charge of the student in the years which are to follow. Let the tests of attainment on what is behind be in the hands of those who have had charge of the pupil in the years which are behind. This combination would have the advantage of reduc- ing the number of our college examinations — in itself an extremely desirable thing — of preserving a standard of quality which schools would compete with one another to reach, and of allowing at the same time the utmost possible latitude in the methods employed by different teachers to bring their pupils up to that 204 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS standard. On the other hand it would be attended with certain dangers and difficulties. The chief objec- tions which are likely to be thus raised may be stated as follows : — First. The attempt, which has been more than once made, to lay special stress on tests of power rather than on knowledge — for instance, sight reading of Latin and Greek authors, translation of English into Latin, etc. — has disappointed the expectation of its advocates. Second. In the inevitable uncertainty attending the results of entrance examinations — due partly to luck, partly to the personal equation of the examiner, and partly to the varying physical condition of the candi- dates — the substitution of a small number of decisive examinations for the very great number now existing will cause some candidates to be unjustly rejected who, under the present requirements, atone for their defi- ciencies in some lines by indication of ability in others. Third. The necessary withdrawal from the examina- tion scheme of large parts of the work in historj^ descriptive science, or English literature will serve to give these subjects an apparently inferior position, and will result in their neglect in those schools which desire to prove their success on the basis of the showing made by their candidates in college examinations. Let us take up these points in order. The first of these objections is, I believe, historically well founded. It is, however, based on the experience of a time when neither teachers nor examiners knew their business as well as they now do. Latin prose composition, as taught in the schools of a generation ago, was simply a piece of mechanical drill on certain fixed phrases, without any infusion of the spirit of the language. The examiners, themselves trained for the 305 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN most part in these same defective methods, set papers which were not real tests of power, and encouraged cramming of a bad sort. The same thing may be said of most of the examinations in sight reading of classical authors They furnished no measure of that kind of power which is required by the college student in his subsequent use of the Latin or Greek language. Many of these papers depend far more upon the quick com- mand of a vocabulary, at times when the candidate is specially nervous, than upon knowledge of linguistic structure. In the easy Latin or Greek which is gen- erally given out on these papers, the candidate who can remember the vocabulary can guess at the structure far better than the candidate who knows the structure can extemporize the vocabulary. Nor can this difficulty in the sight paper be wholly avoided by notes which give the meaning of a few words, for those words which help one boy may prove useless to another. The partial failure of sight papers to accomplish their end proves chiefly the defectiveness of the means, and little or nothing as to the attainability of the object. Of course it may be freely admitted that it would require great ability to carry out the proposed plan by right methods instead of wrong ones. It would per- haps be a number of years before we should know what furnished, on the whole, the best means of testing the student's power. But I feel quite confident that noth- ing which has hitherto been done indicates that the question could not be fairly well solved in a reason- able time. The argument concerning the dangerous fewness of the papers under the proposed plan deserves careful consideration. Any one who knows the uncertainty attending the results of examinations in general, and 206 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS of written examinations in particular, will be reluctant to reduce the variety of chances given to the student to prove in different kinds of papers his probable fitness for any course which he desires to undertake. Yet I believe that the dangers which arise in this way would be more than offset by the safety due to an increased care of reading which the substitution of the few papers for the many would render possible. If we should further extend to teachers of proved ability the oppor- tunity to recommend, at the risk of their own reputa- tion, for provisional admission to our freshman classes, pupils to whom the new system seemed to have done injustice, we should have in our hands a check which would not be greatly liable to abuse, and which would help to protect deserving students from the conse- quences of ill luck. The objection regarding discrimination between studies is perhaps the one which will be most strongly urged. Yet I believe this objection to be based on what is in the long run not a fault but a merit. It is natural enough that a master in a secondary school who has special ability in teaching descriptive science, whether in the form of physics, biology, or history, should wish for the opportunity to prove what his pupils can do in collegiate examinations. He will urge that if they are not given this opportunity to be examined, they will neglect the subjects in such a way as to do injustice to him and harm to themselves. It may seem hard to tell him that the apparent force of these arguments of his is based upon an over-valuation of the usefulness of his work to boys and girls who are going to college. Yet I believe this to be the truth; and if it is truth it should be told plainly. I am not underrating the importance of these things 207 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN in the scheme of secondary education. The pupils who are going directly from the high school into practical life need a somewhat extensive and therefore somewhat superficial study of natural science and human history. Most of these pupils must get their knowledge of these subjects then if they are to get it at all. But for those who are going to pursue these studies afterward, such preliminary acquaintance with history and with science does not take, with any complete equivalence, the place of language or of mathematics. History and natural science are studies which mark the culmination of an educational course, and which, if over-developed far before the close, have a tendency to weaken rather than to strengthen the student's powers of application. If by giving undue importance to these things in the examination system, we add an artificial stimulus to their pursuit by boys or girls who are afterward going to college, I believe that we delay the advent of a reform in our school system which is of vital impor- tance to us all. That reform will consist in the separa- tion of our classes, both in the grammar schools and in the high schools, into groups that are about to finish their school days and groups that are preparing to advance further. In almost all our previous groupings we have tried to classify pupils on the lines of their different tastes, real or supposed. There is a great deal to be said in favor of a different system, which should classify them on the basis of the probable duration of the studies. It is a false idea to assume that those things which are taught to the students whose courses near their end are thereby cheapened or made inferior in value; and it is a yet worse mistake if, in the effort to avoid such cheapen- ing, we put them into a place where they did not really 208 THE USE AND CONTROL OF EXAMINATIONS belong. Our system of secondary education has reached a point of achievement where it can stand on its own merits. Those in charge of it recognize that they have outgrown the stage where their best usefulness was found in being mere preparatory schools. Let us eman- cipate ourselves from a set of ideas which are but the remnant of a state of things which we have now out- grown. Thus, and thus only, shall we obtain the best preparation for college, and the fullest development of the value and freedom of our secondary education. 14 209 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT Thirteen years ago my honored predecessor traced in his inaugural address the changes which two centu- ries had developed in Yale's educational methods and ideals, and showed with clearness what were the corre- sponding changes in organization which would best fit her to apply these methods and approach these ideals. What has once been done so well we need not undertake to do again. Let us rather proceed to a detailed con- sideration of the problems which now confront us in the various departments of college and university life. Let us formulate the questions which press for solution. Let us study the good and evil attendant on various methods of dealing therewith. Let us see, as far as we may, what lines of policy in these matters of immediate practical moment will enable us best to meet the de- mands of the oncoming century. These problems are for the most part not peculiar to Yale. The questions which present themselves to the authorities here are in large measure the same which arise elsewhere. But the conditions governing their solution are different. We may best understand the work which Yale has to do if we study the problems in their general form, as they come before the whole brother- hood of educators as a body ; and then try to solve them in the particular form which is fixed by the special cir- 210 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT cumstances, past and present, which have made Yale University what it is. Fifty years ago the duties of college administration were relatively simple. There was at that time a cer- tain curriculum of studies, chiefly in classics and in de- ductive science, which the public accepted as necessary for the development of an educated man. These studies were taught by traditional methods which compelled the pupil to perform a considerable amount of work whether he liked it or not. The student body was a homoge- neous one, meeting in the same recitation rooms day by day. The classes readily acquired a spirit of good fel- lowship and democracy. Outside conditions favored the maintenance of this spirit. Differences in wealth throughout the community were less conspicuous than they are to-day. College education was so cheap that it fell within the reach of all. Most of the students were restricted in their means. The few who possessed much money found comparatively little opportunity for spending it in legitimate ways. Rich and poor stood on a common footing as regarded participation in the social ambitions and privileges of college life. The intellectual education which such a college gave to the majority of its students was but an incidental service as compared with their education in sterling virtue. The institution which could furnish this double training met fully the requirements which public opinion imposed. The first of the disturbing elements which entered to complicate the problem of college education was found in the development of professional schools. Down to the early part of the present century, professional study was largely done in private, in the office of some suc- cessful lawyer or doctor or in the study of some experi- 211 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN enced minister. Even when schools of theology, of law, or of medicine were established, they at first occupied themselves largely with teaching the same kind of things that might have been learned in the office by the old method. But about the middle of the present century a new and more enlightened view of technical training arose. It was seen that a professional school did its best work when it taught principles rather than practice. Instead of cramming the students with details which they would otherwise learn afterward, it was found much better to train them in methods of reasoning which otherwise they would not learn at all. This study of principles, to be thoroughly effective, necessarily oc- cupied several years. There was a strong pressure to introduce the elements of these professional studies into the curriculum ; and a demand that when once they were incorporated in the college course they should be taught, not in a perfunctory way, but with the same standard of excellence which was achieved in our best professional schools. Meantime, apart from these changes in the method of technical training, the sphere of interest of the culti- vated men of the country was constantly widening. The course of college study which satisfied an earlier generation was inadequate for a later one. The man who would have breadth of sympathy with the various departments of human knowledge could not content himself with classics, mathematics, and psychology. He must be familiar with modern literature as well as ancient, with empirical science as well as deductive. If we had at once widened the college curriculum enough to correspond to the increased range of human interest, and lengthened the period of professional study enough to give each man the fullest recognized train- 212 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT ing for his specialty, — if, to quote the old educational phrase, we had taught each man something of every- thing and everything of something, — the time of univer- sity education would have lengthened itself to ten or fifteen years. Its complete fruition would have been a luxury out of reach of all but the favored few. The difficulty could be met only by the adoption of an elective system, — a system which ceased to treat the college course as a fixed curriculum for all, and gave an opportunity for the selection of groups of studies adapted to the varying needs of the several students. The introduction of these methods of university education, necessary as it was, has been nevertheless attended with serious dangers and evils. In the first place there is apt to be a change in the mode of instruction which, while good for the best students, runs the risk of proving bad for the ordinary ones. The old method of handling large classes in a fixed course of study under the recitation system re- quired all the students to do a modicum of work, and enabled the teacher to see whether they were doing it or not. The divisions were adjusted and could be con- stantly readjusted with that end in view. The time of the instructors was so far economized by the narrow range of subjects taught that their attention could be properly concentrated on this one point of keeping the students up to their work by a daily oral examination. But with the increasing number of things to be learned, the variation in the size of classes, and the demands which the best students now make for really advanced teaching, this supervision and concentration is no longer possible. The instructor who is teaching small groups of selected men who have a particular interest in his subject, is forced to content himself with what is 213 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN little more than a lecture in teaching the larger groups of ordinary men to whom the subject has only a general interest. A lecture system of this kind is beset with perils. It is something of which we have to make use, because there are not enough first-rate men in the country to teach all the subjects of study which this generation demands, in classes of size small enough to adapt themselves to the recitation system. The choice in many lines of study lies between having recitations with fourth-rate men or lectures from first-rate ones. I never met a good teacher who really approved of the lecture system, or who did not prefer small classes to large ones. But these really good teachers are just the men that we wish to bring in contact with as many students as possible. If we refuse to let them lecture, we either confine the benefit of their instructions to a few, or increase their hours beyond the possibility of human endurance. Another evil connected with the elective system is the loss of esprit de corps. In a college like West Point or Annapolis, where a homogeneous body of men is pursuing a common scheme of studies, with a common end in view, and with rigorous requirements as to the work which must be done by each individual, this spirit is seen at its strongest. The place sets its character stamp upon every one, — sometimes perhaps for evil, but in the vast majority of cases for good. An approximation to this state of things was seen in our American colleges during the earlier years of their history. In many of them it is still maintained to a considerable degree. But the forces which maintain it are far less potent to-day than they were fifty years ago. The community of interests is less, the community of hard work is very much less. If this college spirit 214 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT once passes away, the whole group of qualities which we have known by the name of college democracy is in danger of passing also. For the increase of wealth in the outside world is a perpetual menace to old-fashioned democratic equality. If we have within the college life not only differences in things studied, but differ- ences in enjoyment between rich and poor, we are at once in danger of witnessing a development of social distinctions and class interests which shall sweep away the thing which was most characteristic and most valuable in the earlier education of our colleges. Not the intellectual life only, nor the social life only, but the whole religious and moral atmosphere suffers de- terioration if a place becomes known either as a rich man's college, or, worse yet, as a college where rich and poor meet on different footings. What shall it profit us, if we gain the whole world and lose our own soul ; if we develop the intellectual and material side of our education, and lose the traditional spirit of democ- racy and loyalty and Christianity ? That there will be an advance in thoroughness of preparation for the special lines of work which our students are to undertake is a thing of which we may safely rest assured. That there shall be a similar advance in the general training for citizenship in the United States is an obligation for whose fulfilment our universities are responsible. The Yale of the future must count for even more than the Yale of the past in the work of city, State, and nation. It must come into closer touch with our political life, and be a larger part of that life. To this end it is not enough for her to train experts competent to deal with the financial and legal problems which are before us. Side by side with this training, she must evoke in the whole body of her 215 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN students and alumni that wider sense of their obligation as members of a free commonwealth which the America of the twentieth century requires. The central problem, which we all have to face, and about which all other problems group themselves, is this : How shall we make our educational system meet the world's demands for progress on the intellectual side, without endangering the growth of that which has proved most valuable on the moral side ? And it is the latter part which demands the most immediate attention from a college president, not necessarily be- cause it is more important in itself — for where two things are both absolutely indispensable, a comparison of relative values is meaningless — but because the individual professors can, and under the keen competi- tion between universities must, attend in large measure to the excellence of instruction in their several depart- ments, while the action of the university as a whole, and the intelligent thought of the univei-sity adminis- tration is requisite to prevent the sacrifice of the moral interest of the whole commonwealth. There are four ways in which we may strive to deal with this difficulty : — First. By relegating the work of character develop- ment more and more to the preparatory schools. Our acceptance or non-acceptance of this solution deter- mines our attitude toward the problem of entrance requirements. Second. By striving to limit the occasion for the use of money on the part of the student. The necessity for such limitation constitutes the problem of college expenses. Third. By endeavoring to create a body of common interests and traditions outside of the college course 316 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT which shall make up for the diversity of interests within it. The most widely discussed, though possibly not the most important, point under this head is furnished by the problem of college athletics. Fourth. By so arranging the work of the different departments of study that the variety inherent in the elective system shall not be attended with intellectual dissipation ; providing the chance for economy of effort on the part of the instructor and the assurance of syste- matic co-operation on the part of the pupils. This is the problem of university organization. The plan of relegating the responsibility for character development to the preparatory schools has at first sight much to commend it. It relieves the college officers of the most disagreeable part of their duty, that which pertains to matters of discipline, and enables them to concentrate their attention on their function as teachers. It meets the demands of many progressive men engaged in secondary education, some of whom long for an ex- tension of their professional functions into new fields of activity, while others, justly proud of their success in the formation of character under existing conditions, desire the additional opportunity which is given them if they can keep their oldest boys a year or two longer under their influence. The larger the university the greater becomes the pressure in this direction. But with conditions as they exist at Yale, I cannot think it wise to yield to this pressure. If we take a year from the beginning of the college course, that year will be spent by most of the boys either in a high school or a large academy. In the former case we a23proach the German or French system of education; in the latter the English. A compromise between the two, whereby a boy finishes his high school course and then 217 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN takes the additional year at an academy, is hardly admissible on any ground ; the single year is somewhat too short to give the intellectual influences of the new place to which the boy goes, and far too short to give its character influences. I cannot believe that any one who has watched the workings of the French or German system would desire to see it adopted in this country. The passage at an advanced age from the discipline of the lyc^e or gymnasium to the freedom of the uni- versity, however well it may work in its intellectual results, does not produce the kind of moral ones which we need. The English system has wider possibilities; and for England it does extremely well. But it is essentially a product of English conditions, — that is, of aristocratic ones. It is an education for a privileged class. In America, on the other hand, we wish our higher education to remain democratic. We should not be satisfied with a system which excluded from its benefits the large number of boys who come from insti- tutions, public or private, which are situated near their own homes, and prepare only small groups for college. And even to those who are fortunate enough to come from the best preparatory schools, the loss in college life would often outweigh the gain in school life. A system of influences whose operation terminates at nineteen or twenty fixes a boy's moral and social place too soon. For the young man who has grown to the full measure of his moral stature at this age it is good ; for the one who matures later it is distinctly bad. In our every-day experience at Yale, as we watch the inter- action between school estimates and college estimates of character, we can see that whatever postpones a man's final social rating to as late a day as possible lengthens the period of strenuous moral effort, increases 218 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT the chance of continued growth, and is of the largest value to the boys and men of the best type. The abandonment of the responsibility for forming character would have its disadvantages for the univer- sity no less than for the students. A boy's loyalty will remain where his moral character has formed itself. The devotion and sentiment of the Englishman play not so much about Oxford or Cambridge as about Eton, Harrow, and Rugby. Universities which derive their prestige and their wealth from the past rather than from the present may perhaps endure this deprivation. Not so the American college or university, which looks for its strongest support to the loyalty of its alumni. With the desire of secondary school teachers to ex- tend their work I have the strongest sympathy. To the idea of co-operation between universities and schools, whereby each shall arrange its teaching with reference to the other's needs, I am fully and absolutely com- mitted, and purpose to do all that I can to further it. A university fulfils its true function only when it thus seeks and gives aid outside of itself. But I believe that the chance for this extension, this co-operation, and this leadership is to come through the freer inter- change of thought and interchange of men between school teaching and university teaching, rather than through a transference of subjects from one to the other. I believe that with the conditions as they exist, the true policy for our university with regard to entrance requirements is to find out what our secondary schools can do for their pupils, intellectually and morally, and adapt our requirements to these condi- tions. Detailed questions as to what specific subjects we shall require must be subordinated to this general principle of requiring those things, and only those 21-9 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN things, wliicli the schools can do well. To know whether we can substitute French or German for Greek, we must know whether any considerable num- ber of schools teach French or German in such a way as to make it a real equivalent for Greek in the way of preparation for more advanced studies. Unless we keep our minds on this principle, we shall be in per- petual danger of receiving students who have been crammed for their examinations rather than trained for their work. The second of our leading problems is the question of college expenses. Though the increase in this re- spect is less than is popularly supposed, there is no doubt that it is large enough to constitute a serious danger. It is far from easy to see how this danger is to be avoided. It is all very well to talk of returning to the Spartan simplicity of ancient times, but we can- not do it, nor ought we to if we could. We cannot, for the sake of saving the cost of a bathroom, return to the time when people took no baths. Nor can we meet the difficulty by furnishing the comforts of modern civilization and charging no price for them. If the university could afford to do it for every one, it might be well ; but to do it for some and not for others works against the spirit of democracy. It may readily become a form of pauperization. This same danger lurks in the whole system of beneficiary aid, as at present given in Yale and in most other colleges. To avoid this danger, and at the same time give the men the help which they fairly ought to have, we need not so much an increase of beneficiary funds as an increase of the opportunities for students to earn their living. Aid in education, if given without exacting a corresponding return, becomes demoralizing. If it is earned by the 220 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT student as he goes, it has just the opposite effect. This holds good of graduate scholarships and fellowships no less than of undergraduate ones. There is no doubt that in the somewhat indiscriminate competition of dif- ferent universities anxious to increase the size, real or apparent, of their graduate departments, there has been an abuse of these appliances which, unless promptly corrected, threatens the future of the teaching profes- sion with an over-abundant influx of inferior men. The true policy in the matter of expenses and bene- ficiary aid would appear to be as follows : — In building our new dormitories and other appliances connected with the daily life of the students, we should strive to use the kind of intelligent economy which any but the richest man would use in building a house for himself. We should construct them on the standard set by our homes rather than by our clubs. In this way we should create a general level of average expense in the college life which would attract rather than repel the boy who has to make his own way. We should indeed welcome beautiful buildings, given to the university as memorials of affection; but we should strive to have them so designed that their beauty may be a means of enjoyment to the whole community. Tuition should be remitted with the utmost free- dom to all those who maintain a respectable standing. Such tuition should be either earned by service or re- garded as a loan, — a loan without interest, if you please, or at any rate at a purely nominal interest charge, and payable at the option of the holder, but in its essence a loan, — a thing to be paid ultimately, unless disease or death intervene. By establishing a sj^stem of sach re- payment we could give aid far more universally than we now do, could perhaps lower the tuition fees in general, 221 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN and could avoid a system of fraud which is at present practised somewhat extensively on our colleges. Every scholarship in excess of the tuition fees, whether for undergraduates or for graduates, should be distinctly in the nature of a prize for really distinguished work, or a payment for services rendered. I am aware that there are great practical obstacles which oppose the carrying out of this view, and I do not feel sure how quickly Yale will be in a position to put it into effect ; but that it is a desirable ideal and goal there appears to be no doubt whatever. Remuneration rather than pau- perization should be the principle underlying such aid. Above all things — and this is a matter in which we need the co-operation of persons outside as well as inside the university — the utmost study should be be- stowed on the possibility of utilizing the powers of the students in such a way that they can be of service to the college community and the world at large, and thus earn the aid which is given them. The problem is a most difficult one ; too difficult even to be analyzed in the brief space here available. But the amount of pro- gress made already, in the few experiments which have been seriously tried, leads me to believe in an almost unbounded opportunity for ultimate development of this idea. Our third group of problems is connected with the de- velopment and preservation of common student interests and student life outside of the immediate work of the classroom. Of all these interests, the most fundamental are those connected witli religious observances and reli- gious feeling. Yale is, and has been from the first, a Christian college. All her institutions show this throughout their structure. This was the dominant 222 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT purpose in Yale's foundation ; and the work and thought of the children have conformed to the wish of the fathers. What changes time may bring in the outward observances, or how soon it may bring them, I know not. The question of compulsory attendance on religious exercises is one which is seriously discussed by the faculty, the students, and the graduates ; nor can we predict the outcome of such discussion. But this I know : that it is approached by all, young as well as old, in a spirit of wise conservatism and reverence for past usage, and that no change will be made unless it shall surely and clearly appear to those in authority that we are but modifying the letter of a tradition for the sake of preserving its spirit. Even in matters of far less fundamental importance we may, I think, wisely preserve this same spirit of conservatism. An ancient university has a great ad- vantage in the existence of a body of time-honored usages and traditions. Some of these it inevitably outgrows as time goes on. But a large majority serve a most useful purpose in binding the students together by bonds none the less real because so intangible. Such college customs and traditions we should main- tain to the utmost. Even where they seem artificial or meaningless we should be careful how we let them go. It is not inconsistent with the spirit of progress to value them highly. Edmund Burke was one of the most liberal and progressive men of his century ; yet Burke was the man who set the truest value on those forms of the English constitution which, as he himself avowed, were rooted in prejudice. The constitution of Yale to-day, with its strange combination of liberty and priv- ilege, of prescriptive custom and progressive individ- ualism, has not a few points of resemblance to Burke's 223 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN England. I can avow myself a conservative in the sense that Burke was a conservative ; with him, I should hesitate to cast away the coat of prejudice and leave nothing but the naked reason. Another group of cohesive forces which strengthens the influence of a university upon its members is con- nected with college athletics. The value of athletic sports when practised in the right spirit is only equalled by their perniciousness when practised in the wrong spirit. They deserve cordial and enthusiastic support. The time or thought spent upon them, great as it may seem, is justified by their educational influence. But side by side with this support and part of it, we must have unsparing condemnation of the whole spirit of professionalism. I do not refer to those grosser and more obvious forms of professionalism which college sentiment has already learned to condemn. Nor do I chiefly refer to the betting by which intercollegiate con- tests are accompanied, though this is a real and great evil, and does much to bring other evils in its train. I refer to something far more widespread, which still remains a menace to American college athletics, — the whole system of regarding athletic achievement as a sort of advertisement of one's prowess, and of valuing success for its own sake rather than for the sake of the honor which comes in achieving it by honorable methods. I rejoice in Yale's victories, I mourn in her defeats ; but I mourn still more whenever I see a Yale man who regards athletics as a sort of competitive means for pushing the university ahead of some rival. This is professionalism of the most subtle and therefore most dangerous sort. I know that the condition of athletic discipline in a college makes a difference in its attrac- tiveness to a large and desirable class of young men, 224 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT and rightly so. Whether a victory or a series of vic- tories makes such a difference, and increases the num- bers that attend the university, I do not know and I do not care to know. The man who allows his mind to dwell on such a question, if he is not tempted to violate the ethics of amateur sport, is at any rate plaj-ing with temptation in a dangerous and reprehensible way. 1 am glad to believe that our colleges, and our nation as a whole, are becoming better able to understand the love of sport for its own sake. The growth of this spirit through three generations has relieved English universities of some of the problems which to-day con- front us in America. To the growth of this spirit we must ourselves trust for their solution here. I am ready heartily to co-operate in an}^ attempts that other colleges may make to lay down clear rules for the prac- tice of intercollegiate atliletics, because the absence of such co-operation would be misunderstood and would give cause for suspicion where none ought to exist. But I cannot conceal the fact that the majority of such rules can only touch the surface of the difficulty ; and that so far as they distract attention from the moral ele- ment in the case which is beyond all reach of rules, they may prove a positive hindrance to progress. If we can enter into athletics for the love of honor, in the broadest sense of the word, unmixed with the love of gain in any sense, we may now and then lose a few students, but we shall grow better year after year in all that makes for sound university life. Last in order of discussion, though perhaps first in the imminence with which they press upon us for solu- tion, are some of the problems of university organiza- tion, on whose proper treatment depends that economy of effort and utilization of financial resources which is 16 225 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN necessary for the efficient working of the institution as it stands and for its growth in the immediate future. Yale's organization differs somewhat fundamentally from that of most other American universities. It is a group of colleges whose property is held in the name of a single corporation, but whose management is, by tradition and in some slight degree by legal authority, located in the hands of separate faculties. In this respect Yale is not without points of resemblance to Oxford or Cambridge. I shall not try to discuss whether this system is on the whole a good one. It is here, and we cannot for the present change it. Like all other systems, it has its advantages and its disadvan- tages. The advantages are those which are possessed by local government everywhere, — an independence of initiative; a loyal spirit among the members of the several faculties which is the natural result of such independence; a sort of natural grouping of the stu- dents under which a common set of rules can be made for each department, and the evils of too great freedom may be avoided. The independence of initiative has manifested itself in the development of new methods of instruction, like those of the Sheffield Scientific School in the past, or the Department of Music in the present. The loyalty has been exemplified over and over again in the readiness to work for salaries even more conspicuously inadequate than those which have been paid at other universities, by men who seek their reward in the possibilities of future greatness. This history of disinterested effort for future rather than present reward has repeated itself in each department of instruction. The effect of the grouping of the stu- dents in separate departments has shown itself in the preservation of that esprit de corps which Yale has 226 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT succeeded in maintaining, I believe, to a greater degree than any other university of the same magnitude. On the other hand the system has the disadvantages which everywhere pertain to a scheme of independent local government. There is sometimes a difficulty in carrying the whole university sharply forward into any definite line of policy, however strongly it may be demanded. There is yet more frequently a lack of co- ordination in courses ; the work of each of the separate parts or schools having been originally devised with reference to the needs of members of that school rather than to those of the university as a whole. And finally, there is a certain amount of duplication of appliances which involves some actual loss of economy and makes the impression on the public of causing even more loss than really exists. Especially severe does this loss seem to some of the most zealous members of the pro- fessional schools, who believe that by combining the work of their opening years with that of the later years of the Academic Department or Sheffield Scientific School, they can serve the University and the cause of learning with far more fulness and freedom than at present. Reform under these circumstances can only be the result of unconstrained discussion and intelligent nego- tiation. The best possibilities lie not in the exercise of authority but of diplomacy. The effort to impose a prearranged policy is likely to prove futile. We cannot insist on an external appearance of harmony without losing more than we gain. To say that the Scientific School ought to have a four years' course because the Academic Department has one, or to insist that the Academic Department should withdraw from the teaching of natural science because the Scientific 227 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN School has made such full provision for it, serves only to retard the movement toward co-operation. The president who would succeed in establishing real harmony must occupy himself first with providing the means to lead men to a mutual understanding, rather than with predicting the results which should follow. Foremost among the means which we must use is free and unreserved discussion of principles. Even within the departments such discussion has been by no means so universal as it might have been. In more than one of them there has been a tendency, both in matters of administration and of educational policy, to rest con- tent with a compromise between conflicting interests, rather than a reconciliation of conflicting views. A typical result of this policy has been seen in the course of study in the Academic Department, where for many years the so-called elective system was really not a system at all, but the haphazard result of competition between the advocates of different lines of instruction, — a thing which all unite in desiring to reform. With a reasonable degree of diplomacy and patience the task of reform in cases like this should not prove a hard one. Still less adequate has been the interchange of ideas between the different departments. Under the old sys- tem the several faculties have had no organized means of discussing subjects of common interest, or even of learning one another's views. The establishment of a university council for such interchange of thought is an imperative necessity. What will ultimately prove the best form and constitution for such a council can only be a matter of conjecture. For the present, at any rate, such a body is likely to be for the most part 228 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT deliberative in its functions. Whatever else such a body may do or fail to do it can prevent manj^ of the misunderstandings and cross purposes which arise from imperfect information, and can thus contribute to the successful transaction of all business that is possible by preventing attempts at the impossible. In the second place, we must so use those funds which are at the disposal of the central administration as to make it an object for men in the different depart- ments to co-operate at those points where the absence of such co-operation does most harm. As far as elementary teaching is concerned, the waste from having the same subject taught in two or more departments may be more apparent than real. It in- volves no very great loss to teach elementary chemistry in two independent sets of laboratories if both labora- tories are always kept full of students. The waste comes in thus teaching advanced chemistry where there are relatively few students and where there is much need of specialization. Under such circumstances the existence of separate laboratories tends to prevent proper division of labor. Under such circumstances duplication is a waste and co-ordination a necessity. If the material appliances for higher education are not the property of any one department, but stand in relation to the university as a whole, the instructors of the different departments tend of their own free will to co-operate with one another in the higher instruction in their several branches. Under proper management, institutions like the Peabody Museum or the Win- chester Observatory tend thus to systematize instruc- tion at the point where such an effect is most needed. With a very moderate increase of endowment, properly applied, I believe that the same sort of harmony can be 229 THE EDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN attained in many other lines of instruction. Among the achievements of my predecessor in office there is none so wide-reaching in its effects as the development of a large university fund which, without threatening the independence of the several departments, can be used to provide means for promoting unity of action where such unity is indispensable. In the English universities the teaching is in large measure done by the several colleges, while the exami- nations are, with few exceptions, the affair of the university. It seems probable that the development of Yale in the future may be just the reverse of this ; the several colleges taking charge of the examinations and of those more elementary studies whose control natu- rally connects itself with the control of examinations, while the distinctively teaching appliances come, to a constantly greater extent, into the hands of the univer- sity authorities. Under such a system we should have a well-ordered scheme of local government, where each department could make its own rules, prescribe the conditions of entrance and graduation, and be subject to the minimum of interference from without; but where at the same time the instruction would be so ordered that students whose course lay under the control of one faculty could yet enjoy to the fullest possible extent the teaching provided by another, and where, as the subject of study became more and more advanced, the distinction of separate faculties or colleges would dis- appear altogether. Such are, in brief outline, a few of the problems which we have inherited from the past. It would be indeed a large burden had we not also inherited from that past an inspiration yet larger. Yale's seal bears the motto, "Light and Truth;" Yale's history has been 230 YALE PROBLEMS, PAST AND PRESENT worthy of its signet. Never have there been wanting torch-bearers to take the light from the hands that re- linquished it. In this place, hallowed by the deeds of our fathers, all words of formal acceptance of the duties which they have left us are meaningless. It is a God- given trust: may God bless the issue! 231 41 9 23 -'^- ^ <^ ^^^ ,0o^ •^" -0- oo^ o 0' ^^_ * .3 N ^ ^'^- -^^ ■0' c '' o>v>-^:%;-"'">^- ,\. * -^•>- ^ -:^#7'fe^ .^^ o 0^ '^^ V^^ .is Miiji--'^,^- - .A ^ .0 ... r?^ ■' o 0' ■^^, ^\ aV „ : /. -^^\^^ \> .^ ^. ^<^' .,^' v :#^\ .N 0^ ■>^^. ,0 0^ vO o^ \- ^- .»- ~ ./ v\ , 1 /< ., -/• "co'' ,^-^ ■^>. 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