One of the chief property owners in our neighbourhood is a rather crabbed old bachelor.  Having no children and heavy taxes to pay, he looks with jaundiced eye on additions to schoolhouses.  He will object and growl and growl and object, and yet pin him down as I have seen the Scotch Preacher pin him more than once, he will admit that children ("of course,” he will say, “certainly, of course”) must be educated.

“For the good of bachelors as well as other people?” the Scotch Preacher will press it home.

“Certainly, of course.”

And when the final issue comes, after full discussion, after he has tried to lop off a few yards of blackboard or order cheaper desks or dispense with the clothes-closet, he votes for the addition with the rest of us.

It is simply amazing to see how much grows out of these discussions—­how much of that social sympathy and understanding which is the very tap-root of democracy.  It’s cheaper to put up a miserable shack of an addition.  Why not do it?  So we discuss architecture—­blindly, it is true; we don’t know the books on the subject—­but we grope for the big true things, and by our own discussion we educate ourselves to know why a good building is better than a bad one.  Heating and ventilation in their relation to health, the use of “fad studies”—­how I have heard those things discussed!

How Dr. North, who has now left us forever, shone in those meetings, and Charles Baxter and the Scotch Preacher—­broad men, every one—­how they have explained and argued, with what patience have they brought into that small schoolhouse, lighted by Charles Baxter’s lamp, the grandest conceptions of human society—­not in the big words of the books, but in the simple, concrete language of our common life.

“Why teach physiology?”

What a talk Dr. North once gave us on that!

“Why pay a teacher $40 a month when one can be had for $30?”

You should have heard the Scotch Preacher answer that question!  Many a one of us went away with some of the education which we had come, somewhat grudgingly, to buy for our children.

These are our political bosses:  these unknown patriots, who preach the invisible patriotism which expresses itself not in flags and oratory, but in the quiet daily surrender of private advantage to the public good.

There is, after all, no such thing as perfect equality; there must be leaders, flag-bearers, bosses—­whatever you call them.  Some men have a genius for leading; others for following; each is necessary and dependent upon the other.  In cities, that leadership is often perverted and used to evil ends.  Neither leaders nor followers seem to understand.  In its essence politics is merely a mode of expressing human sympathy.  In the country many and many a leader like Baxter works faithfully year in and year out, posting notices of caucuses, school meetings and elections, opening cold schoolhouses, talking to