Our political attitude today is based on an inherited and automatic acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae.  We neither see things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition through to the end:  we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan “slogans” and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous.  Let us see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be.  Is there any one who would confess that character and intelligence are now a helpless minority in this nation?  Such an admission would be almost constructive treason.  The instinct of the majority is right, but it is defective in will and it is subservient to base leadership, while its power for good is negatived by the persistence of a mass of formulae that, under radically changed conditions, have ceased to be beneficient, or even true, and have become a clog and a stumbling block.

I may not have indicated better ideals or sounder methods of operation, but the true ideals exist and it is not beyond our ability to discover a better working system.  Partisanship cannot reveal either one or the other, nor are they the fruit of organization or the attribute of political leadership.  They belong to the common citizen, to you, to the individual, and if once superstition is cast out and we fall back on right reason and the eternal principles of the Christian ethic and the Christian ideal, we shall not find them difficult of attainment; and once attained they can be put in practice, for the ill thing exists only on sufferance, the right thing establishes itself by force of its very quality of right.

VI

THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART

When, as on occasion happens, some hostile criticism is leveled against the civilization of modernism, or against some one of its many details, the reply is ready, and the faultfinder is told that the defect, if it exists, will in the end be obviated by the processes of popular education.  Pressed for more explicit details as to just what may be the nature of this omnipotent and sovereign “education,” the many champions give various answer, depending more or less on the point of view and the peculiar predilections of each, but the general principles are the same.  Education, they say, consist of two things; the formal practice and training of the schools, and the experience that comes through the use of certain public rights and privileges, such as the ballot, the holding of office, service on juries, and through various experiences of the practice of life, as the reading of newspapers (and perhaps books), the activities of work, business and the professions, and personal association with other men in social, craft, and professional clubs and other organizations.

With the second category of education through experience we need not deal at this time; it is a question by itself and of no mean quality; the matter I would consider is the more formal and narrow one of scholastic training in so far as it bears on the Great Peace that, though perhaps after many days, must follow the Great War and the little peace.