There is a true sense in which the universe exists momentarily by the grace of God.  Take light away, and you have darkness.  Take darkness away, and you have not necessarily light; you might have chaos.  Take health away, and you have disease.  Take disease away, and you have not necessarily health; you may have death.  Take virtue away, and you have vice.  Take vice away, and you have not necessarily virtue; you might have negative respectability.  Thus it is the continual affirmation of the good that keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the step toward to-morrow.

Nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of the problem, there are certain big lines of attack.  If we are right in our diagnosis, that the problem of democracy is a problem of education, then our whole system of education, for child, youth and adult, should be reconstructed to focus upon the building of positive and effective moral personality.

American education began as a subsidiary process.  Children got organic education in the home, on the farm, in the work shop.  They went to school to get certain formal disciplines, to learn to read, write and cipher and to acquire formal grammar.  With the moving into the cities, the industrial revolution and the entire transformation of our life, the school has had to take over more and more of the process of organic education.  If children fail to get such education in the school, they are apt to miss it altogether.

With this entire change in the meaning of the school, old notions of its purpose still survive.  Probably no one is so benighted to-day as to imagine that the chief function of the school is to fill the mind with information; but there are many who still hold to the tradition that the chief purpose of education is to sharpen the intellectual tools of the individual for the sake of his personal success.  This notion is a misleading survival, for tools are of value only in terms of the character using them.  The same equipment may serve, equally, good or bad ends.  Only as education focusses on the development of positive and effective moral character can it aid in solving the problem of democracy.

Need it be added that this does not mean teaching morals and manners to children, thirty minutes a day, three times a week?  That is a minor fragment of moral education.  It means that all phases of the process—­ the relation of pupil and teacher, school and home, the government and discipline, the lessons taught in every subject, the environment, the proportioning of the curriculum, of physical, emotional and intellectual culture—­all shall be focussed and organized upon the one significant aim of the whole—­character.