In the district of a large city where newly arrived foreign immigrants gather, you will be shown the group of blocks where the Poles or the Hungarians have segregated themselves from the rest, and even within these, the houses where dwell families from a particular province or even from one definite city or village.  Man is social but he is socially clannish, and the broadest is not so much he who refuses to recognize these clan or caste relationships as he who enters into the largest number of them—­he who keeps in touch with his childhood home, has a wide acquaintance among those of his own religious faith and of his chosen business or profession, keeps up his old college friendships, is interested in collecting coins or paintings and knows all the other collectors, is active in civic and charitable societies, takes an interest in education and educators, and so on.  The social democracy that should succeed in abolishing all these groups or leveling them—­that should recognize no relationships but the broader ones that underly all human effort and feeling—­the touches of nature that make the whole world kin—­would be barren indeed.

We cannot spare these fundamentals; we could not get rid of them if we would; but civilization advances by building upon them, and to do away with these additions would be like destroying a city to get at its foundation, in the vain hope of securing some wide-reaching result in economics or aesthetics.  Occupying a foremost place among these groupings is the large division embracing our educational activities.  And these are social not only in the broad sense, but also in the narrower.  The intercourse of student with student in the school and even of reader with reader in the library, especially in such departments as the children’s room, is so obviously that of society that we need dwell on it no further.

This intercourse, while a necessary incident of education in the mass, is only an incident.  It is sufficiently obtrusive, however, to make it evident that any use of school or library building for social purposes is fit and proper.  There is absolutely nothing new nor strange about such use.  In places that cannot afford separate buildings for these purposes, the same edifice has often served for church, schoolhouse, public library, and as assembly room for political meetings, amateur theatricals, and juvenile debating societies.  The propriety of all this has never been questioned and it is difficult to see why it should not be as proper in a town of 500,000 inhabitants as in one of 500.  The incidence of the cost is a matter of detail.  Why should such purely social use of these educational buildings—­always common in small towns—­have been allowed to fall into abeyance in the larger ones?  It is hard to say; but with the recent great improvements in construction, the building of schools and libraries that are models of beauty, comfort, and convenience, there has arisen a not unnatural feeling in the public