This leads to the larger and all important field of politics.  Here we soon see that office-holding is the incidental, but the standard of citizenship is the essential.  Government does rest upon the opinions of men.  Its results rest on their actions.  This makes every man a politician whether he will or no.  This lays the burden on us all.  Men who have had the advantages of liberal culture ought to be the leaders in maintaining the standards of citizenship.  Unless they can and do accomplish this result education is a failure.  Greatly have they been taught, greatly must they teach.  The power to think is the most practical thing in the world.  It is not and cannot be cloistered from politics.

We live under a republican form of government.  We need forever to remember that representative government does represent.  A careless, indifferent representative is the result of a careless, indifferent electorate.  The people who start to elect a man to get what he can for his district will probably find they have elected a man who will get what he can for himself.  A body will keep on its course for a time after the moving impulse ceases by reason of its momentum.  The men who founded our government had fought and thought mightily on the relationship of man to his government.  Our institutions would go for a time under the momentum they gave.  But we should be deluded if we supposed they can be maintained without more of the same stern sacrifice offered in perpetuity.  Government is not an edifice that the founders turn over to posterity all completed.  It is an institution, like a university which fails unless the process of education continues.

The State is not founded on selfishness.  It cannot maintain itself by the offer of material rewards.  It is the opportunity for service.  There has of late been held out the hope that government could by legislation remove from the individual the need of effort.  The managers of industries have seemed to think that their difficulties could be removed and prosperity ensured by changing the laws.  The employee has been led to believe that his condition could be made easy by the same method.  When industries can be carried on without any struggle, their results will be worthless, and when wages can be secured without any effort they will have no purchasing value.  In the end the value of the product will be measured by the amount of effort necessary to secure it.  Our late Dr. Garman recognized this limitation in one of his lectures where he says:—­

“Critics have noticed three stages in the development of human civilization.  First:  the let-alone policy; every man to look out for number one.  This is the age of selfishness.  Second:  the opposite pole of thinking; every man to do somebody’s else work for him.  This is the dry rot of sentimentality that feeds tramps and enacts poor laws such as excite the indignation of Herbert Spencer.  But the third stage is represented by our formula:  every man