by cash prizes any more than is genius; and a man’s friends should not be obliged to prove that he is a hero in order that he may reap every appropriate reward.  A hero officially conscious of his heroism is a mutilated hero.  In the same way art cannot become a power in a community unless many of its members are possessed of a native and innocent love of beautiful things; and the extent to which such a possession can be acquired by any one or two generations of traditionally inartistic people is extremely small.  Its acquisition depends not so much upon direct conscious effort, as upon the growing ability to discriminate between what is good and what is bad in their own native art.  It is a matter of the training and appreciation of American artists, rather than the cultivation of art.  Illustrations to the same effect might be multiplied.  The popular interest in the Higher Education has not served to make Americans attach much importance to the advice of the highly educated man.  He is less of a practical power in the United States than he is in any European country; and this fact is in itself a sufficient commentary on the reality of the American faith in education.  The fact is, of course, that the American tendency to disbelieve in the fulfillment of their national Promise by means of politically, economically, and socially reconstructive work has forced them into the alternative of attaching excessive importance to subsidized good intentions.  They want to be “uplifted,” and they want to “uplift” other people; but they will not use their social and political institutions for the purpose, because those institutions are assumed to be essentially satisfactory.  The “uplifting” must be a matter of individual, or of unofficial associated effort; and the only available means are words and subsidies.

There is, however, a sense in which it is really true that the American national Promise can be fulfilled only by education; and this aspect of our desirable national education can, perhaps, best be understood by seeking its analogue in the training of the individual.  An individual’s education consists primarily in the discipline which he undergoes to fit him both for fruitful association with his fellows and for his own special work.  Important as both the liberal and the technical aspect of this preliminary training is, it constitutes merely the beginning of a man’s education.  Its object is or should be to prepare him both in his will and in his intelligence to make a thoroughly illuminating use of his experience in life.  His experience,—­as a man of business, a husband, a father, a citizen, a friend,—­has been made real to him, not merely by the zest with which he has sought it and the sincerity with which he has accepted it, but by the disinterested intelligence which he has brought to its understanding.  An educational discipline which has contributed in that way to the reality of a man’s experience has done as much for him as education can do; and an educational discipline which has failed to make any such contribution has failed of its essential purpose.  The experience of other people acquired at second hand has little value,—­except, perhaps, as a means of livelihood,—­unless it really illuminates a man’s personal experience.