is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow-men, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.  The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized words, or even by a grave and manifest public need.  They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes, and how can they be disinterested except in a few little spots as long as their daily occupation consists of money seeking and spending in conformity with a few written and unwritten rules?  In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment.  Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests.  To ask an individual citizen continually to sacrifice his recognized private interest to the welfare of his countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a continual sacrifice is apparently required of an individual in a democratic state.  The only entirely satisfactory solution of the difficulty is offered by the systematic authoritative transformation of the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to a special object.

American public opinion has not as yet begun to understand the relation between the process of national education by means of a patient attempt to realize the national purpose and the corresponding process of individual emancipation and growth.  It still believes that democracy is a happy device for evading collective responsibilities by passing them on to the individual; and as long as this belief continues to prevail, the first necessity of American educational advance is the arousing of the American intellectual conscience.  Behind the tradition of national irresponsibility is the still deeper tradition of intellectual insincerity in political matters.  Americans are almost as much afraid of consistent and radical political thinking as are the English, and with nothing like as much justification.  Jefferson offered them a seductive example of triumphant intellectual dishonesty, and of the sacrifice of theory to practice, whenever such a sacrifice was convenient.  Jefferson’s example has been warmly approved by many subsequent intellectual leaders.  Before Emerson and after, mere consistency has been stigmatized as the preoccupation of petty minds; and our American superiority to the necessity of making ideas square with practice, or one idea with another, has been considered as an exhibition of remarkable political common sense.  The light-headed Frenchmen really believed in their ideas, and fell thereby into a shocking abyss of anarchy and fratricidal bloodshed, whereas we have avoided any similar fate by preaching a “noble national theory” and then practicing it just as far as it suited our