or failures.  The most essential and edifying business of the critic will always consist in building up “a pile of better thoughts,” based for the most part upon the truth resident in the lives of their predecessors and contemporaries, but not without its outlook toward an immediate and even remote future.  There can be nothing final about the creed unless there be something final about the action and purposes of which it is the expression.  It must be constantly modified in order to define new experiences and renewed in order to meet unforeseen emergencies.  But it should grow, just in so far as the enterprise itself makes new conquests and unfolds new aspects of truth.  Democracy is an enterprise of this kind.  It may prove to be the most important moral and social enterprise as yet undertaken by mankind; but it is still a very young enterprise, whose meaning and promise is by no means clearly understood.  It is continually meeting unforeseen emergencies and gathering an increasing experience.  The fundamental duty of a critic in a democracy is to see that the results of these experiences are not misinterpreted and that the best interpretation is embodied in popular doctrinal form.  The critic consequently is not so much the guide as the lantern which illuminates the path.  He may not pretend to know the only way or all the ways; but he should know as much as can be known about the traveled road.

Men endowed with high moral gifts and capable of exceptional moral achievements have also their special part to play in the building of an enduring democratic structure.  In the account which has been given of the means and conditions of democratic fulfillment, the importance of this part has been under-estimated; but the under-estimate has been deliberate.  It is very easy and in a sense perfectly true to declare that democracy needs for its fulfillment a peculiarly high standard of moral behavior; and it is even more true to declare that a democratic scheme of moral values reaches its consummate expression in the religion of human brotherhood.  Such a religion can be realized only through the loving-kindness which individuals feel toward their fellow-men and particularly toward their fellow-countrymen; and it is through such feelings that the network of mutual loyalties and responsibilities woven in a democratic nation become radiant and expansive.  Whenever an individual democrat, like Abraham Lincoln, emerges, who succeeds in offering an example of specific efficiency united with supreme kindliness of feeling, he qualifies as a national hero of consummate value.  But—­at present—­a profound sense of human brotherhood is no substitute for specific efficiency.  The men most possessed by intense brotherly feelings usually fall into an error, as Tolstoy has done, as to the way in which those feelings can be realized.  Consummate faith itself is no substitute for good work.  Back of any work of moral conversion must come a long and slow process of social reorganization and individual emancipation; and not until the reorganization has been partly accomplished, and the individual released, disciplined and purified, will the soil be prepared for the crowning work of some democratic Saint Francis.