This is my assertion.  I cannot prove it.

What we seem to need next in this country in order to be clear-headed and to go ahead, is to prove it.  We want a competent census of human nature.

Lacking a census of human nature, the next best thing we can do is to watch the men who seem to know the most about human nature.

We put ourselves in their hands.

These men seem to believe, judging from their actions, that there is really nothing that suits our temperament better in America than being good.  If we can manage to have some way of being good that we have thought of ourselves, we like it still better.  We dote on goodness when it is ours and when we are allowed to put some punch into it.  We want to be good, to express our practical, our doing-idealism, but we will not be driven to being good and people who think they can drive us to being good in a government or out of it are incompetent people.  They do not know who we are.

We say they shall not have their way with us.

Let them get us right first.  Then they can do other things.

What is our American temperament?

Here are a few American reflections.

The government of the next boys’ school of importance in this country is going to determine the cuts and free hours, and privileges not by marks, but by its genius for seeing through boys.

And instead of making rules for two hundred pupils because just twenty pupils need them, they will make the rules for just twenty pupils.

Pupils who can use their souls and can do better by telling themselves what to do, will be allowed to do better.  Why should two hundred boys who want to be men be bullied into being babies by twenty infants who can scare a school government into rules, i.e., scare their teachers into being small and mean and second-rate?

A government that goes on this principle with business men, and that does it in a spirit of mutual understanding for those who are not yet free from rules, and in a spirit of confidence and expectation and of talking it over, will be a government with an American temperament.

The first trait of a great government is going to be that it will recognize that the basis of a true government in a democracy is privilege and not treating all people alike.  It is going to see that is it a cowardly, lazy, brutal, and mechanical-minded thing for a government which is trying to serve a great people—­to treat all the people alike.  The basis of a great government like the basis of a great man (or even the basis of a good digestion) is discrimination, and the habit of acting according to facts.  We will have rules or laws for people who need them, and men in the same business who amount to enough and are American enough to be safe as laws to themselves, will continue to have their initiative and to make their business a profession, a mould, an art form into which they pour their lives.  The pouring of the lives of men like this into their business is the one thing that the business and the government want.