punishes originality and starves imagination from the moment of first going to school down to the time of death and burial.  The whole spirit in which education is conducted needs to be changed, in order that children may be encouraged to think and feel for themselves, not to acquiesce passively in the thoughts and feelings of others.  It is not rewards after the event that will produce initiative, but a certain mental atmosphere.  There have been times when such an atmosphere existed:  the great days of Greece, and Elizabethan England, may serve as examples.  But in our own day the tyranny of vast machine-like organizations, governed from above by men who know and care little for the lives of those whom they control, is killing individuality and freedom of mind, and forcing men more and more to conform to a uniform pattern.

[1] In England this is called “a sense of humor.”

Vast organizations are an inevitable element in modern life, and it is useless to aim at their abolition, as has been done by some reformers, for instance, William Morris.  It is true that they make the preservation of individuality more difficult, but what is needed is a way of combining them with the greatest possible scope for individual initiative.

One very important step toward this end would be to render democratic the government of every organization.  At present, our legislative institutions are more or less democratic, except for the important fact that women are excluded.  But our administration is still purely bureaucratic, and our economic organizations are monarchical or oligarchic.  Every limited liability company is run by a small number of self-appointed or cošpted directors.  There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business also control its management.

Another measure which would do much to increase liberty would be an increase of self-government for subordinate groups, whether geographical or economic or defined by some common belief, like religious sects.  A modern state is so vast and its machinery is so little understood that even when a man has a vote he does not feel himself any effective part of the force which determines its policy.  Except in matters where he can act in conjunction with an exceptionally powerful group, he feels himself almost impotent, and the government remains a remote impersonal circumstance, which must be simply endured, like the weather.  By a share in the control of smaller bodies, a man might regain some of that sense of personal opportunity and responsibility which belonged to the citizen of a city-state in ancient Greece or medieval Italy.