make such and such a
contribution--you must renounce such and such a separate advantage--you
must set your face against such and such an infringement. If we have any
false ideas about our common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall
be co-operating to damage each other. But, now, here is a part of our
good, without which everything else we strive for will be worthless--I
mean the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the members of our
unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in this definite matter,
which rules can reach. Let us demand that they send their children to
school, so as not to go on recklessly, breeding a moral pestilence among
us, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contributions to a
common fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we watch our
public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, which is also
public, and more momentous even than obedience to sanitary regulations.
While we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us
set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling
which came first, or which is the worse of the two--not trying to settle
the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly
on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure
of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them
lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding the right
methods of applying them.

To find right remedies and right methods. Here is the great function of
knowledge: here the life of one man may make a fresh era straight away,
in which a sort of suffering that has existed shall exist no more. For
the thousands of years down to the middle of the sixteenth century that
human limbs had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew how to stop the
bleeding except by searing the ends of the vessels with red-hot iron.
But then came a man named Ambrose Pare, and said, "Tie up the arteries!"
That was a fine word to utter. It contained the statement of a method--a
plan by which a particular evil was forever assuaged. Let us try to
discern the men whose words carry that sort of kernel, and choose such
men to be our guides and representatives--not choose platform swaggerers,
who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with.

To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which means to get
our life regulated according to the truest principles