full
strength at tasks that are worth while, and all animated by hopes and
aspirations that reach out to the very limits of space.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What may the school do to give helpful direction and needed
modifications to the instinct of acquisition?

2. The ultimate ends of education are more efficient production and more
intelligent consumption. How and by what means may the school bring
about a more intelligent choice of tangible and intangible things?

3. What hint may the teacher of geography receive from the brief
description of London's points of interest?

4. Compare a vitalized school with the panorama of London.

5. To what extent must individual differences be recognized by the
teacher in the recitation? in discipline?

6. Suggest means whereby pupils may be induced to spend their evenings
with Dickens, Eliot, Macaulay, or Irving in preference to the "movies."

CHAPTER VII

DEMOCRACY

=A conflict.=--There was a fight on a railway train--a terrific fight.
The conductor and two other Americans were battling against ten or more
foreigners. These foreigners had come aboard the train at a mining town
en route to the city for a holiday. The train had hardly got under way,
after the stop, when the fight was on. The battle raged back and forth
from one car to the other across the platform amid the shouts and
cursing of men and the screams of women. Bloody faces attested the
intensity of the conflict. One foreigner was knocked from the train, but
no account was taken of him. The train sped on and the fight continued.
Nor did its violence abate until the train reached the next station,
where the conductor summoned reenforcements and invoked the majesty of
the law in the form of an officer. The affray, from first to last, was
most depressing and gave to the unwilling witness a feeling that
civilization is something of a misnomer and that men are inherently
ferocious.

=Misconceptions.=--More mature reflection, however, served to modify
this judgment, and the application of some philosophy resolved the
distressing combat into a relatively simple proposition. The conductor
and his assistants were fighting for their conception of order, and
their opponents were fighting for their conception of manhood. Reduced
to its primal elements, the fight was the result of a dual
misconception. The conductor was battling to vindicate his conception of
order; the foreigners were battling to vindic