markably clean with an old broom, if you will sweep hard enough. The
cleaning up is due, not primarily to the instrument, but to the hand
that wields it.

To speak less figuratively: the cleaning up of the city government with
the inauguration of the commission system, came because the change was
made by an awakening of the good people of the community. Good people
have a habit, however, of going to sleep in an astoundingly short time;
but _the gang never sleeps_. Now suppose, while the good people are
dozing in semi-somnolence, assured that the new broom will sweep of
itself, the gang gets together and elects the three to five worst
gangsters in the city to be the commission? Is it not evident that the
very added efficiency of the instrument means greater graft and
corruption?

Equally the argument applies to the most recent device suggested--the
city manager plan. As we have largely taken our schools out of
politics, and have a non-partisan educational expert as superintendent,
so it is suggested we should conduct our city business. Again, suppose
the gang appoints the city manager: he will be an expert in graft,
rather than in government.

The moment a people gets to trusting to a device it is headed for
danger. There is just one safeguard of democracy, and that is _to keep
the good people awake and at the task all the time_. Some instruments
are better and some are worse, but the instrument never does the work,
it is the hand and brain that wield it.

If there is one field where we could reasonably expect to find pure
democracy, it is in our higher educational institutions. In a college
or university, where a group of young men and women, and a group of
older men and women are gathered apart, out of the severer economic
struggle, dedicated to ideal ends: there, surely, we could expect pure
democracy in organization and relationship; yet the tendency has been
steadily toward autocracy. One can count the fingers of both hands and
not cover the list of college and university presidents who have taken
office during the last fifteen years, only on condition that they have
complete authority over the educational policy of the institution, and
often over its financial policy as well. The reason is obvious: we run
a railroad efficiently by getting a good president and giving him
arbitrary control; why not a university?

There are just the two objections cited above: even in a university, it
is difficult to k