eep your tyrant good. This, again, is the minor
objection. The real evil is in the effect upon the rank and file of
those governed by the autocrat. There are men in university faculties
to-day who say, privately, that if they could get any other opportunity,
they would resign to-morrow, for they feel like clerks in a department
store, with no opportunity to help determine the educational policy of
the institutions of which they are integral parts.

The German university, under all the autocracy and bureaucracy of the
German state, is more democratic in its organization than our own. Its
faculty is a self-governing body, electing to its own membership. The
Rectorship is an honor conferred for the year on some faculty member for
superior worth and scholarship. Each member of the faculty may thus
feel the self-respect and dignity, resulting from the power and
initiative he possesses as a free citizen of the institution.

Let me suggest what would be the ideal democratic organization of a
college or university. Why not apply the same division of functions of
government that has proved so successful in the state? The board of
Trustees is the natural judiciary; the President, the executive. The
faculty is the legislative body, with the student body as a sort of
lower house, cooperating in enacting the legislation for its own
government. Where has such a plan been tried?

If the primary purpose of democracy is thus, not immediate results in
government, but the education of the citizen, on the other hand,
democracy rests, for its safety and progress, on the ever better
education of the citizen. Under the older forms of human society, laws
may be passed and executed that are far in advance of public opinion.
That cannot be done in a democracy. The law may be a slight step in
advance, and so perhaps educate public opinion to its level; but if it
goes beyond that step, after the first flurry of interest in the law is
past, it remains a dead letter on the statute books--worse than useless,
because cultivating that dangerous disrespect for all law, which we have
seen growing upon us as a people.

Thus from either side, the problem of democracy is a problem of
education. It rests upon education, its aim is education. In a
democracy, the supreme function of the state is, not to establish a
military system for defense, or a police system for protection, it is
not the enforcement of public and private contract: it is to ta