nce.

With that conception they must surely turn in the end, as we
Socialists turn, to the most creative profession of all, to that great
calling which with each generation renews the world's "circle of
ideas," the Teachers!

The whole trend and purpose of this book from the outset has been to
insist upon _the mental quality of Socialism_, to maintain that it is
a business of conventions about property and plans of reorganization,
that is to say, of changes and expansions of the ideas of men, changes
and expansions of their spirit of action and their habitual circles of
ideas. Unless you can change men's minds you cannot effect Socialism,
and when you have made clear and universal certain broad
understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices
and applied intelligence. That is the constructive Socialist's
position. Logically, therefore, he declares the teacher master of the
situation. Ultimately the Socialist movement _is_ teaching, and the
most important people in the world from the Socialist's point of view
are those who teach--I mean of course not simply those who teach in
schools, but those who teach in pulpits, in books, in the press, in
universities and lecture-theatres, in parliaments and councils, in
discussions and associations and experiments of every sort, and, last
in my list but most important of all, those mothers and motherly women
who teach little children in their earliest years. Every one, too, who
enunciates a new and valid idea, or works out a new contrivance, is a
teacher in this sense.

And these Teachers collectively, perpetually renew the collective
mind. In the measure that in each successive generation they apprehend
Socialism and transmit its spirit, is Socialism nearer its goal.

Sec. 2.

At the present time in America and all the western European countries,
there is a collective mind, a public opinion made up of the most
adventitious and interesting elements. It is not even a national or a
racial thing, it is curiously international, curiously responsive to
thought from every quarter; a something, vague here, clear there, here
diffused, there concentrated. It demands the closest attention from
Socialists this something, this something which is so hard to define
and so impossible to deny--civilized feeling, the thought of our age,
the mind of the world. It has organs, it has media, yet it is as hard
to locate as the soul of a man. We know that somewhere in the bra