the debates in a state house of
representatives, or analyzed the annual grist of legislative bills, or
have sat for an hour or two in the Senate or House at Washington. Such
an experience is, I assure you, illuminating, for it shows exactly why
popular government is what it is, while it forms an admirable basis for
a constructive revision of judgment as to the soundness of accepted
principles and the validity of accepted methods.

Our political attitude today is based on an inherited and automatic
acceptance of certain perfectly automatic formulae. We neither see
things clearly, estimate conditions as they are, nor think a proposition
through to the end: we are obsessed by old formulae, partisan "slogans"
and newspaper aphorisms; the which is both unworthy and perilous. Let us
see things clearly for a moment; if we do this anything is possible, no
matter how idealistic and apparently impracticable it may be. Is there
any one who would confess that character and intelligence are now a
helpless minority in this nation? Such an admission would be almost
constructive treason. The instinct of the majority is right, but it is
defective in will and it is subservient to base leadership, while its
power for good is negatived by the persistence of a mass of formulae
that, under radically changed conditions, have ceased to be beneficient,
or even true, and have become a clog and a stumbling block.

I may not have indicated better ideals or sounder methods of operation,
but the true ideals exist and it is not beyond our ability to discover a
better working system. Partisanship cannot reveal either one or the
other, nor are they the fruit of organization or the attribute of
political leadership. They belong to the common citizen, to you, to the
individual, and if once superstition is cast out and we fall back on
right reason and the eternal principles of the Christian ethic and the
Christian ideal, we shall not find them difficult of attainment; and
once attained they can be put in practice, for the ill thing exists only
on sufferance, the right thing establishes itself by force of its very
quality of right.

VI

THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART

When, as on occasion happens, some hostile criticism is leveled against
the civilization of modernism, or against some one of its many details,
the reply is ready, and the faultfinder is told that the defect, if it
exists, will in the end be obviated by the processes of popula