iness or profession, keeps up his old college friendships, is
interested in collecting coins or paintings and knows all the other
collectors, is active in civic and charitable societies, takes an interest
in education and educators, and so on. The social democracy that should
succeed in abolishing all these groups or leveling them--that should
recognize no relationships but the broader ones that underly all human
effort and feeling--the touches of nature that make the whole world
kin--would be barren indeed.

We cannot spare these fundamentals; we could not get rid of them if we
would; but civilization advances by building upon them, and to do away
with these additions would be like destroying a city to get at its
foundation, in the vain hope of securing some wide-reaching result in
economics or aesthetics. Occupying a foremost place among these groupings
is the large division embracing our educational activities. And these are
social not only in the broad sense, but also in the narrower. The
intercourse of student with student in the school and even of reader with
reader in the library, especially in such departments as the children's
room, is so obviously that of society that we need dwell on it no further.

This intercourse, while a necessary incident of education in the mass, is
only an incident. It is sufficiently obtrusive, however, to make it
evident that any use of school or library building for social purposes is
fit and proper. There is absolutely nothing new nor strange about such
use. In places that cannot afford separate buildings for these purposes,
the same edifice has often served for church, schoolhouse, public library,
and as assembly room for political meetings, amateur theatricals, and
juvenile debating societies. The propriety of all this has never been
questioned and it is difficult to see why it should not be as proper in a
town of 500,000 inhabitants as in one of 500. The incidence of the cost is
a matter of detail. Why should such purely social use of these educational
buildings--always common in small towns--have been allowed to fall into
abeyance in the larger ones? It is hard to say; but with the recent great
improvements in construction, the building of schools and libraries that
are models of beauty, comfort, and convenience, there has arisen a not
unnatural feeling in the public that all this public property should be
put to fuller use. Why should children be forced to dance on the street o