bachelor. Having no children and heavy taxes to pay, he
looks with jaundiced eye on additions to schoolhouses. He will object
and growl and growl and object, and yet pin him down as I have seen the
Scotch Preacher pin him more than once, he will admit that children ("of
course," he will say, "certainly, of course") must be educated.

"For the good of bachelors as well as other people?" the Scotch
Preacher will press it home.

"Certainly, of course."

And when the final issue comes, after full discussion, after he has
tried to lop off a few yards of blackboard or order cheaper desks or
dispense with the clothes-closet, he votes for the addition with the
rest of us.

It is simply amazing to see how much grows out of these discussions--how
much of that social sympathy and understanding which is the very
tap-root of democracy. It's cheaper to put up a miserable shack of an
addition. Why not do it? So we discuss architecture--blindly, it is
true; we don't know the books on the subject--but we grope for the big
true things, and by our own discussion we educate ourselves to know why
a good building is better than a bad one. Heating and ventilation in
their relation to health, the use of "fad studies"--how I have heard
those things discussed!

How Dr. North, who has now left us forever, shone in those meetings, and
Charles Baxter and the Scotch Preacher--broad men, every one--how they
have explained and argued, with what patience have they brought into
that small schoolhouse, lighted by Charles Baxter's lamp, the grandest
conceptions of human society--not in the big words of the books, but in
the simple, concrete language of our common life.

"Why teach physiology?"

What a talk Dr. North once gave us on that!

"Why pay a teacher $40 a month when one can be had for $30?"

You should have heard the Scotch Preacher answer that question! Many a
one of us went away with some of the education which we had come,
somewhat grudgingly, to buy for our children.

These are our political bosses: these unknown patriots, who preach the
invisible patriotism which expresses itself not in flags and oratory,
but in the quiet daily surrender of private advantage to the public
good.

There is, after all, no such thing as perfect equality; there must be
leaders, flag-bearers, bosses--whatever you call them. Some men have a
genius for leading; others for following; each is necessary and
dependent upon the other. In cities, that leaders