necessity under the representative system. But it is demanded under this system that there shall be men of extraordinary learning and wisdom, who, as leaders in the commonwealth, shall be worthy of confidence. Thus, in so far as our plan of universal education draws attention and support away from, and prevents the development of, means for the highest instruction, degrading the intellectual standard and leaving us to the guidance of the blind, in so far it is in conflict with the fundamental idea on which every complex society is organized. The preliminary educational need of this great representative republic, as it appears from this point of view, is not the further multiplication of institutions for superficial instruction, but the establishment of a new and higher ideal of intellectual life, which shall silence and put to shame the noisy pretensions of half-knowledge, and, through the realization of this ideal in higher wisdom, relieve the nation from the dangers of uninstructed counsel.

LECTURE IV.

PRESERVATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT.

LTHOUGH the forms of our society may change in the course of our social growth, yet at the same time we feel the rightness of our instinct to preserve the democratic life. We know that in a community growing from simplicity to complexity, equality tends to disappear, and with equality also the conditions favorable to democratic rule. Yet as a nation we stand committed to a representative republic based on democracy. For us there is no alternative but an oligarchy or a military dictatorship, and to neither of these can we look with any degree of hope. A throne upheld by great achievements and the traditions of glorious centuries is impossible on this continent. We are compelled, therefore, to stand for

what we have, for the fundamental ideas and institutions under which we live, and to attempt to counteract those social forces that tend to make them impossible. We stand for these institutions, although we recognize that their establishment was in some sense an experiment. In fact, we recognize the establishment of every government as an experiment. Moreover, the whole governmental history of the world. is only one long series of more or less successful attempts to find some means for wisely organizing and controlling men in communities and nations. It is true, the individual men who lay the plans and set in operation the forces of the experiment seldom live to see the outcome; but the nation or the race stands by and waits calmly for the result. And all this must be because no two governmental problems, either in the same age or in different ages, involve the same factors, and therefore the history of the past furnishes only hints, but no solutions, for the future. In making the experiment, the government must be framed on the basis of the circumstances

and conditions which we know from an observation of the present; but it goes into force to apply to circumstances and conditions which we cannot know, because they are in the undeveloped future.

After only one hundred years it may be too early to pronounce on the success or failure of this experiment. When the Roman empire had lasted an hundred years, The close of the increased renown

it was still in its infancy. second century saw it in and undiminished vigor. As it passed the end of the third century, it was guided by one whose acts reveal the true prophetic insight of a statesman. And not until after four hundred years was its existence seriously threatened by external shock. To have said during the first three hundred years of its existence that the Roman empire was a failure, as some have said of this American republic in its first hundred years, or to have said that it was established to last forever, as our patriotism prompts us to say of our government, would clearly have been a false judgment. The Roman empire may not have had all

the qualities of our ideal of a wise and efficient government, but at the same time, in the second or third century, it had by no means failed. Still it was not immortal, and finally passed away with the development of Christian society.

In view of the Empire's long unrivalled dominion and final extinction, in view of the perishableness of all human institutions, which is emphasized on every page of history, it is not to be supposed that as a nation we have reached a point in the development of social and political forms beyond which we shall not advance; to suppose this is to presume that the active practical intelligence which this nation has displayed for an hundred years will suddenly become paralyzed, and social stagnation settle over the land. As long as the nation moves with the current of progress, our institutions will continue to change to meet the demands of the developing spirit.

If, then, the establishment of our gov ernment is one of a long line of experiments which the race has made, why celebrate its beginnings or take delight in its con