u please, contains this interesting
objection: "Because although those comrades who intend to emigrate with
Cabet may be eager Communists, yet they still possess too many of the
faults and prejudices of present-day society by reason of their past
education to be able to get rid of them at once by joining Icaria."

That simple statement might be taken to heart by all the reformers and
socialists who insist that the people are all right, that only
institutions are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require a nation
vastly better educated, a nation freed from its slovenly ways of
thinking, stimulated by wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the
sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say that institutions must
be changed from top to bottom and then assume that their victims are
prepared to make the change. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or
short ballots make a democracy out of an illiterate people. Those
portions of America where there are voting booths but no schools cannot
possibly be described as democracies. Nor can the person who reads one
corrupt newspaper and then goes out to vote make any claim to having
registered his will. He may have a will, but he has not used it.

For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it is just as well that men
shouldn't know what they want or how to express it. Education has always
been a considerable nuisance to the conservative intellect. In the
Southern States, culture among the negroes is openly deplored, and I do
not blame any patriarch for dreading the education of women. It is out of
culture that the substance of real revolutions is made. If by some magic
force you could grant women the vote and then keep them from schools and
colleges, newspapers and lectures, the suffrage would be no more
effective than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sunday. It is
democratic machinery with an educated citizenship behind it that embodies
all the fears of the conservative and the hopes of the radical.

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts,
their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their
table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific
training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire.
All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
Without a favorable culture political schemes are a mere imposition. They
will not work without a people to work th