to his use,
determines the possibility of progress.

The so-called "common man," the universal type of our democracy, is
worthy of our admiration. He has his life of toil and his round of
duties alternating with pleasure, bearing the burdens of life
cheerfully, with human touch with his fellows; amid sorrow and joy,
duty and pleasure, storm and sunshine, he lives a normal existence and
passes on the torch of life to others. But the man who shuts himself
in his laboratory, lives like a monk, losing for a time the human
touch, spends long days of toil and "nights devoid of ease" until he
discovers a truth or makes an invention that makes millions glad, is
entitled to our highest reverence. The ordinary man and the
investigator are complementary factors of progress and both essential
to democracy.

_The Diffusion of Knowledge Necessary to Democracy_.--Always in
progress is a deflecting tendency, separating the educated class from
the uneducated. This is not on account of the aristocracy of learning,
but because of group activity, the educated man following a pursuit
different from the man of practical affairs. Hence the effort to
broadcast knowledge through lectures, university extension, and the
radio is essential to the progress of the whole community. One phase
of enlightenment is much neglected, that of making clear that the
object of the scholar and the object of the man of practical affairs
should be the same--that of establishing higher ideals of life and
providing means for approximating these ideals. It frequently occurs
that the individual who has centred his life on the accumulation of
wealth ignores the educator and has a contempt for the impractical
scholar, as he terms him. Not infrequently state legislatures, when
considering appropriations for education, have shown more interest in
hogs and cattle than in the welfare of children.

It would be well if the psychology of the common mind would change so
as to grasp the importance of education and scientific investigation to
every-day life. Does it occur to the {481} man who seats himself in
his car to whisk away across the country in the pursuit of ordinary
business, to pause to inquire who discovered gasoline or who invented
the gasoline-engine? Does he realize that some patient investigator in
the laboratory has made it possible for even a child to thus utilize
the forces of nature and thus shorten time and ignore space? Whence
comes the improv