ly accept some degree of
incooerdination and confusion for the sake of our ideals of freedom. We
do not wish cohesion based upon any form of pessimism or fear--fear of
enemies without or of powers within. To secure unity in our own
national life we must work for it incessantly, and we ought to be
willing to, for unity means so much to us. It is not cohesion at any
price that we want, but voluntary and natural union, and to secure that
we should not hesitate to make our educational institutions broad
enough to include the education of the most fundamental relations of
the individual to society. We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a
morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from
slavery--neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and
enforced social organization. We must not be deceived either by a vague
and false idea of liberty or by the equally vicious ideal of militarism
with its superficiality of social relations and its pedagogical
simplicity. Both these ideas represent social life on a low plane.
Healthy individualism, even with its strong sense of tolerance and
comradeship and its respect for law and order, is not the kind of
social ideal that we should now cultivate, for it is too primitive a
state to fit into our already complex social life, or to be a basis for
the firm solidarity we need for the future. As for militarism, it may
become a mere shell, giving the appearance of social unity when its
bonds are mere shreds and the last drop of moral vitality has gone out
of it.

Our need and problem are plain enough. We wish to develop social
cohesion and unity upon a natural and permanent basis of social
feeling expressed in, and in turn produced by, social organization,
voluntarily entered into for practical and for ideal purposes. Such
solidarity can neither be made nor unmade by external forces. We must
form and sustain it by creating internal bonds. We live, in any great
society, always over smoldering fires, however highly civilized the
society, and we are always threatened with the eruption of volcanic
forces. It is fatuous to ignore this, and to make a fool's paradise of
our democracy. Our problem is to produce such a social life as shall
keep us safe through all dangers--dangers from enemies without, and
within, and underneath. A democracy, or indeed any society after all
and at its best, contains the makings of the crowd and the mob.
Organized as it is, it is always an order made o