loyd
Garrison can be measured by the difference in moral and intellectual
discipline to which each of these men submitted. Lincoln sedulously
turned to account every intellectual and moral opportunity which his
life afforded. Garrison's impatient temper and unbalanced mind made him
the enthusiastic advocate of a few distorted and limited ideas. The
consequence was that Garrison, although apparently an arch-heretic, was
in reality the victim of the sterile American convention which makes
willful enthusiasm, energy, and good intentions a sufficient substitute
for necessary individual and collective training. Lincoln, on the other
hand, was in his whole moral and intellectual make-up a living protest
against the aggressive, irresponsible, and merely practical Americanism
of his day; while at the same time in the greatness of his love and
understanding he never allowed his distinction to divide him from his
fellow-countrymen. His was the unconscious and constructive heresy which
looked in the direction of national intellectual independence and
national moral union and good faith.

IV

MEANS OF INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION

We are now in a position to define more clearly just how the American
individual can assert his independence, and how in asserting his
independence he can contribute to American national fulfillment. He
cannot make any effective advance towards national fulfillment merely by
educating himself and his fellow-countrymen as individuals to a higher
intellectual and moral level, because an essential condition of really
edifying individual education is the gradual process of collective
education by means of collective action and formative collective
discipline. On the other hand, this task of collective education is far
from being complete in itself. It necessarily makes far greater demands
upon the individual than does a system of comparative collective
irresponsibility. It implies the selection of peculiarly competent,
energetic, and responsible individuals to perform the peculiarly
difficult and exacting parts in a socially constructive drama; and it
implies, as a necessary condition of such leadership, a progressively
higher standard of individual training and achievement, unofficial as
well as official, throughout the whole community. The process of
educating men of moral and intellectual stature sufficient for the
performance of important constructive work cannot be disentangled from
the process of natio