s a resource the more painful and costly
methods of nature's instruction. A serious error will be followed by its
inevitable penalty, proportioned to the blindness and the perversity in
which it originated; and thereafter the prosperity of the country's
future will hang partly on the ability of the national intelligence to
trace the penalty to its cause and to fix the responsibility. No matter
how loyal the different members of a national body may be one to
another, their mutual good faith will bleed to death, unless some among
them have the intelligence to trace their national ills to their
appropriate causes, and the candid courage to advocate the necessary
remedial measures. At some point in the process, disinterested
patriotism and good faith must be reenforced by intellectual insight. A
people are saved many costly perversions, in case the official
school-masters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor
insubordinate; but if the lessons are foolishly phrased, or the pupils
refuse to learn, the school will never regain its proper disciplinary
value until new teachers have arisen, who understand both the error and
its consequences, and who can exercise an effective authority over their
pupils.

The mutual loyalty and responsibility, consequently, embodied and
inculcated in a national school, depends for its efficient expression
upon the amount of insight and intelligence which it involves. The
process of national education means, not only a discipline of the
popular will, but training in ability to draw inferences from the
national experience, so that the national consciousness will gradually
acquire an edifying state of mind towards its present and its future
problems. Those problems are always closely allied to the problems which
have been more or less completely solved during the national history;
and the body of practical lessons which can be inferred from that
history is the best possible preparation for present and future
emergencies. Such history requires close and exact reading. The national
experience is always strangely mixed. Even the successes of our own
past, such as the Federal organization, contain much dubious matter,
demanding the most scrupulous disentanglement. Even the worst enemies of
our national integrity, such as the Southern planters, offer in some
respects an edifying political example to a disinterested democracy.
Nations do not have to make serious mistakes in order to learn valuable
l