hundred millions for its
beautification, we could make it look like a combination of Athens,
Florence, and Paris. Is it desirable for the American citizen to be
something of a hero? I will encourage heroes by establishing a fund
whereby they shall be rewarded in cash. War is hell, is it? I will work
for the abolition of hell by calling a convention and passing a
resolution denouncing its iniquities. I will build at the Hague a Palace
of Peace which shall be a standing rebuke to the War Lords of Europe.
Here, in America, some of us have more money than we need and more good
will. We will spend the money in order to establish the reign of the
good, the beautiful, and the true.

This faith in a combination of good intentions, organization, words, and
money is not confined to women's clubs or to societies of amiable
enthusiasts. In the state of mind which it expresses can be detected the
powerful influence which American women exert over American men; but its
guiding faith and illusion are shared by the most hard-headed and
practical of Americans. The very men who have made their personal
successes by a rigorous application of the rule that business is
business--the very men who in their own careers have exhibited a shrewd
and vivid sense of the realities of politics and trade; it is these men
who have most faith in the practical, moral, and social power of the
Subsidized Word. The most real thing which they carry over from the
region of business into the region of moral and intellectual ideals is
apparently their bank accounts. The fruits of their hard work and their
business ability are to be applied to the purpose of "uplifting" their
fellow-countrymen. A certain number of figures written on a check and
signed by a familiar name, what may it not accomplish? Some years ago at
the opening exercises of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Mr. Andrew
Carnegie burst into an impassioned and mystical vision of the
miraculously constitutive power of first mortgage steel bonds. From his
point of view and from that of the average American there is scarcely
anything which the combination of abundant resources and good intentions
may not accomplish.

The tradition of seeking to cross the gulf between American practice and
the American ideal by means of education or the Subsidized Word is not
be dismissed with a sneer. The gulf cannot be crossed without the
assistance of some sort of educational discipline; and that discipline
dep