ation by the single-minded
and intelligent realization of his own specific purposes; but all
individual successes will have little more than an individual interest
unless they frequently contribute to the work of national construction.
The nation can do much to aid individual education; but the best aid
within its power is to offer to the individual a really formative and
inspiring opportunity for public service. The whole round of superficial
educational machinery--books, subsidies, resolutions, lectures,
congresses--may be of the highest value, provided they are used to
digest and popularize the results of a genuine individual and national
educational experience, but when they are used, as so often at present,
merely as a substitute for well-purposed individual and national action,
they are precisely equivalent to an attempt to fly in a vacuum.

That the direct practical value of a reform movement may be equaled or
surpassed by its indirect educational value is a sufficiently familiar
idea--an idea admirably expressed ten years ago by Mr. John Jay Chapman
in the chapter on "Education" in his "Causes and Consequences." But the
idea in its familiar form is vitiated, because the educational effect of
reform is usually conceived as exclusively individual. Its effect
_must_, indeed, be considered wholly as an individual matter, just so
long as reform is interpreted merely as a process of purification. From
that point of view the collective purpose has already been fulfilled as
far as it can be fulfilled by collective organization, and the _only_
remaining method of social amelioration is that of the self-improvement
of its constituent members. As President Nicholas Murray Butler of
Columbia says, in his "True and False Democracy": "We must not lose
sight of the fact that the corporate or collective responsibility which
it (socialism) would substitute for individual initiative is only such
corporate or collective responsibility as a group of these very same
individuals could exercise. Therefore, socialism is primarily an attempt
to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, in
the hope that they will cancel each other." But what is all organization
but an attempt, not to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding
them together, so much as to make use of many men's varying individual
abilities by giving each a sufficient sphere of exercise? While all men
are imperfect, they are not all imperfect t