holesome democratic
organization. Says Mr. John Jay Chapman in the chapter on "Democracy,"
in his "Causes and Consequences": "It is thought that the peculiar merit
of democracy lies in this: that it gives every man a chance to pursue
his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption
imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow-men.... The
concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger and
not the safety of democracy, for democracy contemplates that every man
shall think first of the state and next of himself.... Democracy assumes
perfection in human nature." But men will always continue chiefly to
pursue their own private ends as long as those ends are recognized by
the official national ideal as worthy of perpetuation and encouragement.
If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man
shall serve his fellow-men, the organization of democracy should be
gradually adapted to that assumption. The majority of men cannot be made
disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any
expenditure of subsidized words, or even by a grave and manifest public
need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to
become disinterested in their individual purposes, and how can they be
disinterested except in a few little spots as long as their daily
occupation consists of money seeking and spending in conformity with a
few written and unwritten rules? In the complete democracy a man must in
some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to
his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is
dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between
private and public interests. To ask an individual citizen continually
to sacrifice his recognized private interest to the welfare of his
countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a
continual sacrifice is apparently required of an individual in a
democratic state. The only entirely satisfactory solution of the
difficulty is offered by the systematic authoritative transformation of
the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to
a special object.

American public opinion has not as yet begun to understand the relation
between the process of national education by means of a patient attempt
to realize the national purpose and the corresponding process of
individual emancipation and growth. It still beli