eves that democracy is
a happy device for evading collective responsibilities by passing them
on to the individual; and as long as this belief continues to prevail,
the first necessity of American educational advance is the arousing of
the American intellectual conscience. Behind the tradition of national
irresponsibility is the still deeper tradition of intellectual
insincerity in political matters. Americans are almost as much afraid of
consistent and radical political thinking as are the English, and with
nothing like as much justification. Jefferson offered them a seductive
example of triumphant intellectual dishonesty, and of the sacrifice of
theory to practice, whenever such a sacrifice was convenient.
Jefferson's example has been warmly approved by many subsequent
intellectual leaders. Before Emerson and after, mere consistency has
been stigmatized as the preoccupation of petty minds; and our American
superiority to the necessity of making ideas square with practice, or
one idea with another, has been considered as an exhibition of
remarkable political common sense. The light-headed Frenchmen really
believed in their ideas, and fell thereby into a shocking abyss of
anarchy and fratricidal bloodshed, whereas we have avoided any similar
fate by preaching a "noble national theory" and then practicing it just
as far as it suited our interests or was not too costly in time and
money. No doubt, we also have had our domestic difficulties, and were
obliged to shed a good deal of American blood, because we resolutely
refused to believe that human servitude was not entirely compatible with
the loftiest type of democracy; but then, the Civil War might have been
avoided if the Abolitionists had not erroneously insisted on being
consistent. The way to escape similar trouble in the future is to go on
preaching ideality, and to leave its realization wholly to the
individual. We can then be "uplifted" by the words, while the resulting
deeds cannot do us, as individuals, any harm. We can continue to
celebrate our "noble national theory" and preserve our perfect
democratic system until the end of time without making any of the
individual sacrifices or taking any of the collective risks, inseparable
from a systematic attempt to make our words good.

The foregoing state of mind is the great obstacle to the American
national advance; and its exposure and uprooting is the primary need of
American education. In agitating against the tr