y as parent,
doctor, food dealer, food carrier, home builder, protector; or mentally
as teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and
growths and the fine future of mankind, but the collective aspects
of man, his social and political organizations must also be, in the
essence, organizations that more or less profitably and more or
less intentionally set themselves towards this end. They are finally
concerned with the birth, and with the sound development towards still
better births, of human lives, just as every implement in the toolshed
of a seedsman's nursery, even the hoe and the roller, is concerned
finally with the seeding and with the sound development towards still
better seeding of plants. The private and personal motive of the
seedsman in procuring and using these tools may be avarice, ambition, a
religious belief in the saving efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple
passion for bettering flowers, that does not affect the definite final
purpose of his outfit of tools.

"And just as we might judge completely and criticize and improve that
outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants, and with an
entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
births and development. ANY COLLECTIVE HUMAN ENTERPRISE, INSTITUTION,
MOVEMENT, PARTY OR STATE, IS TO BE JUDGED AS A WHOLE AND COMPLETELY, AS
IT CONDUCES MORE OR LESS TO WHOLESOME AND HOPEFUL BIRTHS, AND ACCORDING
TO THE QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ADVANCE DUE TO ITS INFLUENCE MADE
BY EACH GENERATION OF CITIZENS BORN UNDER ITS INFLUENCE TOWARDS A HIGHER
AND AMPLER STANDARD OF LIFE."

And individual conduct, quite as much as collective affairs, comes under
the same test. We are guides and school builders, helpers and influences
every hour of our lives, and by that standard we can and must judge all
our ways of living.

3.27. POSSIBILITY OF A NEW ETIQUETTE.

These two ideas, firstly the pupil-teacher parental idea and secondly
the democratic idea (that is to say the idea of an equal ultimate
significance), the second correcting any tendency in the first to
pedagogic arrogance and tactful concealments, do I think give, when
taken together, the general attitude a right-living man will take to
his individual fellow creature. They play against each other, providing
elements of contradiction and determining a balanced course. It seems to
me to foll