ge to have some way of being good that we have
thought of ourselves, we like it still better. We dote on goodness when
it is ours and when we are allowed to put some punch into it. We want to
be good, to express our practical, our doing-idealism, but we will not
be driven to being good and people who think they can drive us to being
good in a government or out of it are incompetent people. They do not
know who we are.

We say they shall not have their way with us.

Let them get us right first. Then they can do other things.

What is our American temperament?

Here are a few American reflections.

The government of the next boys' school of importance in this country is
going to determine the cuts and free hours, and privileges not by marks,
but by its genius for seeing through boys.

And instead of making rules for two hundred pupils because just twenty
pupils need them, they will make the rules for just twenty pupils.

Pupils who can use their souls and can do better by telling themselves
what to do, will be allowed to do better. Why should two hundred boys
who want to be men be bullied into being babies by twenty infants who
can scare a school government into rules, _i.e._, scare their teachers
into being small and mean and second-rate?

A government that goes on this principle with business men, and that
does it in a spirit of mutual understanding for those who are not yet
free from rules, and in a spirit of confidence and expectation and of
talking it over, will be a government with an American temperament.

The first trait of a great government is going to be that it will
recognize that the basis of a true government in a democracy is
privilege and not treating all people alike. It is going to see that is
it a cowardly, lazy, brutal, and mechanical-minded thing for a
government which is trying to serve a great people--to treat all the
people alike. The basis of a great government like the basis of a great
man (or even the basis of a good digestion) is discrimination, and the
habit of acting according to facts. We will have rules or laws for
people who need them, and men in the same business who amount to enough
and are American enough to be safe as laws to themselves, will continue
to have their initiative and to make their business a profession, a
mould, an art form into which they pour their lives. The pouring of the
lives of men like this into their business is the one thing that the
business and the go