them, with a few
exceptions; and so long as this is so, so long as our highly
individualised society is recruited, year by year, by a large
contingent of individualists of all ranks, drawn from schools of
all grades, for so long will the Socialistic ideal remain an
impracticable dream. An impracticable and a mischievous dream; for
in the attempt to realise it, the community will almost inevitably
be brought to the verge of civil war. When the seeds of socialistic
legislation, or even of socialistic agitation, are sown in a soil
which is highly charged with the poison of individualism, the
resulting crop will be class hatred and social strife.

No, we must change our standard of reality before we can hope to
reform society. Where the outward standard prevails, where material
possessions are regarded as "the good things of life," the basis of
society must needs be competitive rather than communal, for there
will never be enough of those "good things" to satisfy the desires of
_all_ the members of any community. And even if the socialistic
dream of state-ownership could be universally realised, the
change--so long as the outward standard of reality prevailed--would
not necessarily be for the better, and might well be for the worse.
Competition for "the good things of life" would probably go on as
fiercely as ever; but it would be a scramble among nations rather
than individuals, and it might conceivably take the form of open
warfare waged on a titanic scale.[35] Even now there are indications
that such a struggle, or series of struggles, if not actually
approaching, is at any rate not beyond the bounds of possibility. And
on the way to the realisation of the collectivist ideal, we should
probably have in each community a similar struggle for wealth and
power among political parties,--a struggle which would generate many
social evils, of which civil war might not be the most malignant.

But if we are to change our standard of reality we must change it,
first and foremost, in the school. The way to do this is quite
simple. We need not give lessons on altruism. We need not teach or
preach a new philosophy of life. All that we need do is to foster the
growth of the child's soul. When the growth of the soul is healthy
and harmonious, the cultivation of all the expansive instincts having
been fully provided for, the _communal_ instinct will evolve itself
in its own season; and when the communal instinct has been fully
evolved