ommon school system was coincident with the
founding of the colonies; and even the establishment of institutions
for higher education did not lag far behind. Harvard College was
founded but six years after the first settlement of Boston.

Third: _Submission to leadership as distinguished from authority._
Democratic ideals can be attained only where those who govern exercise
their power not by alleged divine right or inheritance, but by force
of character and intelligence. Such a condition implies the attainment
by citizens generally of relatively high moral and intellectual
standards; and such a condition actually existed among the Jews. These
men who were habitually denied rights, and whose province it has been
for centuries "to suffer and to think," learned not only to sympathize
with their fellows (which is the essence of democracy and social
justice), but also to accept voluntarily the leadership of those
highly endowed morally and intellectually.

Fourth: _A developed community sense._ The sense of duty to which I
have referred was particularly effective in promoting democratic
ideals among the Jews, because of their deep-seated community feeling.
To describe the Jew as an individualist is to state a most misleading
half-truth. He has to a rare degree merged his individuality and his
interests in the community of which he forms a part. This is evidenced
among other things by his attitude toward immortality. Nearly every
other people has reconciled this world of suffering with the idea of a
beneficent providence by conceiving of immortality for the individual.
The individual sufferer bore present ills by regarding this world as
merely the preparation for another, in which those living righteously
here would find individual reward hereafter. Of all the nations,
Israel "takes precedence in suffering"; but, despite our national
tragedy, the doctrine of individual immortality found relatively
slight lodgment among us. As Ahad Ha-'Am so beautifully said: "Judaism
did not turn heavenward and create in Heaven an eternal habitation of
souls. It found 'eternal life' on earth, by strengthening the social
feeling in the individual; by making him regard himself not as an
isolated being with an existence bounded by birth and death, but as
part of a larger whole, as a limb of the social body. This conception
shifts the center of gravity not from the flesh to the spirit, but
from the individual to the community; and concurrently