ublic loss and injury incident to this kind of industrial
warfare. If compulsory arbitration has been a successful
method of dealing with labor difficulties in Australia in the
past, we can, by a careful study and comparison of conditions
there and conditions current in our country at the present,
illuminate and clarify our own problems. A campaign manager
in one presidential campaign does not forget what was
effective in the last, nor does he hesitate to profit by his
mistakes or those of others.

An impartial survey of the heritage of the past undertakes
critically to examine institutions, customs, ideas still current
with a view to determining their relevancy and utility to our
present needs. This demands, on the one hand, clarity as to
what those needs are, and, on the other hand, freedom from
prejudice for or against existing modes of life simply because
they have a history. A critical examination of the past
amounts practically to a taking stock, a summary of our
social assets and liabilities. We shall find our ideas, for
example, and our customs, a strange mixture of useful preservations,
and absurd or positively harmful relics of the past.
Ideas which were natural and useful enough in the situation
in which they originated, live on into a totally changed situation,
along with other ideas, like that of gravitation, which are
as true and as useful now as when they were first enunciated.
Many customs and institutions which may be found to have
as great utility now as when they were first practiced generations
ago, the customs and institutions, let us say, of family
life, may be found persisting along with customs and institutions,
like excess legal formalism (or, as their opponents claim,
a bi-cameral legislative system or a two-party system) which
may come generally to be regarded as impediments to progress.[1]
The unprejudiced observer, scientifically interested in
preserving those forms and mechanisms of social life which
are of genuine service to his own generation, will not condemn
or applaud "the past" _en masse_. He will, rather, examine it
in specific detail. He will not, for example, dismiss classical
education, because it is classical or old. He will rather try
experimentally to determine the actual consequences in the
case of those who study the classics. He will examine the
claims made for the study, try in specific cases to find out
whether those claims are fulfilled, and condemn or approve
the st