ent of theirs, had been
drawn up by some lawyer whom they might or might not know, and were
intended to do something that would be beneficial to a particular set of
persons. I do not mean, necessarily, beneficial in a way that would be
hurtful to the rest; they may have been perfectly honest, but they came
out of cubby-holes all over the State. They did not come out of public
places where men had got together and compared views. They were not the
products of common counsel, but the products of private counsel, a very
necessary process if there is no other, but a process which it would be
a very happy thing to dispense with if we could get another. And the
only other process is the process of common counsel.

Some of the happiest experiences of my life have been like this. We had
once when I was president of a university to revise the whole course of
study.[G] Courses of study are chronically in need of revision. A
committee of, I believe, fourteen men was directed by the faculty of the
university to report a revised curriculum. Naturally, the men who had
the most ideas on the subject were picked out and, naturally, each man
came with a very definite notion of the kind of revision he wanted, and
one of the first discoveries we made was that no two of us wanted
exactly the same revision. I went in there with all my war paint on to
get the revision I wanted, and I dare say, though it was perhaps more
skillfully concealed, the other men had their war paint on, too. We
discussed the matter for six months. The result was a report which no
one of us had conceived or foreseen, but with which we were all
absolutely satisfied. There was not a man who had not learned in that
committee more than he had ever known before about the subject, and who
had not willingly revised his prepossessions; who was not proud to be a
participant in a genuine piece of common counsel. I have had several
experiences of that sort, and it has led me, whenever I confer, to hold
my particular opinion provisionally, as my contribution to go into the
final result but not to dominate the final result.

That is the ideal of a government like ours, and an interesting thing is
that if you only talk about an idea that will not work long enough,
everybody will see perfectly plainly that it will not work; whereas, if
you do not talk about it, and do not have a great many people talk about
it, you are in danger of having the people who handle it think that it
will