m it was
then right to attend to.

It was this individualistic religion that made T. D., democrat as he
nevertheless was, so hostile to all socialisms and administrative
panaceas. Life must be flexible. You ask for a free man, and these
Utopias give you an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a
rule-bound organism. The real thing to aim at is liberation of the
inner interests. Give man possession of a _soul_, and he will work out
his own happiness under any set of conditions. Accordingly, when, in
the penultimate year of his life, he proposed his night-school to a
meeting of young East-Side workingmen in New York, he told them that he
had no sympathy whatever with the griefs of "labor," that outward
circumstances meant nothing in his eyes; that through their individual
wills and intellects they could share, just as they were, in the
highest spiritual life of humanity, and that he was there to help them
severally to that privilege.

The enthusiasm with which they responded speaks volumes, both for his
genius as a teacher and for the sanity of his position. A small
posthumous book of articles by Davidson and of letters written from
Glenmore to his class, just published, with an introduction by his
disciple Professor Bakewell,[2] gives a full account of the experiment,
and ought to stand as a model and inspirer to similar attempts the
world over. Davidson's idea of the universe was that of a republic of
immortal spirits, the chief business of whom in their several grades of
existence, should be to know and love and help one another. "Creeds
are nothing, life is everything. . . . You can do far more by
presenting to the world the example of noble social relations than by
enumerating any set of principles. Know all you can, love all you can,
do all you can--that is the whole duty of man. . . . Be friends, in
the truest sense, each to the other. There is nothing in all the world
like friendship, when it is deep and real. . . . The divine . . . is a
republic of self-existent spirits, each seeking the realization of its
ideas through love, through intimacy with all the rest, and finding its
heaven in such intimacy."

We all say and think that we believe this sort of thing; but Davidson
believed it really and actively, and that made all the difference.
When the young wage-earners whom he addressed found that here was a man
of measureless learning ready to give his soul to them as if he had
nothing els