ically, it was the necessary outcome of the political democracy.
In striking contrast to the European bureaucracy, any citizen could at
any time be called to be postmaster or mayor or governor or member of
the cabinet. A true American would find his way, however complex the
work before him. That was, and is, splendid. Yet the development of
the recent decades has clearly shown that the danger of this mental
attitude after all appears to the newer American generation alarmingly
great in many fields. Civil service has steadily grown, the influence
of the engineer and the expert in every technical and practical field
has more and more taken control of American life, because the
go-as-you-please methods of the amateur have shown increasingly their
ineffectiveness. Education has slowly been removed from the
dilettantic, unprepared school boards. The reign of the expert in
public life seems to have begun. But in private life such an attitude
is still a part of the mental equipment of millions. They ignore the
physician and cure themselves with patent medicines or mental healing:
they ignore the banker and broker and make their investments in
accordance with their own amateurish inspiration. They pick up a few
data, ask a few friends who are as little informed as themselves, but
do not think of asking the only group of men who make a serious,
persistent study of the market their lifework.

They call this independence, and it cannot be denied that some
features of our home and school education may have fostered this
tendency not to submit to the judgment of those who know better. They
have grown up in schools in which the kindergarten method never
stopped, in which they were permitted to select the studies which they
liked, and to learn just what pleased them; they were brought up in
homes in which they were begged and persuaded, but never forced to do
the unwelcome; in short, they have never learned to submit their will
to authority. It cannot be surprising that they fancy that it is the
right kind of mental setting to feel one's self the ultimate authority
in every field, and it would be harmless indeed if the patent
medicines would really cure as well as the prescriptions of the
physician, and if the wildcat schemes would really yield the same safe
income as those investments recommended by the reliable banker. It is
then, after all, no chance that this commercially clever American
nation wastes more in anti-economic fancies