The New State quotes

The ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy.

Democracy is not a sum in addition.

Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The question before the American people today is—How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party has always ignored him;

What American politics need today is positive principles. We do not want to “regulate” our trusts, to “restrain” our bosses.

The measure of our progress is never what we give up, but what we add.

It may be necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile of the dead branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of the flourishing state of the garden.

when we really learn the process our ideas will be struck out by the interplay.

To compare notes on what we have thought separately is not to think together.

I asked a man once to join a committee I was organizing and he replied that he would be very glad to come and give his advice. I didn’t want him—and didn’t have him.

There is no end to this process. A new being springs forth from every fresh contact. My nature opens and opens to thousands of new influences. I feel countless new births. Such is the glory of our common everyday life.

Imitation is for the shirkers, like-mindedness for the comfort lovers, unifying for the creators.

The lesson of the new psychology is then: Never settle down within the theory you have chosen, the cause you have embraced; know that another theory, another cause exists, and seek that. The enhancement of life is not for the comfort-lover.

The bond created had not within it the variety which the human soul needs for its nourishment.

Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim.

We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed. Anarchy means unorganized, unrelated difference; coordinated, unified difference belongs to our ideal of a perfect social order. We don’t want to avoid our adversary but to “agree with him quickly”;

… deep and lasting friendship is one capable of recognizing and dealing with all the fundamental differences that must exist between any two individuals, one capable therefore of such an enrichment of our personalities that together we shall mount to new heights of understanding and endeavor.

Someone ought to write an essay on the dangers to the soul of congeniality.

Pleasant little glows of feeling can never be fanned into the fire which becomes the driving force of progress.

This gives us both the principle and the method of democracy. A democratic community is one in which the common will is being gradually created by the civic activity of its citizens.

The test of democracy is the fullness with which this is being done.

The practical thought for our political life is that the collective will exists only through its self-actualizing and self-creating in new and larger and more perfectly adjusted forms.

he may be one who lives constantly with others in all the complexity of modern city life, but who is so shut-up or so set upon his own ideas that he makes no real union with others.

Individuality is the capacity for union.

The measure of individuality is the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not as far as I am apart from, but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is non-relation.

Evil is non-relation. The source of our strength is the central supply. You may as well break a branch off the tree and expect it to live.

Non-relation is death.

I have said that individuality consists neither of the separateness of one man from the other, nor of the differences of one man from the other. The second statement is challenged more often than the first. This comes from some confusion of ideas.

most, perhaps all, our desires have this motive. The spirit craves totality, this is the motor of social progress; the process of getting it is not by adding more and more to ourselves, but by offering more and more of ourselves.

Not appropriation but contribution is the law of growth.

What our special contribution is, it is for us to discover. More and more to release the potentialities of the individual means the more and more progressive organization of society if at the same time we are learning how to coordinate all the variations.

Some women-suffragists talk of women as “enslaved” and advocate their emancipation by the method of giving them the vote. But the vote will not make women free.

Freedom is always a thing to be attained.

And we must remember too that freedom is not a static condition. As it is not something possessed “originally,” and as it is not something which can be given to us, so also it is not something won once for all.

My freedom is my share in creating, my part in the creative responsibility. The heart of our freedom is the impelling power of the will of the whole.

Who then are free? Those who win their freedom through fellowship.

The method of moral hygiene as of physical hygiene is social cooperation.

We do not walk into the Kingdom of Heaven one by one.

The exposition of the self-and-others fallacy has transformed the idea of self-interest. Our interests are inextricably interwoven. The question is not what is best for me or for you, but for all of us. My interests are not less important to the world than yours;

Such subordination is an act of assertion; it is fraught with active power and force; it affirms and accomplishes. We are often told to “surrender our individuality.”

To claim our individuality is the one essential claim we have on the universe.

We give up self when we are too sluggish for the heroic life.

Many of us nowadays resent being used as part of a crowd; the moment we hear eloquence we are on the defensive. The essential evil of crowds is that they do not allow choice, and choice is necessary for progress.

A crowd is an undifferentiated mass; a group is an articulated whole.

It is often difficult to determine whether a number of people met together are a crowd or a group (that is, a true society), yet it is a distinction necessary for us to make if we would understand their action.

The group on the other hand stimulates thought. There are no “differences” in the crowd mind. Each person is swept away and does not stop to find out his own difference.

In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony.

We want the single voice but not the single note; that is the secret of the group.

But synthesis is the principle of life, the method of social progress.

Men have developed not through struggle but through learning how to live together.

Lately the struggle theory has been transferred from the physical to the intellectual world. Many writers who see society as a continuous conflict think its highest form is discussion.

All is growing; we must recognize this and free the way for the growth. We must unclose our spiritual sources, we must allow no mechanism to come between our spiritual sources and our life. The élan vital must have free play.

Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal.

We do not want rigid institutions, however good. We need no “body of truth” of any kind, but the will to will, which means the power to make our own government, our own institutions, our own expanding truth.

We are to be no longer satisfied with the pace of a merely fortuitous progress. We must know now that we are coworkers with every process of creation, that our function is as important as the power which keeps the stars in their orbits.

We are creators here and now. We are not in the anteroom of our real life. This is real life.

We cannot, however, mould our lives each by himself; but within every individual is the power of joining himself fundamentally and vitally to other lives, and out of this vital union comes the creative power.

Go to clubs, go to dances, go to theatres or moving-pictures, and the mass of our young people look indifferent and more or less bored—they have not found the joy of life.

Play, as useless idling, does not give us joy. Work, as drudgery, does not give us joy. Only creating gives us joy.

When we see that we are absolute masters of our life, that in every operation, however humble, we are working out the fundamental laws of being, then we shall walk to our daily work as the soldiers march to the Marseillaise.

But conscious evolution, the endless process of a perfect coordinating, demands vital people.

War is the easy way: we take to war because we have not enough vitality for the far more difficult job of agreeing.

So also that kind of religion which consists of contemplation of otherworldliness is the easy way, and we take to that when we have not enough vitality deliberately to direct our life and construct our world.

… cannot assume that we possess a body of achieved ideas stamped in some mysterious way with the authority of reason and justice, but even were it true, the reason and justice of the past must give way to the reason and justice of the present.

You cannot bottle up wisdom⁠—it won’t keep⁠—but through our associated life it may be distilled afresh at every instant.

We are coming now to see indeed that law is a social imperative in the strict psychological sense, that is, that it gets its authority through the power of group life.

To sum up: our present idea of the state is that it is not something outside ourselves, that it must flow out from ourselves and control our social life. But it must “control” our life by expressing it.

The state is always the great Yes, not the great No.

Liberty and restraint are not opposed, because ideally the expression of the social will in restraint is our freedom. The state has a higher function than either restraining individuals or protecting individuals.

How different from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting with us.

Someone has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.”

We are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought. We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it.

If it is necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is equally necessary to show that the present worship of minorities in certain quarters is also unsound.

There is no inherent virtue in a minority.

If as a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a certain amount of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those in a minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more apt to be right than eleven.

A man said to me once, “I am very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a workingman.” What in the world has that to do with democracy?

Democracy is faith in humanity, not faith in “poor” people or “ignorant” people, but faith in every living soul.

Democracy does not enthrone the workingman, it has nothing to do with sympathy for the “lower classes”;

As biology shows us nature evolving by the power within itself, so social psychology shows us society evolving by the power of its own inner forces, of all its inner forces. There is no passive material within it to be guided by a few.

There is no dead material in a true democracy.

When people see the confusion of our present life, its formlessness and planlessness, the servile following of the crowd, the ignorance of the average man, his satisfaction in his ignorance, the insignificance of the collective life, its blindness and its hopelessness, they say they do …

But this is not democracy. The so-called evils of democracy—favoritism, bribery, graft, bossism—are the evils of our lack of democracy, of our party system and of the abuses which that system has brought into our representative government.

It is not democracy which is “on trial,” as is so often said, but it is we ourselves who are on trial.

We have been constantly trying to see what democracy meant from the point of view of institutions, we have never yet tried to see what it meant from the point of view of men.

But this is not enough. Democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving the will of the people. For this reason the study of group psychology is a necessary preliminary to the study of democracy.

Neither party bosses nor unscrupulous capitalists are our undoing, but our own lack of knowing how to do things together.

The startling truth that the war is bringing home to many of us is that unity must be something more than a sentiment, it must be an actual system of organization.

The essence of democracy is not in institutions, is not even in “brotherhood”; it is in that organizing of men which makes most sure, most perfect, the bringing forth of the common idea.

Democracy has one task only⁠—to free the creative spirit of man.

This is done through group organization. We are sometimes told that democracy is an attitude and must grow up in the hearts of men. But this is not enough. Democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving the will of the people.

There is no line where the life of the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private life and my public life.

A man I know tells me that he “wouldn’t touch politics with a ten-foot pole,” but how can he help touching politics?

He may not like the party game, but politics shape the life he leads from hour to hour.

When this is once understood no question in history will seem more astonishing than the one so often reiterated in these days, “Should woman be given a place in politics?”

Woman is in politics; no power under the sun can put her out.

Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the needs of the people? Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of certain classes, of certain “interests”; these can never be woven into the needs of the people.

How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give.

Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart.

Do we dare, therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure.

The quest of life and the meaning of life is reality.

We may flit on the surface as gnats in the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and thirst for realness, for substance.

We must plunge down to find our treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the depths forever more and more.

Certain organizations have sprung up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love.

If only we knew how to love!

I am ready to say to you this minute, “I love my neighbors.” But all that I mean by it is that I have a vague feeling of kindliness towards them. I have no idea how to do the actual deed.

We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling with a thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist consciousness, think that all we have to do is to decide on fellowship as a delightful idea.

But fellowship will be the slowest thing on earth to create.

An eager longing for it may help, but it can come into being as a genuine part of our life only through a deep understanding of what it really means.

Our happiness, our sense of living at all, is directly dependent on our joining with others.

We are lost, exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union.

I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is going to be the substitute for what men now get in war.

The man who knows the “best” society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and that only, is a narrow man because the ideals and standards of the “best” society of London, Paris and New York are the same.

He knows life across but not down⁠—it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal.

This man has always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different tastes and different standards.

We have the authors’ club, the social workers’ club, the artists’ club, the actors’ society, the business men’s club, the business women’s club, the teachers’ club etc. The satisfaction and contentment that comes with sameness indicates a meagre personality.

I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my neighborhood club to meet men.

It is just because my next door neighbor has never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory girl’s point of view.

A group of honest men—what a disconcerting picture the phrase calls up! We want efficient men, thinking men, as well as honest men.

Take care of your thinking and your morals will take care of themselves⁠—is a present which would have benefited certain reform campaigns.

The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make us think and to seek accurate information in order to be able to think and to think clearly.

… Englishman who visited America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper this advice, “Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him,” and was much struck with the difference between the American and the English way of looking at the matter.

The Englishman, he said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him!

I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with them.

The Englishman, he said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him!

I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with them.

Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to truth.

We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them.

I always feel intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which separates men.

Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win.

In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation.

The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have.

If I have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve.

But I do not want the American people to starve. The average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It is our Great Illusion.

There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy.

The popular will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will—the true will of the people.

Every individual? The majority? A theoretical average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.”

There are no “people.” We have to create a people.

The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the people.

The man who knows most about educational matters will lead in those, will be chosen eventually for the school committee or for the educational committee of the state legislature. Thus the different leaders of a democracy appear. Here in the neighborhood group leaders are born.

Democracy is the breeding-ground of aristocracy.

You have all the chance the world gives. In your neighborhood group show the clearness of your mind, the strength of your grip, your power to elicit and to guide cooperative action, and you emerge as the leader of men.

He must give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies. He must be able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions upon us.

We need leaders, not masters or drivers.

The power of leadership is the power of integrating. This is the power which creates community. You can see it when two or three strangers or casual acquaintances are calling upon someone.

he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate energy in every man.

The person who influences me most is not he who does great deeds but he who makes me feel I can do great deeds.

Many people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but few have made me want to do something.

Moreover at present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike, are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility.

What we need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the responsibility.

The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided responsibility but shared responsibility—a very different thing.

A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist, a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the city sees that my children are in their places at school.

I am constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act.

New York has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I robbed of my most precious possession—my responsibilities—for only the active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose.

That is, I can learn through my neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal transference of responsibility to an invisible and nonexistent “they” can be blotted out forever.

When neighborhood organization begins to teach that there is no “they,” that it is always we, we, we

, that mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson.

This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization, for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that

I serve my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service I become my neighborhood, my city, my nation.

Surely at this hour in our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is being born today. The war is binding together class and class, alien and American, men and women.

Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take the place of allegiance to party.

Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a thing⁠—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic.

And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is the order of our new life.

Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a thing—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic. And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our united life.

Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the new democracy.

Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is the order of our new life.

The young David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith?

Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we approach the sacred life?

Then no wonder politics are what they have become. But this is not the creed of men today: we believe in the sacredness of all our life;

It is a plan for sending the news backwards and forwards from individual to nation, from nation to individual, and it is also a plan for correlating the problems of the local community with the problems of the nation and of cooperating nations.

But why should we be more efficiently organized for war than for peace?

Is our proverbial carelessness to be pricked into effectiveness only by emergency calls? Is the only motive you can offer us for efficiency—to win?

The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to have the proper foundations for political thinking.

The pluralists apotheosize the group but do not study the group.

They talk of sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty.

It is absolutely impossible to give self-government: no one has the right to give it; no one has the power to give it. Group A allows group B to govern itself? This is an empty permission unless B has learned how to govern itself.

Self-government must always be grown.

Sovereignty is always a psychological process.

Thus the new school of jurisprudence founded on social psychology cannot be a teleological school alone, but must be founded on all the elements which constitute the social process.

Ideals do not operate in a vacuum.

This theorists seem sometimes to forget, but those of us who have had tragic experience of this truth are likely to give more emphasis to the interaction of purpose, will and activity, past and present activity.

If this force goes on working after the group is formed, what becomes of it? It must reach out to embrace other groups in order to repeat exactly the same process.

When you stop your automobile without stopping your engine, the power which runs your car goes on working exactly the same, but is completely lost. It only makes a noise.

Do we want this to happen to our groups? Are they to end only in disagreeable noises?

We must provide ways for it to go out to meet the life force of other groups, the new power thus generated again and endlessly to seek new forms of unification. No “whole” can imprison us infinite beings.

The centre of today is the circumference of tomorrow.

Thus while the state is not necessary to grant authority, it is the natural outcome of the uniting groups. The state must be the collective mind embodying the moral will and purpose of All.

The groups are always reaching out towards unity. Our safeguard against crystallization is that every fresh unity means (as I have tried to show in chapter III) the throwing out of myriad fresh differences—our safeguard is that the universe knows no static unity.

Unification means sterilization; unifying means a perpetual generating.

We do not want the unified sovereignty of Germany; but when you put the individual and the group first, you get unifying sovereignty.

“The dilemma which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not merely within the nation but in the family of nations.”

But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your conclusion.

The weakness of the reasoning involved in the balance of power argument has been exposed in so much of the war literature of the last three years, which has exploded the balance of power theory between nations, that little further criticism is needed here.

It must take our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I have all these different allegiances, I should indeed lead a divided and therefore uninteresting life if I could not unify them,

Life would be “just one damned thing after another.”

The true state has my devotion because it gathers up into itself the various sides of me, is the symbol of my multiple self, is my multiple self brought to significance, to self-realization.

If you leave me with my plural selves, you leave me in desolate places, my soul craving its meaning, its home.

The home of my soul is in the state.

But the true state does not “demand” my allegiance. It is the spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our multiple interests.

If I live fully I become so enriched by the manifold sides of life that I cannot be narrowed down to mere corporation or church or trade-union or any other special group.

The miracle of spirit is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided.

I am not a serial story to be read only in the different instalments of my different groups.

The miracle of spirit is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided.

I am not a serial story to be read only in the different instalments of my different groups.

We do not give a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to each and the whole remains for every other relation.

… country need not be rivals of the state, but must be made to contribute to the state, must be the means by which the state becomes great and powerful at the same time that it uses that power for the well-being and growth of all.

Our timidity has been but the reflection of our ignorance.

A larger understanding is what we need today. There is no need to condemn the state, as do the pluralists; there is no need to condemn our great corporate bodies, as do their opponents.

Our relation to society is so close that there is no room for either rights or duties. This means a new ethics and a new politics.

Citizenship is not a right nor a privilege nor a duty, but an activity to be exercised every moment of the time.

Democracy does not exist unless each man is doing his part fully every minute, unless everyone is taking his share in building the state-to-be. This is the trumpet call to men today.

The state will become a splendid thing when each one of us becomes a splendid individual. Democracy does not mean being lost in the mass, it means the contribution of every power I possess to social uses.

The individual is not lost in the whole, he makes the whole.

A striking exception to the attitude of the average American in the matter of his personal responsibility was Mr.

But we are so to democratize our industrial and our political methods that all will have a share in policy and in responsibility.

Exhortation to good citizenship is useless.

We get good citizenship by creating those forms within which good citizenship can operate, by making it possible to acquire the habit of good citizenship by the practice of good citizenship.

If we could believe in men, if we could see that circle which unites human passion and divine achievement as a halo round the head of each human being, then social and political reorganization would no longer be a hope but a fact.

The old individualism feared men; the cornerstone of the new individualism is faith in men.

We need a constructive faith and a robust faith, faith in men, in this world, in this day, in the Here and the Now.

The forces of life should be used, not stifled. It is not corruption, dishonesty, we have to fight; it is ignorance, lack of insight, desires not transmuted. We want a state which will transmute the instincts of men into the energies of the nation.

You cannot dam the stream entirely, you can only see that it flows so as to irrigate and fructify.

It all comes down to our fear of men.

As we see the value of the individual, of every individual, so we must see the value of each nation, that all are needed. The pacifists have wanted us to tolerate our enemies and the more extreme ones to turn the other cheek when smitten.

But tolerance is intolerable.

And we cannot dwell among enemies. The ideal of this planet inhabited by Christian enemies all turning the cheek does not seem to me a happy one.

The ideal of this planet inhabited by Christian enemies all turning the cheek does not seem to me a happy one. We must indeed, as the extreme militarists tell us, “wipe out” our enemies, but we do not wipe out our enemies by crushing them.

The old-fashioned hero went out to conquer his enemy; the modern hero goes out to disarm his enemy through creating a mutual understanding.

The failure of international society in the past is a fact fraught with deep significance: the differences between nations are not to be overcome by one class of people in a country uniting with the same class in another country.

Perhaps one of the most useful lessons to be learned from the group process is a new definition of patriotism. Patriotism must not be herd-instinct. Patriotism must be the individual’s rational, self-conscious building of his country every moment.

Loyalty means always to create your group, not to wave a flag over it.

We need a patriotism which is not “following the lead” but involved in a process in which all take part. In the place of sentimental patriotism we want a common purpose, a purpose evolved by the common life, to be used for the common life.

We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true.

War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.

I knew a young business man who went to the Spanish war who said when he came back that it had been as good as going to a sanitarium;

Once when I was in Paris I made the acquaintance of little Michael, a charming English boy of five, who upon being taken to the Louvre by his mother and asked what he thought of the Mona Lisa, replied, with a most pathetic expression, “

I don’t think she looks as if she liked little boys.

” That was certainly a contribution to Mona Lisa criticism.

Where are people to get this necessary education? Our present form of industry does not give enough. Tending a machine all day is not conducive to thought; a man thus employed gets to rely entirely on his foreman.

The man who lets his foreman do his thinking for him all day tends to need a political boss at night.

We must somehow counteract the paralyzing effect of the methods of modern industry. In the School Centre we have an opportunity for adult education in the only forms in which many people, tired out with the day’s work, can take it: