growth of humanity. It is the emergence of man from a state of pupilage toward the state of manhood, with all his animal appetites and passions, all his higher aspirations and desires, as yet neither understood nor controlled. It is the spirit of growth, of progress, of development. Democracy is not merely a form of government; it is not merely a phase of society; it is a spirit of life. Democracy, therefore, does not merely have to do with the political organization. It is the reign of the common people in every department of life." It therefore revolutionizes every department of life: architecture, mechanics, invention, literature, art, the home, the school, industry, government, religion. Latin democracy and Hebrew democracy are only the directions in which this movement of the common people is being directed. A brief glance at the course of the last hundred years will suffice to illustrate this truth; a volume would be needed fully to interpret its various applications.

Demos builds no temples equal to those of Greece, no cathedrals equal to those of medieval Christianity. When an attempt is made to build one, as in New York City or in the suburbs of Washington, there is a vague feeling that it is an anachronism, a building born out of due time. Demos builds pewed churches where the worshiper

may sit at ease, measures the service by its ability to serve the worshiper, not by its fitness to please God, and puts emphasis on the sermon as a chief instrument of instruction and inspiration. Demos builds no palaces equal to those of ancient times. But he builds innumerable homes which offend the taste by barrenness of architectural ornament or vulgarity of ostentatious display, but which abound in comforts that the most luxurious lords of the Middle Ages or patricians of ancient Rome never knew. Demos owns no finer horses than the ancient landed proprietor, and has no such gilded coaches and liveried outriders. The principal survival of the old coaching days is an occasional four-in-hand driven by an amateur and highly cultivated Tony Weller. But the roads are incomparably better than those on which princes jolted and jostled when they drove at all, and the railway invented in the last century for the convenience of Demos covers in an hour more distance than his noble ancestors could have covered in a day. No modern artist in color surpasses a Titian, a Rembrandt, a Frans Hals. But public picture galleries, unknown before the middle of the eighteenth century, give to the plainest and humblest of the people access to the noblest and rarest art. No wood-engraving of to-day surpasses that of Albrecht Dürer in beauty of design and perfection of execution;

but photo-engraving, not yet half a century old, lays the work of the designer on every cottage table. For our present literature we go back to the creative geniuses of the past; but the printing-press, which gives us in the morning daily the equivalent in amount of a moderate volume for a penny, also puts into one's hands for the price of a pot of beer or a cigar the great works of the great masters. And the first public library, established in England in 1850, has been followed by such a progeny of children that in the United States there is scarcely to be found in any except the most sparsely settled States any town of moderate size without its library free to all the people. The public school puts the fundamentals of education within the reach of the great majority of the children of even the poorest and less educated; and the half-million of pupils who crowd the high schools, which have been in existence but little over half a century, bear witness to the avidity with which the higher branches of education are sought by increasing numbers of boys and girls.

In short, democracy means radical changes in all the material conditions of life, and in the nature and the spirit of life: in the means of intercommunication and transportation; in the tools and implements of industry; in the comforts of the homes; in the opportunities for self-develop

ment; in the fundamental conceptions of the aims and the uses of the institutions of religion. It means not merely government of the people, by the people, and for the people: it means, no less, wealth, industry, education, religion, — in a word, life, for the people. That in this developing life we are to accept the guidance of the HebrewPuritan democracy rather than that of the LatinFrench democracy, the theistic rather than the untheistic, the social rather than the individual, appears to me so axiomatic that it needs only to be clearly apprehended in order to be approved. At all events, I shall assume that we are tending, and that we ought to tend, in the direction of a social democracy; and I shall try to indicate what light this guiding principle throws on the current questions of the Family, the School, Industry, and Politics.

CHAPTER III

THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY

MR. ZANGWILL has characterized America as a "Melting-Pot." Not merely various races, nationalities, and religious sects are thrown into this melting-pot, but, no less, conflicting ideas and ideals. All creeds, traditions, theories, institutions, are brought into the laboratory by democracy to be analyzed. In this process, the more radical and revolutionary the reformer, the more sure he is of a hearing. Curiosity is agog, and the more novel the hypothesis, the more eager we are to know what it is. The experience of the past counts for little, partly because the modern reformer is often ignorant of the past, partly because in his eager and impatient haste for change he regards the convictions of his ancestors as valuable only because they show him what to avoid.

The family is the oldest and the most sacred, as it is the most fundamental, of all social organisms, but the family is not exempt from this process of reinvestigation. There is no possible question about the family that is not asked, no possible change in the family that is not proposed. Ought the family to be one husband and one