360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



matters of skill and exact science. The best kind of water supply, the 

 proper sort of sewage disposal, the best way to handle streets, street-rail- 

 ways, public parks, schools, playgrounds, public health, the housing 

 problem, etc., are no longer matters of fight or ballot in well-ordered 

 communities. There exists always a best way and experts are selected 

 to find and direct it. The modern civilized community is no longer a 

 state, but a School. The body politic has become one vast, complexly 

 organized, research institution. Governments are, in this age of in- 

 dustrialism, instruments for replacing darkness with light, for substi- 

 tuting for the indefinite and approximate, the definite and accurate. 

 This is about all there is to the best public service. The state has be- 

 come a great thinking, investigating organization, or laboratory, or re- 

 search institution. There is this distinction between the school and the 

 state: the school researches only, the state researches and acts. 



The illumination of great public matters by modern scholarship is 

 best illustrated by what is constantly occurring in the countries of west- 

 ern Europe. There, as every one knows, municipalities are in the hands 

 of experts whose life work is a study, as in a laboratory, of the needs of 

 the community and its individuals. Nothing is left to chance, and 

 little to choice, except when the people can be trusted to choose wisely. 

 The city and state with its utilities, sanitary inspection, land purchase, 

 construction and sale of homes for working men, control of food, care 

 of children, supply of milk, expert advice to mothers, the promotion of 

 all sorts of special schools, museums, galleries, theaters, concert halls, 

 municipal banks, pawnshops, employment bureaus, industrial insurance, 

 old-age pensions, etc., etc., is conducting a laboratory for racial and civic 

 betterment, and is carrying upon the broad shoulders of the state the 

 burden that a democracy would shift to the people themselves. All new 

 or difficult questions receive special study and an honest attempt is 

 made to settle them in the best manner. 



The doctrine of the president of the University of Wisconsin that 

 the state university exists for and should serve all of the people of the 

 state is but a recognition in another form of a principle which has been 

 admitted by older civilizations for a generation or more. Whether an 

 American state will be willing to go at present very far on this path is 

 questionable. It is too far a step from the reign of pull and graft to the 

 rule of knowledge. But in the end the state will accept the higher 

 leadership, no matter how many ups and downs may intervene. 



Another of the major influences of industrialism has been its de- 

 structive power over democratic government. Democracy, the dream of 

 the eighteenth century, became the illusion of the nineteenth. Govern- 

 ment of the people, by the people, has not only never been realized, it 

 would probably have been undesirable, if realizable. Whatever name 

 may be given to the modern well-ordered government, it is not democ- 



