SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY 265 



quests of science have been found unsound and that the still unpossessed 

 territory is inimitably greater than that already gained is but a chal- 

 lenge to his courage and his resources. To the truly scientific spirit 

 science is in part an achievement; in a larger sense it is a hope, an 

 aspiration, a kind of intellectual idealism. As prophecy it is more con- 

 vincing than revelation; as a field for constructive imagination it is as 

 interesting as poetry or music. 



This also is the spirit of democracy. If one insists on regarding 

 society as a completed thing, then it must be admitted that democracy 

 does not justify itself. It has never yet established on a lasting basis 

 that thoroughgoing equality of which it dreams. The so-called democ- 

 racy of Greece was admittedly founded upon the institution of slavery; 

 that of England rests upon an economic submergence of large masses of 

 its people, and in our own country privilege in business, politics, educa- 

 tion and religion, with the consequent corruption of society and abortion 

 of justice mocks our praise of democracy even while we make it. Our 

 enemies need but to uncover the facts to lay bare a frightful indictment 

 of our claim that democracy is the best form of social organization. 

 City councils bought with money, weak and incompetent mayors, police 

 forces subdued by threats or seduced by gifts, legislatures the willing 

 servants of men who want the law shaped for their private gain, gov- 

 ernors caught in the clutches of the party machine and unable to per- 

 form their sworn duty as executors of the law, seats in the senate bought 

 with money or the promises of preferment, retired congressmen deliver- 

 ing their information acquired in the public service to private wealth 

 for private ends, public courts shaping their procedure so that the man 

 of means has an advantage over the poor man in the administration of 

 justice, the supreme court of the land erecting itself into a law-making 

 body through constitutional interpretation and thereby overriding the 

 wishes of the people as expressed through their legislatures; four mil- 

 lion laboring men subsisting on incomes below the level of a living wage ; 

 children sacrificed to factory labor; women unable to secure from state 

 legislatures labor conditions comparable to those of men; the dispensa- 

 tion of religion administered in such a way as to make the rich com- 

 fortable and stupid, the poor indifferent or bitter, and the thoughtful 

 anti-ecclesiastic; education for the professional classes but little for 

 laborers ; palaces and leisure for the rich and hovels and drudgery for 

 the poor these are the facts flaunted before us in this most democratic 

 country in the world. 



But the real democrat is not disheartened by the hideous picture. 

 He sees all this and he sees beyond it. In the presence of many failures 

 he discerns one success, and to him that success is the important thing. 

 You show him a score of corrupted cities, and beyond them he sees 

 Cleveland with its new charter; you show him the terrible conditions 



