266 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of the textile and steel workers and he thinks of the workmen's com- 

 pensation and state insurance laws ; you show him a score of state gov- 

 ernors subservient to the pressure of wealth and he recalls Johnson and 

 La Follette; you show him failures in government ownership and he 

 thinks of the post office and Panama Canal; you talk of aristocratic 

 churches and he remembers the Salvation Army and the institutional 

 church; you mention subsidized education, and he thinks of the state 

 university ; you recount the multitudinous cases where the popular suf- 

 frage fails to select men of learning and character and he thinks of 

 Hughes, Eoosevelt and Wilson. 



That the upward strivings of democracy should have issued in in- 

 numerable abortions of social ideals is what on his theory was to have 

 been expected. That these same strivings should have brought to 

 maturity one well-born child of promise is much more significant, for it 

 is the augury of the future. Not the level of his attainment but the 

 direction of his going, concerns him most. His faith in democracy 

 is not a doctrine of comfort; it is one of effort; he believes not so much 

 in something attained as in something attainable. It is not something 

 to be preserved, but something to be achieved. Just as science is an 

 intellectual aspiration, democracy is a moral aspiration. Together they 

 constitute an idealism toward which the will to live strives with an 

 ever-increasing measure of success. To get the tinge of this idealism 

 is to have one's fragmentary work become more vital. The isolated 

 research and the little extension of justice in the affairs of men become 

 significant by their association with larger movements. These in turn 

 grow weighty with the wider purposes of many men and distant times. 



In the realist sense, therefore, our modern life is typified by the 

 twin movements of science and democracy. To our aspirations they give 

 hope; to their achievement they solicit all that is vital and generous 

 in men. They front the future not with the fatalistic view that some- 

 how all will turn out well, but with the settled faith that that future 

 will be made by what men do. Both are militant movements. They 

 set a world of problems still unsolved and lay upon men the obligation 

 to find the way. In their behalf they enlist a number of social forces, 

 but to be the leader in their militant campaigns the call comes loudest 

 to the university. Sad will it be if its ears are closed with selfish pur- 

 suits or its feet heavy with an unforgettable past. 



