THE REAL PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY. 7 



as a kind of heresy to be properly introduced. They admit all 

 sorts of men to their conversation, and are not in the least scan- 

 dalized at the most improper proposals being made to them." To 

 see how ecclesiastics themselves fall a prey to the ethics of mili- 

 tant activities, becoming as heartless and debauched as any other 

 class, take a page from Italian history at the time of Pope Alex- 

 ander VI. " Crimes grosser than Scythian," says a pious Catholic 

 who visited Rome, " acts of treachery worse than Carthaginian, 

 are committed without disguise in the Vatican itself under the 

 eyes of the Pope. There are rapines, murders, incests, debauch- 

 eries, cruelties exceeding those of the Neros and Caligulas." Sim- 

 ilar pages from the history of every other country in Europe given 

 uj) to war, including Protestant England, might be quoted. 



But what is true of ecclesiastical effort in the presence of mili- 

 tant activities is true of pedagogic effort in the presence of politi- 

 cal activities. For more than half a century the public-school 

 system in its existing form has been in full and energetic operation. 

 The money devoted to it every year now reaches the enormous 

 total of one hundred and eighty million dollars. Simultaneously 

 an unprecedented extension of secondary education has occurred. 

 Since the war, colleges and universities, supported in whole or in 

 part at the public expense, have been established in more than half 

 of the States and Territories of the Union. To these must be added 

 the phenomenal growth of normal schools, high schools, and acad- 

 emies, and of the equipment of the educational institutions already 

 in existence. Yet, as a result, are the American people more 

 moral than they were half a century ago? Have American insti- 

 tutions — that is, the institutions based upon the freedom of the 

 individual — been made more secure? I venture to answer both 

 questions with an emphatic negative. The construction and oper- 

 ation of the greatest machine of pedagogy recorded in history has 

 been absolutely impotent to stem the rising tide of political cor- 

 ruption and social degeneration. If there are skeptics that doubt 

 the truth of this indictment let them study the criminal history of 

 the day that records the annual commission of more than six thou- 

 sand suicides and more than ten thousand homicides, and the embez- 

 zlement of more than eleven million dollars. Let them study the 

 lying pleas of the commercial interests of the country that demand 

 protection against " the pauper labor of Europe," and thus commit a 

 shameless aggression upon the pauper labor of America. Let them 

 study the records of the deeds of intolerance and violence committed 

 upon workingmen that refuse to exchange their personal liberty 

 for membership of a despotic labor organization. Let them study 

 the columns of the newspapers, crowded with records of crime, 



