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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXYIII. No. 720 



subjects, it is enough, therefore, to show 

 that in a democracy there is a class whose 

 happiness is promoted by such studies. 



But we maj^ place our argument on yet 

 higher ground. The defense of the main- 

 tenance of scholarship in abstract and 

 purely theoretical subjects rests not merely 

 on the possibility that they will help us 

 to more or better economic opportunities, 

 or that they wiU satisfy the cultural de- 

 mands of a class. Their strongest defense 

 lies in the fact that a democracy needs to 

 develop scholarship pure and simple, in the 

 abstract— phUology, art, philosophy, his- 

 tory, literature— in order to subserve 

 wants that can not be satisfied by any other 

 kind of knowledge. The satisfaction of 

 the higher wants of a democratic people is 

 necessary to prevent the decay of democ- 

 racy. If any evidence of this were needed 

 we see it aU about i;s as a result of the too 

 exclusive attention that we have thus far 

 given to merely economic or material de- 

 velopment. The present evils of our body 

 social and politic are largely due to our 

 over-emphasis of wealth, and the undue 

 honor we have attached to the class that 

 has supplied our economic wants. 



Carlyle expressed a great triath when he 

 said that the people would have leaders. 

 Democracy needs ideals and leaders to sus- 

 tain itself. Few people do their own 

 thinking. Most inherit or borrow their be- 

 liefs. In the past the masses have taken 

 their ideals and leaders from the class 

 whose interests were not at one with their 

 own or not primarily devoted to them. 

 Democracy must train its own leaders, set 

 up its own standards, establish its own 

 ideals. The true life of a people is in- 

 tellectual and spiritual. Material pros- 

 perity is a means, not an end. No de- 

 mocracy can endure which rests content 

 with material prosperity. It must have as 

 its ideals, intelligence, honesty, honor, serv- 

 ice, all that makes character for an indi- 



vidual; liberty, fraternity and equality of 

 opportunity, for public life. It can get 

 and keep these ideals only if it pro\'ides 

 means to men to gather for it the world's 

 knowledge, to add to this knowledge, to set 

 standards of public opinion and to stir the 

 moral and spiritual nature of the people. 

 We should have less occasion to-day for the 

 denunciation of iniquitous wealth and we 

 should see less of the betrayal of honor and 

 trust in high places, if we had laid more 

 emphasis in the last generation upon the 

 necessity of knowledge in leaders of our 

 people. We should have a better political 

 and social policy if we had trusted more 

 in the leadei-ship of men who know the 

 race life, its changing ideals, its history, 

 its experiences, and its impulses. In the 

 absence of such leaders the people, in their 

 desire to be led, have turned, as they 

 always will do, to the nearest demagogue 

 who professes to be appointed to "prepare 

 the way of the Lord," 



What means now are appropriate for 

 training s^^ch leaders and for setting up 

 siTch standards of democratic life? I 

 answer research, scholarship, in history, 

 literature, philosophy and art — the records 

 of human experience, the interpretation of 

 human life, the analysis of human mo- 

 tives — to supply inspiration and foi'mulate 

 ideals that may be woven into the life of 

 the people and become the intellectual and 

 spiritual inheritance of the nation; to 

 frame and furnish the ideas and impulses 

 that shall be the substance of the common 

 consciousness and find expression as the 

 consensus of public opinion through polit- 

 ical action in the formulation of law, creed 

 and the general social order. 



The nineteenth ceutuiy was one of great 

 material development whose activity has 

 hardly yet slackened. If democracy is to 

 endure, or is not to sink into a materialism 

 like communism, the twentieth century 

 must develop our legal, political, social and 



