In a Democracy the school should not be the temple of knowledge. It should be the temple of reason. And it shall be! And that day will be a sad one for charlatanism and for charlatans.
CHAPTER XII
A NATION OF DREAMERS
Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The problems of mental and physical food are not analogous; they are two parts of a whole. Our ignorance of chemistry and hygiene and our unguarded appetites lead us into gastronomic folly; our ignorance of the simple and easily learned laws of the mind and our vitiated and undiscriminating mental appetites, called passions and prejudices, lead us into educational follies as wild but no wilder than our gastronomic follies. The results of the one show in poor health; the results of the other show in confusion in the conduct of our affairs, private and public.
Some of us have no means of getting good mental food, and would not know what to select and what to reject if we had. Others, and these are the overwhelming majority, have no power to discriminate between the true and the false, the rational and the irrational, between that which strengthens the powers of the mind and that which weakens or perverts them. We take in cheap or worthless mental food just as we put cheap or worthless stuff into our stomachs. We take in that which is easy and pleasant to the taste—that is, we patronize the intellectual pastry cooks and confectioners too liberally. Or, we go to the purveyors of the strong waters of passion and prejudice, and under the influence of such whiskies and brandies imagine ourselves beings of extraordinary and fine mentality.
There is as much, indeed, there is greater, cause for alarm over the gastronomic than over the mental follies. But neither kind is evidence that we are on the down grade. We are more alert and wiser all the time in matters of physical health, despite our own appetites and foolish inclinations and lazy disinclinations, despite the pretentious ignorance of the medical profession and the shrewd chicanery of the quacks. In the same manner we are more and more alive to the importance of mental health, of the well-fed, well-exercised brain; and this improvement goes steadily forward, despite the harmful effects of alleged literature and drama, despite the pretentious ignorance of our regularly constituted teachers, despite the energetic educational quackeries of false learning, false culture and false taste. Intelligence will spread; Democracy will compel.
A hundred years ago small indeed was the part of the human race that could be reached by an appeal to the reason. To-day in many parts of the civilized world advances begin to be made not alone by appeals to empty stomachs, by shouts about full and empty dinner pails, but by real intellectual force. There are even a few rare but highly significant instances of masses of men being induced to sacrifice a small immediate good to gain a remoter larger good. That is, the masses begin to show signs of that same intelligent foresight which created and maintained class rule in times past, which makes some successful far beyond their fellows. And those who are so greatly concerned by the vast concentration of machinery and capital in a few hands fail to give proper consideration to the two most important points, more important far than the evils of concentration of wealth and power:
First: Concentrations of capital are at the mercy of brains. They are impotent unless they are administered by brains, administered by a multitude of brains working intelligently and harmoniously for a common end.
Second: Their evil consequences result from lack of reasoning power, lack of far-sightedness, due to imperfect education in the managers; lack of knowledge how to protect their own interests on the part of the masses.
On one hand we see an enormous increase in the brain power of the people—a multitude able to think, eager to think, not to be prevented from thinking, where only two or three generations ago the thinking was done exclusively by the few. On the other hand we see the necessity for more thinking, for vigorous stirring-up of the minds of the masses, for more and more education. And, year by year, the stirring-up process increases. The evils of the present day are as old as the race, as old as ignorance, as old as human frailty. The good, the benefits, are new, entirely new.