his level among these people, without being subjected to tests which ignore his pet egoisms and his carefully nourished illusions, without learning that poverty is not a disgrace nor good manners a sign of weakness, without becoming in some measure aware of that essentially democratic truth that the merit of a man is independent of the externals which distinguish him, and of the accidents which place him high or low in the social scale.

This has been well enough in the past, but it is doubtful whether it will continue to be so in the future; and it is a significant fact that our school system, from top to bottom, is just now under rather general and drastic criticism. So long as American life is essentially democratic, as it has been in the past, the public schools, even if they do no more than to reflect and confirm that life, must have a powerful democratic influence. But if, as there are many indications, and as many people are coming to think, American life is becoming less democratic than it was-if class divisions are becoming more marked and more permanent, if political freedom is becoming ineffective because economic freedom is disappearing, if plutocracy is becoming the substance and democracy only the form of American society— if this is what the future holds, then the public schools can no longer serve democracy to any

purpose by merely reflecting and confirming the conditions of life. Their task, in that case, is to work against these conditions. This, in a general way, is the task of the public schools for the future; and in order to accomplish this task they must be informed by a more conscious and deliberate purpose than they have been; they must devote themselves with better talent and greater concentration to things intellectual; they must lead and not follow the best thought of the age, shape and not be shaped by the pressure of economic and social tendencies. This will be no slight undertaking, but it will be no more difficult than democracy itself, of which, indeed, it will be an essential condition.

20

X

DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY

SING

I

INCE the French Revolution liberty and equality have been words to conjure with, perhaps because their meaning is not capable of very precise definition. They are commonly used together, as though they were but different aspects of the same thing; but many people find, upon analysis, that they mean precisely opposite things. Men cannot be made equal, they say, without being subject to a great deal of restraint, for perfect equality would mean that no man could be permitted to have what any other man could not have, or to do what any other man could not do. On the other hand, it is maintained, a man cannot be perfectly free unless he is allowed to do as he likes. According to these people, therefore, the desire for liberty is contrary to the desire for equality, so that if liberty is what men want they ought to renounce the idea of

equality, and if equality is what they want they ought to renounce the idea of liberty.

The men who inaugurated the French Revolution evidently did not think that this was true, since they desired and demanded both liberty and equality, not to speak of fraternity in addition. In their famous "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen" they proclaimed that "all men are born free and equal in rights"; and they were so far from thinking that liberty and equality were inconsistent with each other that they defined them in the same phrase. "Liberty," they said, "consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights." This is perfectly clear as a principle, although the application of the principle may not be very easy. By this definition liberty does not mean the right of a man to do as he pleases, but only the right to do as he pleases in so far as he does not please to interfere with the equal right of every other man. The emphasis is chiefly on equality, for liberty is defined in terms of equality; and M. Émile Faguet has written a brilliant essay to prove that to the men of the Revolution liberty and equality meant the

same thing; that what they chiefly wanted was equality, and that they believed that if men had equality they would thereby have all the liberty they needed or were likely to want.

II

M. Faguet is doubtless right. But even if the men of the Revolution had their minds fixed primarily upon equality, they expected to get it not so much by imposing restraints as by removing them. They found themselves living in a world where the most glaring inequalities existed; but these inequalities were sanctioned by laws and customs which restrained one man from doing what another man was permitted to do. The peasant or the noble was forbidden to do what the member of the industrial gild could do; the gildsman was forbidden to do what the noble could do; and every man was forbidden or required to do whatever the king might take it into his head to command. The men of the Revolution were, therefore, convinced that the glaring inequalities that existed were due to the fact that a man's liberty of action was thwarted and restrained at every turn by quite senseless restraints. It was for this reason that they saw liberty and equality as two parts of the same thing. They easily