The Care and Culture of Men Author:DAVID STARR JORDAN Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SCHOOL AND THE STATE THE very essence of republicanism is popular education. There is no virtue in the acts of ignorant majorities, unless by dint of repe... more »ated action the majority is no longer ignorant. The very work of ruling is in itself education. As Americans, we believe in government by the people. This is not that the people are the best of rulers, but because a growth in wisdom is sure to go with an increase in responsibility. The voice of the people is not the voice of God; but if this voice be smothered, it becomes the voice of the demon. The red flag of the anarchist is woven where the people think in silence. In popular government, it has been said, ignorance has the same right to be represented as wisdom. This may be true, but the perpetuity of such government demands that this fact of representation should help to transform ignorance into wisdom. Majorities are generally wrong, but only through the experience of their mistakes is the way opened to the permanent establishment of right. The justification of the experiment of universal suffrage is the formation of a training-school in civics, which, in the long run, will bring about good government. Our fathers built for the future—a future even yet unrealized. America is not, has never been, the best governed of civilized nations. The iron-handed dictatorship of Germany is, in its way, a better government than our people have ever given us. That is, it follows a more definite and consistent policy. Its affairs of state are conducted with greater economy, greater intelligence, and higher dignity than ours. It is above the influence of the two arch-enemies of the American State—the corruptionist and the spoilsman. If this were all, we might welcome a Bismarck as our ruler, in place of our succession of weak-ar...« less