Teaching elementary school subjects . nstructed a per-petual-motion machine—a self-active automatism whichwould run forever without their thought or care. Instead,they had entered upon a new and fragile type of co-operativelife in a great continent millions of times larger and morepopulous than the Greek city-state democracy of old, and inan age when constant change and invention would keep lifein an increasing turmoil of complexity and had done away with the king and queen at the top andthey had made every man a king and every woman a had added to the private duti
Teaching elementary school subjects . nstructed a per-petual-motion machine—a self-active automatism whichwould run forever without their thought or care. Instead,they had entered upon a new and fragile type of co-operativelife in a great continent millions of times larger and morepopulous than the Greek city-state democracy of old, and inan age when constant change and invention would keep lifein an increasing turmoil of complexity and had done away with the king and queen at the top andthey had made every man a king and every woman a had added to the private duties, which every one mustbear, a great host of public duties. They had vastly increasedthe opportunities and possibihties of human life, but theyhad also greatly increased its dangers and if people refused to meet their new public duties andwent on as before in their pursuit of private gain? What ifthe rich and powerful should gain control of the government,as in cases where democracy had been attempted in times. CIVICS 467 past, and should gradually usurp all rights and privileges andmake peasants and serfs of the masses of the people as theydid in ancient Rome ? What if great immigrant hordesshould come to our shores—as they have indeed come—andfail to take up in its fulness and richness the democratic life ?What if we should not be able to banish or avoid poverty, in-justice, criminality, exploitation of our natural and humanresources, preventable death and disease, and the great fearsand evils which those who sought these shores and framedour government so fondly hoped they might forever preventin this virgin land? The wide-spread failure to realize these hopes Washington,Jefferson, Franklin, and others were kindly not permitted toforevision. Some of them lived to see that nothing less thana universal moulding of human nature along democratic lineswould make possible the success of their great of them talked of general schooling of
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