Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/407

Rh the essential conditions of health. Nothing but intellectual impotence can excuse any citizen, least of all the social scholar, from a degree of direct effort on behalf of good local government. He is liable to make mistakes, but these will not be so fatal as the acts of men who sell or buy franchises under which the community is made to serve the clique. If anything can turn a quiet student into the noisy street, it is the conviction that the public thoroughfare is being taken from him without adequate recompense.

When the scholar enters the sphere of practice, he must prepare himself for the treatment given a man with a silk hat in the bull-and-bear pit on a board of trade holiday; he becomes the target for the wildest boys. If he says anything which by any chance tends to affect prices or nominations, he should not look for reverence. That is an obsolete virtue in American practical life. Nothing thinner than rhinoceros hide will do for an overcoat where conflicting interests are at stake, and arrows are flying in all directions.

And yet the scientific method is needed along with the practical method. The general interest can be served only by the union of science and art. The bronzed captain on the bridge can direct the ship in a storm or fog better than the author of "Synthetic Philosophy" or "Dynamic Sociology." Rude sailors told the officious nobles to go below because they did "assist the storm." The best service of college professors when the wind blows worst is to stay in bed and set an example of quietness and confidence. And yet the educated captain knows that the mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, physicists and biologists have all contributed to his art. The more thoroughly he knows the history of navigation the more he respects the scholars who have made his craft possible.

The more college graduates we have in the counting rooms the more cordial and fruitful will be the relations between practical men and scholars. As "scholarship" comes to mean social service, and is freed from mediævalism and dialectics, it will be recognized and respected by the men who are driving the