Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/269

Rh of science have been found unsound and that the still unpossessed territory is inimitably greater than that already gained is but a challenge to his courage and his resources. To the truly scientific spirit science is in part an achievement; in a larger sense it is a hope, an aspiration, a kind of intellectual idealism. As prophecy it is more convincing than revelation; as a field for constructive imagination it is as interesting as poetry or music.

This also is the spirit of democracy. If one insists on regarding society as a completed thing, then it must be admitted that democracy does not justify itself. It has never yet established on a lasting basis that thoroughgoing equality of which it dreams. The so-called democracy of Greece was admittedly founded upon the institution of slavery; that of England rests upon an economic submergence of large masses of its people, and in our own country privilege in business, politics, education and religion, with the consequent corruption of society and abortion of justice mocks our praise of democracy even while we make it. Our enemies need but to uncover the facts to lay bare a frightful indictment of our claim that democracy is the best form of social organization. City councils bought with money, weak and incompetent mayors, police forces subdued by threats or seduced by gifts, legislatures the willing servants of men who want the law shaped for their private gain, governors caught in the clutches of the party machine and unable to perform their sworn duty as executors of the law, seats in the senate bought with money or the promises of preferment, retired congressmen delivering their information acquired in the public service to private wealth for private ends, public courts shaping their procedure so that the man of means has an advantage over the poor man in the administration of justice, the supreme court of the land erecting itself into a law-making body through constitutional interpretation and thereby overriding the wishes of the people as expressed through their legislatures; four million laboring men subsisting on incomes below the level of a living wage; children sacrificed to factory labor; women unable to secure from state legislatures labor conditions comparable to those of men; the dispensation of religion administered in such a way as to make the rich comfortable and stupid, the poor indifferent or bitter, and the thoughtful anti-ecclesiastic; education for the professional classes but little for laborers; palaces and leisure for the rich and hovels and drudgery for the poor these are the facts flaunted before us in this most democratic country in the world.

But the real democrat is not disheartened by the hideous picture. He sees all this and he sees beyond it. In the presence of many failures he discerns one success, and to him that success is the important thing. You show him a score of corrupted cities, and beyond them he sees Cleveland with its new charter; you show him the terrible conditions