Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/107

 One of the most interesting experiences of life in those young Western communities, with not a few of which I became well acquainted, was the observation of the educational influence exercised by active local self-government. I met there a great many foreign-born persons who in their native countries had been accustomed to look up to the government as a superior power which, in the order of the universe, was ordained to do everything—or nearly everything—for them, and to whose superhuman wisdom and indisputable authority they had to submit. Such people, of course, brought no conception of the working of democratic institutions with them, and there is sometimes much speculation on the part of our political philosophers as to how the new-comers can safely be entrusted here with any rights or privileges permitting them to participate in the functions of government. In point of fact, there will be very little, if any, serious trouble whenever such people are placed in a situation in which they will actually be obliged to take an active and responsible part in the government respecting those affairs which immediately concern them—things in which they are intimately interested. Plant such persons in communities which are still in an inchoate, formative state, where the management of the public business, in the directest possible way, visibly touches the home of every inhabitant, and where everybody feels himself imperatively called upon to give attention to it for the protection or promotion of his own interests, and people ever so little used to that sort of thing will take to democratic self-government as a duck takes to water. They may do so somewhat clumsily at first and make grievous mistakes, but those very mistakes with their disagreeable consequences will serve to sharpen the wits of those who desire to learn—which every person of average intelligence who feels himself responsible for his own interests,