Page:The new ideal in education - an address given before the League of the Empire on July 16th, 1916 (IA newidealineducat00veliiala).djvu/12

 I: Certainly I do; but their work is too much overestimated. Not a handful of economic writers, like Adam Smith and Marx, but the common genius of generations and generations arranged the house, set the furniture, created the cooking, constructed towns, invented plays and enjoyments, customs, language, and so forth.

He: You agree, I think, that Shaljapin and Caruso have wonderful voices, don't you?

I: Yes, I agree. But don't you agree that a choir of millions of human voices would be something much more striking and wonderful than any solo singer since the beginning of time?

He: Don't you believe in the wisdom of wise men like Kant and Spencer?

I: No, I don't. I think there is incomparably more healthy and more applicable wisdom in the popular sayings, proverbs, parables, and tales of the nations, cultivated and uncultivated, in Macedonia, Armenia, Ceylon, New Zealand, Japan, &c., than in some dozen of the greatest thinkers of Europe.

He: Who is then in your opinion a great man?

I: Only a good man is a great man to me, who is conscious that he is a cell in the panhuman organism, or a brick in the building of human history. Such a man is more a man of truth and of the future than any conqueror, who thinks that a hundred millions of people and hundreds of years have waited just for him and his guidance, his work, or his wisdom.

That is what I would say to a pupil of individualism in education. And at the end I would remind him of Christ and His call after the children, and of the new ideal of education, of panhumanism which stands over individualism, and of the collective work of people which stands over every individual work and merit.

It is quite surprising and humiliating that other things can be discussed and settled as international affairs, before