human material. Can we permit boys and girls, perhaps of rare gifts, just because they happen to have been born on the outskirts of the country, to have only the outskirts of an education? Those boys and girls are the nation's highest assets. The nation must do its share toward bearing the burden of their training.

But suppose the nation cannot be made to see its duty. Then there is only one other way: the teachers, by concerted action and the application of the principle of collective bargaining, must compel the nation to wake up. But surely this will not be necessary. The war is training the national imagination to see things on a new scale. It is no longer a day when we say, "This ought to be done. We will do it, provided we can get the money." It is a day rather when we say of whatever is vital to the public welfare, "Let this be done." And then we get the money.

It is a day of big things. It is a day preeminently when those who are serving the state must be granted the right of way. The teachers of the country are not only serving the state now; they have been serving it all their lives. They are the captains of the army of understanding; not alone of that technical understanding upon which military victory depends, but of that larger human understanding upon which depends the whole hope and future of the world. If we spend billions to save the world, can we not spend millions to make the world worth saving? If we pour forth our treasure without stint to those who shape our steel and iron, can we not, grant at least a living wage to those who are molding our life itself? The nation must come to the rescue of its schools. For a nation without education is a coast without a lighthouse.

THE NATION AT WAR

JAMES A. B. SCHERER, MEMBER, COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE,
WASHINGTON, D.C.

You will, of course, remember that as soon as we entered the Great War the President called for the organization of the Council of National Defense. This was not possible without the organization of the state councils; but that has been accomplisht in all of the forty-eight states, either by legislative enactment or by executive order. The next step was for the states to organize the counties, and this has now been done very generally. There remains the ultimate unit of the school district; and the object of this great series of war conferences that I have just attended in a dozen western states was to organize there, as in other states, community councils with the schoolhouse as the place of meeting and the school district as the ultimate unit of organization. These community councils are organized essentially for war work in a federated system heading up in Washington. The Council

of National Defense is now focusing its attention on community councils, properly so called; and they are in successful operation thruout many parts of the country.

Senator Overman said the other day that there are four hundred thousand German spies in the United States; surely enough to go around. When I went into the different parts of the country to see what the states were doing in rallying their vast resources for the winning of this greatest of all crusades, I wisht for the loan of a spy that he might with me "spy out the land," hear what I heard, see what I saw, and then report to his Kaiser truthfully (if he could) his observations in the form of a letter.

The first trip they sent me on took me down to Dixie. I was glad to go down there because I was born in the South, and I wanted to see for myself just how far the German Emperor's nefarious program had succeeded in stirring up the black man against the white.

Major Moton, the distinguisht negro who succeeded Booker Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute, has said that during the brief period of this war and by reason of this present war more has been accomplisht in the improvement of relations between the blacks and whites in the South than during his entire lifetime previously. German spies please note carefully!

Beneath all superficial disturbances there is a strong bond between the southern white man and the negro.. This war has greatly strengthened that bond, and I predict that in consequence of such state-council movements as that of the "Sumter County plan" in South Carolina, the race problem is going to be far less acute in the South in the future than it has been in the immediate past.

In North Carolina they believe that even doctors have their uses, so they have organized the physicians of the state into a patriotic league, and nowadays when a doctor goes into a tar-heel home to relieve a patient who is shaking with fever and ague, he not only gives him quinine, but while he has him down he injects into him the spiritual hypodermic of a more intelligent patriotism, so that if the doctor has luck the man not only gets up well but gets up better-a better patriot than when he went to bed.

They have also organized the women down there; they have what might be called a company of three-minute women, on the principle, I suppose, that women can say more in three minutes than the four-minute men can in four (and say it much more to the purpose). They have put these threeminute women at the telephones; it is easy enough to get the cooperation of the telephone companies. So every day at noon when Johnny Hayseed glues his ear to the telephone (if I use slang it is because I am a college man), he has discovered that he not only gets the latest market quotations on "butter'n'eggs," and corn, and cotton, and hay, but that "central" drops. into his ear at the same time just a little dose of the patriotic "dope" that Uncle Sam thinks he needs at the moment. It works like a charm.

Speaking of "publicity," however, I rather think that Connecticut, under the leadership of George Brinton Chandler, is leading the country in its efficient methods of public education. They have bulletin boards all over the state, costing $3.00 apiece. They emblazen these boards, for example, with our poster "The Prussian Blot." Our council has already distributed 340,000 copies thruout the country and we have more for proper distribution. It is exceedingly difficult to explain by word of mouth to popular audiences just what the "Prussian Blot" means. You can do it, however, with a poster, and Connecticut has lit up the land with these posters, which any man or woman can comprehend in five minutes. It is a plan that ought to be widely copied thruout the nation.

Missouri has begun to "show" the rest of the nation how to conduct an efficient state council. She is producing 10 per cent more foodstuffs than ever before; last year 750,000 acres were put into corn that had never been put into any crop before.

If my German spy had crisscrost the country with me he would have found the planters of Louisiana concerned about their sugar crop, not for what they could make out of it, but for what they could do with it in feeding our boys and our Allies. At the opposite corner of the country he would have found the lumbermen of Washington and Oregon concerned, not about what they could get out of their lumber, but about how they could get the spruce out of the forests to help Uncle Sam build his airships. All thru the country he would have found the people determined to support Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes in their endeavor to get the men who have hindered our aircraft-building program. Further, in Massachusetts and Connecticut he would have found the great men of those states giving practically all of their time to the war organization of the country; building up, for example, a great war-emergency employment service that will enable New England to handle its labor supply effectively by distributing labor, with labor's free consent, from the points of surplus supply to the points of the greatest need. Crossing the country thru the great Northwest and dropping down with me into the expansive grain fields of the Central West, he would have found the farmer concerned in "speeding up" production; just as in California, if he would go home with me, he would find captains of industry along the Pacific Coast "speeding up ship production in huge plants that have sprung up, as it were, over night.

We are beginning to put ourselves into this war, and God knows it is high time. America must awake! Away with the false and treasonable self-praise-false as to the fact, treasonable to our Allies-which boasts of what we have done! We have not done nearly what we should have done. Welcome the heart-searching and the repentance for our faithless lukewarmness; welcome to the girding up of the loins until every last ounce of our energy is thrown to the aid of those tensely strained Allies who have

born the brunt and the shock of the battle for us for almost the terrible length of our own Civil War!

The most contemptible man that I meet in my journeys is the copperhead parasite the man who, instead of asking, as every true patriot must, how much we can put into this war, is continually whining about what we are going to get out of it. I will let your uncle Lafe Young, of Iowa, answer him:

Every traitor and every near traitor in the United States is inquiring, "What are we going to get out of this war?"

Well, among other things, we are going to get a better grade of patriotism than we have been having.

....

Out of this war, we are going to get a new United States. We are going to hate nobody, but we are going to be prepared to fight whenever necessary.

We are going to have the freest country in the world, but we are not going to allow any traitorous highbrows to set their own standards of freedom by which to convert freedom into treason.

There are a good many other things "we are going to get out of this war." When the soldier boys come home, we are going to have two millions of patriots who, having fought for the flag, will make good citizens and thoro patriots.

Already we clasp hands across the sea with our mother-land. The virtual alliance in which we find ourselves with England is a logical conclusion far too long delayed. It is only the shallowest and narrowest view of history that regards our Revolutionary War as other than one in the long sequence of the revolts of English-speaking people against tyrants.

Of course we should not limit our alliance to England; it should include all of the genuine democracies of the world, no matter what their form of government.

Most of all we should conclude forever an inseparable alliance with our sister-Republic la belle France! It is a "soul of goodness" in the evil of this war that America, long blind, is at last awake to the spiritual beauty of her twin sister across the Atlantic. "Frivolous," "frail," even "decadent," we have called her; to realize now, in the incandescent light of this war, that what we called frivolity is but the laughing, rippling surface of a nobility as deep as the ocean; that what we called frailty was but her gay "camouflage" for sinews of unbending steel; and that instead of decadence France has since 1870 enjoyed a renaissance, has risen and climbed and stood upon glorious resurrection heights from which now she beckons and bids us to climb up and stand at her side. To commemorate the centenary of our independence she sent her great bronze gift across the water and stood it up in New York Harbor. We are now sending our boys by the million to aid her in the establishment of her own independence, and to aid her further in her gigantic task of setting up on the watchtowers of Europe her own radiant and heroic monument of liberty enlightening the world.

DEMOCRACY EVERY DAY

JOHN COLLIER, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL COMMUNITY CENTER ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK, N.Y.

American-wise in the true, often forgotten sense-American-wise and not Teuton-wise—we will bear our part in the war to make democracy safe in this world.

And so it is that we have done. President Wilson is today a worldleader, not merely in the political sense, but far more greatly in a sense moral and human, because he has interpreted to us our own genius, because he has shown us the way. It is President Wilson who in the solitude of his own thought, as revealed in his acts even more than in his words, has determined that not merely should America do her own warrior part in this world-war, that not merely should we win this war-and we shall win it--but that in winning the war we should pledge ourselves to such ends, commit ourselves to such methods, as would restore our spiritual birthright, our destiny, to us. We cannot doubt that President Wilson is conscious of this intent. We are going to win this war by methods of democracy. Perhaps no other nation has with deliberation reacht such a decision and cumulatively put it into effect.

Assuming that President Wilson has prophesied for the nations, what has been his meaning? His meaning is not just rhetorical or poetic. It is not winning the war thru democracy if we merely lead all the people to feel favorable toward the war, to feel ecstatic about far dreams that ever haunt the brains of peoples, or to feel friendly toward those who are making the decisions and doing the work of the war. There is no evidence that all these conditions are not found even in Germany today. No transient emotional state, no elation or narcosis such as comes to heroes and martyrs, can itself constitute winning the war thru democracy.

If the American people are to win this war thru methods of democracy, it must be thru millions of conscious mental judgments which involve the taking of responsibility by individual citizens for things vital to the carrying on of the war; the taking of that responsibility and then the conscious, voluntary, and patient bearing of that burden whose significance we understand the burden of detailed things which men and women and children can do; the bearing of one another's burdens, made heavier thru the war; the burden of sustained will, but even more the burden of sustained thinking directed toward the great ends, domestic and world-wide, of this war.

And so we come to the plan of community councils of national defense. This plan aims to win the war thru democracy. It involves manifold adjustments-permanent adjustments if we will make them such-in the direction of constructive citizenship. It goes far beyond the purpose of merely repressing a bad state and insuring a good state of mind. The