nomic. Representative government very often seems to represent only the tricky and seamy side of human nature. Men elected to represent mixed constituencies often lack the courage to take definite positions on important questions and "play safe" by trimming, drifting, and pretending to be all things to all men. There are too many demagogues, time-servers, shifty politicians (called "practical"), in the public life of every democracy. Such men have no intellectual or moral fitness for the functions they are supposed to discharge. The result is futile, insincere, and ineffective legislation, evasion and paltering and endless delays in attending to ripe problems that demand earnest discussion and statesman-like action.

Even the average man, who is no philosopher, is disappointed in the conditions or prospects of modern democracy. He rails at politicians and politics. He does not expect efficiency or integrity of democratic government. He refuses to take seriously campaigns against waste, extravagance, or "graft." He sneers at party platforms, made, as he says, "to get in on but not to stand on." is skeptical regarding the success of proposed reforms of the familiar type for so many of them have been tried and found empty and fruitless.

He

This aspect of the democratic situation cannot and need not be ignored. It is responsible for much of the sympathy, interest, and enthusiasm which the Russian soviet system has aroused in liberal and progressive circles. The Russian Bolshevik idealists, we are assured by many, have shown us the way out-have evolved what Lenine calls "a higher form of democracy" than that of England, France, or America. Let us abolish our legislatures and executives, and "sovietize" our state and national governments, cry some superficial radicals.

The soviet system has nothing to do with bolshevism, terrorism, Leninism, or the dictatorship of a class. It does offer hints to advanced democracies, and its failure in Russia, which is certain, will not prove its total want of merit.

We must make our legislatures more representative and more efficient. This can be done, undoubtedly, by substituting, at least to some extent, representation of industries, social groups, schools

of opinions, vocations, and functions for the representation of geographical areas, heterogenous populations, and nebulous partisan policies. This substitution is the essence of the soviet system, and it is worth studying and experimenting with under favorable circum

stances.

There is no reason why these American states that have been discussing the possibility of applying the commission plan of government to states, or of abolishing the upper chamber of the state legislature and experimenting with a unicameral general assembly, should not seriously consider an experiment along the Russian soviet lines. They might retain the state senate, but provide for the election of its members not, as now, by the body of voters, but by electoral colleges representing industrial guilds, commercial associations, bankers and brokers, merchants, trade unions, professional and scientific bodies, etc. Years ago Herbert Spencer, if memory serves, suggested the reformation of the British House of Lords after the manner just indicated. He would not have favored the soviet plan in its entirety, but he recognized the defects of Parliament Carlyle's "Talking Machine"-and the necessity of such changes in the electoral system as might insure the adequate representation of the ability, the enterprise, the intelligence, the character, and the industry of the nation in the parliament. A revising chamber of experts, of men who "do things," who have had special training for constructive and positive work, would undoubtedly give a much better account of itself than a chamber of lawyers and politicians—especially of lawyers and politicians nominated and elected by partisan machines and local bosses.

In addition to a revising chamber of the type suggested, or pending the adoption of constitutional amendments permitting the creation and election of such a senate, national, state, and local councils might be organized for the purpose of deliberating on industrial, social, and mixed problems, carrying on investigations and tendering formal advice to the legislature. Such industrial councils are being organized, or at least proposed, in Great Britain. As some enlightened newspapers have pointed out, British progressives, with characteristic sense and sobriety have modified the Russian soviet plan and adapted it to the institutions and traditions

of their own country, whose genius for timely compromise and accommodation is universally admired. It is no humiliation to the sovereign Parliament of Britain to admit that it often fumbles and muddles because it lacks scientific and practical knowledge, and because it is hampered by partisan politics and supposed partisan strategy. But, humiliating or not, the admission that parliaments and congresses and legislatures of the conventional type have developed weakness and faults and require extensive "mending' will have to be made. And it is fortunate that sober-minded students of the problem are beginning to develop a sort of consensus of opinion respecting the sort of mending that needs to be done. Extreme, superficial notions are being discarded. The silly demand for the sudden, immediate "sovietizing" of our so-called bourgeois governments on the Moscow, Petrograd, and Budapest models was confined to ignorant and shallow editors of the yellow radical press. We shall hear little of that nonsense after a while, but we shall and ought to hear much about genuinely representative legislative assemblies, as well as about electoral machinery and electoral laws that are intentionally designed to produce such assemblies.

It is certain that even plain business men who would warmly repudiate any charge of sympathy with radicalism will increasingly insist on changes in the composition, personnel, and atmosphere of our legislative bodies. The complaint that "there are too many lawyers" in Congress is familiar and symptomatic. There are too many lawyers in every legislative body in the United States. Lawyers have a strong bias toward legalism. They are more adept at raising objections, drawing fine distinctions, splitting hairs, finding reasons against proposed courses of action, than at removing difficulties and making constructive suggestions. The business man is right when he asserts that we need, in public life, more men who know how to get results. We need farmers, merchants, manufacturers, engineers, physicians, educators, practical sociologists, mechanics, labor leaders, in our legislative bodies. This is in strict accord with the true democratic principle; there is nothing wild or extreme about the idea. We shall have a better state, a more efficient and democratic state, when the men and women who speak and act in its name represent industry, commerce, science,

the liberal professions, the arts, practical benevolence, and the like. That state will be as good as the average character, intelligence, and culture of the people can make it. More is impossible.

Finally, within the limits of the state's proper activities—and, to repeat with emphasis, to demand more democracy is not to demand the enthronement of the majority and the abolition of individual and minority rights-the voters must be armed with effective weapons of control and defense, with the referendum, the initiative, the recall, proportional representation, as against their elected representatives. A golden means must be found between the chaos and emotionalism of so-called "pure democracy," which, in truth, has become impossible in large and heterogeneous societies, and a too rigid system of representative government, which has so often resulted in anti-democratic, anti-popular, misrepresentative government.

Changes still more fundamental than those sketched may and must be left to the future. It is unprofitable to speculate upon their nature, for the data available are wholly insufficient. Mere technical and mechanical progress may react powerfully on the modern state. The further development of a sane and sound internationalism, which is inevitable, cannot fail to affect the nationalist state. But such changes cannot be foreseen in the concrete; to predict them in vague generalities is 'not to facilitate them. The course of wisdom and sane, philosophical radicalism is to interpret and facilitate such changes as are surely coming, as are actually casting shadows before them, and as we can afford to encourage and welcome.

EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP IN A DEMOCRACY'

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD
University of Missouri

The Great War was supposedly fought to "make the world safe for democracy"; while some of us hoped that, purified by the trials of that mighty struggle and ennobled by its heroism, democracy might become "safe for the world." Neither result, however, is yet in evidence; and those of us who were optimistic as to the beneficent results of a victorious war upon our democracy and our civilization must sorrowfully admit the old, well-known truth that war in its effects is destructive, not constructive, and that constructive work for democracy must come through education. The only way we can "make the world safe for democracy" or democracy "safe for the world," it should now be evident, is through educating the world for democracy.

The sober fact is that democracy is now confronting the greatest crisis of its existence, and unless education can do something to foster it and render it successful it must go under. So far from increasing enthusiasm for democracy, the war seems to have had exactly the opposite effect in some quarters. Only recently university presidents, corporation managers, and even politicians have expressed doubts about the ability of the people to govern themselves. Such doubts may seem not unjustified in view of the present disturbed condition of even the most democratic countries. Democracy as a political and social system has, of course, been successful in the past, but under much simpler conditions of life. We must recognize that the relative success of democracy under the simple, rural conditions of life in which our fathers lived is but little argument for the success of democracy in the complex, urban civilization in which we live. The individualistic laissez faire democracy of our fathers will not work today. Their simple, rural life demanded only a minimum of 'An address before the Southern Sociological Congress, Washington, D.C., May 9.