skimming the waters. Why is she free? Because she has adjusted herself to the great force of nature that is brewed with the breath of the wind. She is free in proportion as she is adjusted, as she is obedient, and so men are free in society in proportion as their interests are accommodated to one another, and that is the problem of liberty.

Analysis Accomplished-now Assembled

Liberty as now expressed is unsatisfactory in this country and in other countries because there has not been a satisfactory adjustment, and you cannot readjust the parts until you analyze them. Very well, we have analyzed them. Now, this movement is intended to contribute to an effort to assemble them, bring them together, let them look one another in the face, let them reckon with one another, and then they will coöperate, and not before.

You cannot bring adjustment into play until you have got the consent of the parts to act together, and then, when you have got the adjustment, when you have discovered and released those forces and they have accommodated themselves to each other, you have that control which is the sovereignty of the people.

There is no sovereignty of the people if the several sections of the people be at loggerheads with one another. Sovereignty comes with coöperation; sovereignty comes with mutual protection; sovereignty comes with the quick pulses of sympathy; sovereignty comes by a common impulse.

You say, and all men say, that great political changes are impending in this country. Why do you say so? Because everywhere you go you find men expressing the same judgment, alive to the same circumstances, determined to solve the problems by acting together, no matter what older bonds they may break, no matter what former prepossessions they may throw off, determined to get together and do the thing.

Enlightened Control in Place of Management

And so you know that changes are impending because what was a body of scattered sentiment is now becoming a concentrated force, and so with sympathy and understanding comes control, for, in place of this control of enlightened and sovereign opinions, we have had in the field of politics, as elsewhere, the reign of management, and management is compounded of these two things, secrecy plus concentration.

You cannot manage a nation, you cannot manage the people of a State, you cannot manage a great population, you can manage only some central force. What you do, therefore, if you want to manage in politics or anywhere else, is to choose a great single force or single group of forces and then find some man or men sagacious and secretive enough to manage the business without being discovered. And that has been done for a generation in the United States.

Now, the schoolhouse, among other things, is going to break that up. Is it not significant that this thing is being erected upon the foundation originally laid in America, where we saw from the first that the schoolhouse and the church were to be the pillars of the Republic? Is it not significant that, as if by instinct, we return to those sources of liberty undefiled which we find in the common meeting place in the place owned by everybody, in the place where nobody can be excluded, in the place to which everybody comes as by right?

And so what we are doing is simply to open what was shut, to let the light come in upon places that were dark, to substitute for locked doors open doors, for it does not make any difference how many or how few come in provided anybody who chooses may come in. So, as soon as you have established that principle, you have openings, and these doors are open as if they were the floodgates of life.

Faith in People Justified

I do not wonder that men are exhibiting an increased confidence in the judgments of the people, because wherever you give the people a chance, such as this movement has given them in the schoolhouse, they avail themselves of it. This is not a false people, this is not a people guided by blind impulses, this is a people who want to think, who want to think right, whose feelings are based upon justice, whose instincts are for fairness and for the light.

So what I see in this movement is a recovery of the constructive and creative genius of the American people, because the American people as a people are so far different from others in being able to produce new things, to create new things out of old.

This Movement Fundamentally American

I have often thought that we overlook the fact that the real sources of strength in the community come from the bottom. Do you find society renewing itself from the top? Don't you find society renewing itself from the ranks of unknown men? Do you look to the leading families to go on leading you? Do you look to the ranks of the men already established in authority to contribute sons to lead the next generation? They may, sometimes they do, but you can't count on them; and what you are constantly depending on is the rise out of the ranks of unknown men, the discovery of men whom you had passed by, the sudden disclosure of capacity you had not dreamed of, the emergence of somebody from some place of which you had thought the least, of some man unanointed from on high, to do the thing that the generation calls for. Who would have looked to see Lincoln save a nation? Who that knew Lincoln when he was a lad and a youth and a young man but all the while there was springing up in him as if he were connected with the very soil itself,

the sap of a nation, the vision of a great people, a sympathy so ingrained and intimate with the common run of men that he was like the people impersonated, sublimated, touched with genius. And it is to such sources that we must always look.

No man can calculate the courses of genius, no man can foretell the leadership of nations. And so we must see to it that the bottom is left open, we must see to it that the soil of the common feeling of the common consciousness is always fertile and unclogged, for there can be no fruit unless the roots touch the rich sources of life.

And it seems to me that the schoolhouses dotted here, there, and everywhere, over the great expanse of this Nation, will some day prove to be the roots of that great tree of liberty which shall spread for the sustenance and protection of all mankind.

We are in the midst of a rural revolution. The pre-emption of the "area available for agricultural purposes" which, according to the Federal census, was practically complete at the beginning of the new century, has set in motion forces that are swiftly transforming the spirit of American farm life and the character of the economic and social institutions in the open country.

approximately from the

For more than a hundred years time when the embargo of 1807 established the "nursing of infant industries" as our dominant national policy the industrial revolution, with its teeming commercial and manufacturing centers, has shaped the course of American civilization. Notwithstanding the fact that throughout the nineteenth century the rural population greatly outnumbered the population of the cities, its influence upon national affairs remained definitely secondary. So long as there were millions of acres available for agricultural settlement, the power of the rural majority was subject to ready control. Whenever the farmers attempted to organize, as they did through the Grange in the sixties and seventies, and again through the Populist uprising of the early nineties, their ranks were broken and scattered by the opening of vast reserves of arable land. Effective group action is impossible without stability, an economic surplus, and leisure; cheap lands meant cheap prices for agricultural products; so long as "Uncle Sam was rich enough to give us each a farm," the rural majority could be

1 Copyright. Reprinted by permission from Harper's Magazine, November, 1914.