holder emerged furiously from his castle, unhitched the team, and led it into his stable. And to his assembling neighbors he breathed out the threatening that he would be paid by whoever owned that team, and paid well, for this damage before the owner should ever have back his horses.

A while later a tired man came hurrying up the street and saw his wagon marooned by the householder's tulip-bed. He came to the man's door. And the neighbors who were thereabout heard what the owner of the injured property said. It was:

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Why, hello Cal! Was them your colts? Never recognized 'em. Oh, they're all right now. I've got 'em in my barn. Dinner's just ready. Come on in!"

In these incidents lies a part of the rationale of the Social Center Idea. Namely, that, if you know people, things look different. We have always felt this. We have agreed that the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin, and that a touch of nature makes the whole world kin. But we have never institutionalized that universal feeling. The Social Center does that. It consciously seeks to express and to develop the common humanhood. For this, it says, is the basis of democracy.

Here and there among the people who watch life and help it to live there is the spirit that rejects the conscious notion of clearing up the world. Perhaps more people have this spirit than ever may show it, because the stress and conflict of things most worth while constantly make the talk take to itself terms more or less militant. But deep within the insufficient things said about right and reform and improvement lives this spirit which knows that unless the thing done is done for its own sake, for the joy of doing, and as a spontaneous expression of the human being behind it, then it is born without wings.

It is precisely this spirit that the Social Center Idea expresses. It says that the common thing about people is that they are

human beings and want to be with other human beings. It says that to bring this about in right relations, and to let people act upon it and express it spontaneously, is to get more results. for humanity than can result from the conscious nurturing of specific "reforms." It instils, not the rules of democracy, but the zest of the game.

In more than one hundred cities and towns in the United States social centers have been developed within the last few years: in Rochester, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Toledo. Now the University of Wisconsin has a department of Social Centers and Civic Development, in charge of Edward J. Ward, who was the director of the Rochester social centers and who instituted the movement. That is, the Wisconsin University has created an office whose duties are to develop neighborhood centers throughout the State, and to assist in their activities. One result of this has been the recent National Convention at Madison, with delegates from sixteen States, and the formation there of the National Association of Social Centers and Civic Development, with headquarters now established in New York City. And the University of Virginia has followed Wisconsin in the establishment of a Social Center Department; and other universities have afoot similar plans. It is felt to be eminently the province of the universities, since their occupation is the making of citizens. Thus the little towns and villages are growing into the movement, too. It is the ancient and simple way to accomplishment.

The Social Center, then, is the place in any community where the people of that community meet, discuss, enjoy, coöperate upon common ground as citizens in a democracy, as members of a neighborhood, as human beings, without regard to party, creed, class, or difference of possession.

With the need for such a place as this arises the realization of citizens that they have made a certain investment which could pay more than it is paying. The public schools are open

only about six hours a day. The rest of the time they lie useless, making no return on the billion-dollar investment which taxpayers have made in them. The school-house is the logical place for social center activities. It is giving the citizens the use of their own property, long subject to the "permission" of school boards. The Legislature of Wisconsin lately passed a bill granting the use of all school-houses for free discussion and recreation purposes, on application by an organization of citizens. Wisconsin is the first State to write such a bill on its statute-books, thus recognizing its function as a State to minister to the social needs of its citizens just as it ministers to their other vital needs.

The idea having arisen and the place having been opened, the development everywhere proceeds along the same natural lines: the organization of a Recreation Department in the school or in the town, the engaging of a salaried civic club organizer or director who helps with the various club meetings, with the public lectures, the motion picture entertainments, dramatics, orchestras, choruses, and the gymnasium. The spirit

of the social center is the spirit of neighborhood, and its method is the method of Christmas and Thanksgiving extended to take in the family of the neighborhood, of the town.

As in every other movement, the appeal varies with the community. In one the need is recognized as the demand for social life. In another the need is for recreational life for the young people, to keep the young people off the streets, they say. In another it is to satisfy the instinct for organization. In another too many organizations have rent the life of the town, until a common meeting-place is needed to win back the town's dignity and its unity-its sacred unity. And in these days of social readjustment the blunders committed because some folk are the first by whom the new is tried and some are the lingering last by whom it is laid aside would be far less frequent, the Social Center Idea maintains, if there were some place for general discussion of new community

and State measures besides saloons and partisan political meetings if there were a citizens' forum. But, whatever the specific appeal, always the starting-point is everybody's starting-point: being human, needing to meet as citizens, as neighbors, as human beings, for wholesome recreation and talk.

ELEMENTARY DUTY OF A DEMOCRACY
WALTER LIPPMANN

[From Drift and Mastery; copyright. Reprinted by permission of Mitchell Kennerley.]

THE desire for self-government has become vivid with the accumulation of a great surplus of wealth. Man to-day has at last seen the possiblity of freeing himself from his supreme difficulty. It wasn't easy to think much of the possibilities of this world, while he lived on the edge of starvation. Resignation to hardship was a much more natural outlook. But in the midst of plenty, the imagination becomes ambitious, rebellion against misery is at least justified, and dreams have a basis in fact.

Of course, there are immense sections of the globe where the hard conditions of the older life still prevail, and there the ideal of democracy is still a very ineffective phase. But the United States has for the most part lifted itself out of primitive hardship, and that fact, more than our supposedly democratic constitution, is what has justified in some measure the hope which inspires our history. We have been far from wise with the great treasure we possessed, and no nation has such cause for shame at the existence of poverty. We have only our short-sighted selves to blame. But the blinders are not fatal: American wealth has hardly been tapped. And that is why America still offers the greatest promise to democracy.

The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole population well above the misery line. To create

a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state. For those who go below the line of civilized decency not only suffer wretchedly: they breed the poisons of self-government. They form the famous slum proletariat about whom even the socialists despair. Occasionally some dramatic figure rises out of them, occasionally they mutter and rebel and send the newspapers into a panic. But for the purposes of constructive revolution this submerged mass is of little use, for it is harassed, beaten, helpless. These last will not be first. They may scare the rest of us into a little reform. But out of sheer wretchedness will come little of the material or the power of democracy, for as Walter Weyl has said, “A man or a class, crushed to earth — is crushed to earth."

Unfit for self-government, they are the most easily led, the most easily fooled, and the most easily corrupted. They make a governing class essential. They are used by the forces of reaction. Once in a while they are used by revolutionists for agitation, but always they are used. Before you can begin to have democracy you need a country in which everyone has some stake and some taste of its promise.

THE REPUBLIC WILL ENDURE
JAMES GIBBONS

[From an address at the meeting of the American Federation of Catholic Societies in New York City, August 20, 1916. “The note of loyalty," says a newspaper account, "that dominated the first big public meeting of 'Catholic Week' was suggested by the use of the stars and stripes as the sole decoration, and was reiterated in patriotic songs and speeches which met with hearty response from the great audience."]

You live in a Republic where there is liberty without license, and authority without despotism, and where the civil rulers hold over you the ægis of its protection without interfering with the God-given rights of conscience.