John Jay Chapman
in the chapter on "Education" in his "Causes and Consequences." But the
idea in its familiar form is vitiated, because the educational effect of
reform is usually conceived as exclusively individual. Its effect
_must_, indeed, be considered wholly as an individual matter, just so
long as reform is interpreted merely as a process of purification. From
that point of view the collective purpose has already been fulfilled as
far as it can be fulfilled by collective organization, and the _only_
remaining method of social amelioration is that of the self-improvement
of its constituent members. As President Nicholas Murray Butler of
Columbia says, in his "True and False Democracy": "We must not lose
sight of the fact that the corporate or collective responsibility which
it (socialism) would substitute for individual initiative is only such
corporate or collective responsibility as a group of these very same
individuals could exercise. Therefore, socialism is primarily an attempt
to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, in
the hope that they will cancel each other.
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