Not until his personal action is
dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between
private and public interests. To ask an individual citizen continually
to sacrifice his recognized private interest to the welfare of his
countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a
continual sacrifice is apparently required of an individual in a
democratic state. The only entirely satisfactory solution of the
difficulty is offered by the systematic authoritative transformation of
the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to
a special object.
American public opinion has not as yet begun to understand the relation
between the process of national education by means of a patient attempt
to realize the national purpose and the corresponding process of
individual emancipation and growth. It still believes that democracy is
a happy device for evading collective responsibilities by passing them
on to the individual; and as long as this belief continues to prevail,
the first necessity of American educational advance is the arousing of
the American intellectual conscience.
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