Of these realities, one is the constant, if obstructed, drive toward democracy, based on the dogma of natural rights which animated the wars and works of the founding fathers: free public education is a primary, if abated, attainment of this drive. Another is the correlated growth of population, cities, and natural resources: the dropsical school systems, public and private, are by-products of this increase. In a century the wealth of the United States has multiplied by inconceivable ratios. Even in 1932, at the very trough of a signal deflation, national wealth and income must be stated in figures that have no empirical living meaning. They are merely symbols of indefinitely extending power--manpower and machine-power; and of the organization of this power in dynamic patterns that constitute a social economy. With this organization, there has come an increase in essential security. In spite of the business-cycle, in spite of unemployment, social waste, and all the rest of the major evils of industrial civilization, its individual citizens are better fed, better housed, in better health, and have better times than their pre-industrial ancestors. Their average expectation of life has increased from forty-seven years to fifty-eight. The society they compose is physiologically more adult, more aged, than the society of their forbears. More of its members are over forty, fewer of them are under seventeen. During the century of industrialization the proportion of children to adults has decreased by more than a half. This does not mean that the same number of children are born and more die. It means that fewer are born and far fewer die. Far fewer die because all receive a great deal better care than even the children of the richest used to get a hundred years ago. This care comes only somewhat accidentally and in a disordered way from the parents. It comes systematically from the community. The average parent of the working class deals with his children much as his own parents dealt with him. He in the main realizes that the child requires and somehow receives absorbed attention in extreme infancy. Past that stage, he leaves it more and more to itself. All that he asks of it is to make itself as little troublesome and as largely convenient as possible. For the rest, it is out on the street to grow its way into adulthood for itself, troubled by only occasional irruptions of disciplinary or exploitative parental interest, and by admonitions from the cop on the beat. To the socially-minded part of the community this is a dangerous situation. They fear disease and crime. They talk about corner gangs; about the break-down of family life. They regard it as of supreme importance “to get the children off the street.” Social settlements, boys’ clubs, scouting, playgrounds, and other semi-public and public enterprises have come up largely as instruments toward this end. But the chief instrument has become the school.