We must either live by our education or live without it. The alternatives are desiccation and anarchy. If we live by it, education itself stays alive, grows, sloughs off dead matter, adapts itself like an organism to environment. If we live without and beyond and in neglect of education, as many “practical” Americans have always done once they left school or college, education decays, and sooner or later the man decivilizes, drifts toward that mere acceleration of busyness, which is the modern equivalent of barbarism. Once before, and far more seriously, a civilization was threatened because its education became merely traditional and ceased to function in practical life. The society of Appolinaris Sidonius in the fifth century, as Dill describes it, was faced with economic disruption, with hordes of aliens, with a rampant individualism that put the acquisition of a secure fortune above everything else. The leaders failed to lead. “Their academic training only deepened and intensified the deadening conservatism of unassailable wealth.” “Faith in Rome had killed all faith in a wider future for humanity....” There was an “apparent inability to imagine, even in the presence of tremendous forces of disruption, that society should ever cease to move along the ancient lines.” Roman imperialism divorced itself from Roman thought and became a deadening tyranny. Roman thought divorced itself from Roman life and became an empty philosophy. And the sixth century and disaster followed. The historical analogy is imperfect. Our civilization is still vigorous where the Roman was tired and weak. No outer barbarians threaten us. Science safeguards us from economic breakdown. And yet, like the skeptic who does not believe in God, but refuses to take chances on his death-bed, I should not scoff at the parallel. Stale imperialism, shaken religions, a liberalism become an article of faith not an instrument of practice--all these are potential of decay, of explosion. We must look to our education. If it does not grip our life, we must change education. If life is not gripped, our life needs reforming. And the thing is so extraordinarily difficult that it is high time we ceased praising for a while the virtues of our forefathers or the wealth of our compatriots, and began the task. After all, it means no more than to teach the next generation not merely to preserve, but also to carry on, the traditions of America. CHAPTER III RADICAL AMERICA It is with no intention to be paradoxical that I call America a radical nation. I know well by experience, sometimes galling, what an English labor leader or a French socialist thinks of America, as he understands it. A mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground of the bourgeoisie, the birthplace of trusts, where even the labor-unions are capitalistic. If the world is to be saved for democracy, he says, it will not be by America.