No, Mr. Hoover’s formula will not do. The task is far greater. We shall not develop obedience to law in America until we have educated both our electorate and our legislators to a knowledge of the nature of law, to the limits of laws, and to their effects; until we have educated them both to a tolerance and a practical wisdom in the art of governing; until we have cleaned the Augean stables of our public life of their accumulated filth, and the governments themselves—municipal, state, and federal—obey and impartially enforce the law; until public opinion and public prosecutors demand the punishment of millionaires and of highly placed officials in Washington with the same rigor as would be meted out to the ordinary criminal; until the ideal of quickly accumulated wealth, by any means whatever, is made subordinate to the ideal of private and public virtue. [Pg 143] If Mr. Hoover merely tells the American people to obey every absurd law, every unenforced law, every unequally and unjustly enforced law, every unenforceable law, that is now on the statute books of the nation and our forty-eight sovereign states, he will get nowhere. If, on the other hand, he will undertake to show the people what underlies their problem, and assume the leadership in a crusade to reform the very foundations of their life—the rotten foundations that are at the bottom of the problem of our lawlessness—then he will prove the leader for whom America waits, and patriotism and nobility may again rise above efficiency and wealth. By that path only can America regain respect for law and for herself. Nor is it a question only of respect. Far down the path which America is now treading, at the end of the vista, in the shadow of the future, but all too clearly visible to the eye of the historian, stands, biding his time, the sinister figure of the man on horseback, the dictator who inevitably “saves society” when social insubordination and disintegration have become intolerable, when order has given place to chaos. We must rule or be ruled. Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Mussolini—the line is long and the sequence inevitable. America can be saved, but it must be by regeneration, not by efficiency. May Mr. Hoover ponder the problem and face the issue! [Pg 145] CHAPTER VII TO “BE” OR TO “DO” [Pg 147] TO “BE” OR TO “DO” I A recent writer in a privately printed volume on education begins with the sentence: “What is the matter with our schools?—Everything.” I would not go quite as far as that in a blanket indictment of our educational system, but I must confess that to an outside but interested observer the system appears to be more and more hopelessly uncertain of where it is trying to go or what it is trying to do—a welter of “isms” in a sea of expense, without the slightest agreement as to basic aims.