This question brings us to reflect on another branch of civic duty not yet mentioned. Besides the civic duties already described of Fighting, Voting, and Thinking, there is another duty. It is the duty of Mutual Help, the duty incumbent on those who possess, through their knowledge and intelligence, the capacity of Instruction and Persuasion to advise and to guide their less competent fellow-citizens. No sensible man ought ever to have supposed that under such conditions as large modern communities present, the bulk of the citizens could vote wisely from their own private knowledge and intelligence. Even in small cities, such as was Sicyon in the days of Aratus, or Boston in the days of James Otis, the Average Man needed the help of his more educated and wiser neighbours. While communities remained small, it was easy to get this help. But now the swift and vast growth of states and cities has changed everything. Private talk counts for less when the richer citizens dwell apart from the poorer; their opportunities of meeting are fewer, and there is less friendliness, if also less dependence, in the relation of the employed to the employer. Public meetings do not give nearly all that the Average Man needs, not to add that being got together to present one set of facts and arguments and deliberately to ignore the other, they do not put him in a fair position to judge. Besides, the men who most need instruction are usually those who least come to meetings to receive it. To fill this void the newspapers have arisen,--organs purporting to supply the materials required for the formation of political opinion. Whatever the services of the newspaper in other respects, it has the inevitable defect of superseding, with most of those who read it, the exercise of independent thought. The newspaper--I speak generally, for there are some brilliant exceptions--is, in Europe even more than here, almost always partisan in its views, often partisan in its selection of facts or at least in its way of stating them. Presenting one side of a case, addressing chiefly those who are already adherents of that side, putting a colour on the events it reports,--it serves up to the reader ideas, perhaps only mere phrases or catchwords, which confirm him in his prepossessions, and by its daily iteration makes him take them for truths. Seldom has he the leisure, still more seldom the impulse or the patience, to scrutinize these ideas for himself and form his own judgment. He is glad to be relieved of the necessity for thinking, because thinking is hard work. Indolence again! The habit of mind that is formed by hasty reading, and especially by the reading of newspapers and magazines in which the matter, excellent as parts of it often are, is so multifarious that one topic diverts attention from the others, tends to a general dissipation and distraction of thought. It is a habit which tells upon us all and makes continuous reflection and