When a crowd of world reformers becomes a crusade, men do not confine themselves to asking impertinent questions. They are not even deterred by constitutional guaranties of personal rights. The storm rages until it blows itself out and leaves behind only the debris of what before had been good feeling among men. When a crusade is on--and there are usually several going at the same time in a democracy like ours--educational institutions are pressed into its service, and are forced to take sides, or at best maintain a precarious middle of the road policy. This is not the task of those interested in education. They are not “in the middle of the road.” They are not on the trampled highway at all. Their task, while others are wrangling over unreal issues that today take their toll of life and tomorrow are forgotten, is to keep the lights of civilization burning, to humanize their own behavior with reasonableness and good taste. As Emerson said, history has been mean: all nations have been mobs. The populace runs after this passing cause and that popular hero. To the populace your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standards. But there is a time in each man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better or for worse. All men preen themselves on the improvement of society and no man improves. Society never advances, it recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society is a wave; the wave moves forward, but the water of which it is composed does not. Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. Such a suggestion as this at once meets serious objection. It is contrary to the habits of this busybody age. Many will ask, how can we have done with propaganda? We live in the age of publicity and organization, of causes and needed reforms. Great movements challenge our complacency and invite our support. What, without these interests, could we live for? How could we accomplish anything for the common good? Is not the educated person as you depict him aloof and ineffective, a monastic sort of person who disdains the common ways and devotes his days to idle contemplation? And have you not yourself said again and again that intellect does not exist as a sequestered, inactive thing or end in itself, but that thinking is a part of doing? How then can intellect be trained in indifference to the affairs of men? But I have not argued that one seclude himself. Is there nothing to occupy the modern man except to stuff himself with half-truths and regulate society? Does existence lose its value at the mere suggestion that man mind his own business? What I have said is that a person cannot educate himself by filling his head with propaganda.