We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of our daily life—its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with all—furthers this inner, this spiritual union which is at last to be the core of a new politics. The fourth way of developing the neighborhood bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that government satisfy those needs—the satisfaction also must be found in that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI. The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, “From Neighborhood to Nation.” Party politics are organized, “interests” are organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state. ----- Footnote 81: Since April, 1917, with the rapidly extending use of the schoolhouse as a centre for war services, these numbers have probably greatly increased. Footnote 82: See Appendix, The Training for the New Democracy. Footnote 83: That it is also in many instances leading the way to real community organization makes it one of the most valuable movements of our time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXIV NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION The Will of the People -------------- MANY of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What our political life needs to-day is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be adopted from any we have hitherto known.