We are now awaking to this need. In the past the American conception of government has been a machine-made not a man-made thing. We have wanted a perfect machine which could be set going like an international exhibition by pressing the button, but who is going to press the button? We have talked about the public without thinking that we were the public, of public opinion as something quite distinct from any opinion of our own. It is partly because men have not wanted the trouble of governing themselves that they have put all their faith in “good” officials and “good” charters. “I hate this school, I wish it would burn up,” wrote a boy home, “there’s too much old self-government about it, you can’t have any fun.” Many of us have not wanted that kind of government. The idea of the state as a collection of units has fatally misled us in regard to our duty as citizens. A man often thinks of his share in the collective responsibility for Boston as a 1/500,000 part of the whole responsibility. This is too small a part to interest him, and therefore he often disregards such an infinitesimal duty altogether. Of course we tell him about little drops of water, little grains of sand etc., but hitherto such eloquence has produced little effect. This is because it is untrue. We must somehow make it clear that the part of every man in a great city is not analogous to the grain of sand in the desert, it is not a 1/500,000 part of the whole duty. It is a part so bound up with every other part that no fraction of a whole can represent it. It is like the key of a piano, the value of which is not in its being 1/56 of all the notes, but in its infinite relations to all the other notes. If that note is lacking every other note loses its value. Another twist in our ideas which has tended to reduce our sense of personal responsibility has been that we have often thought of democracy as a happy method by which all our particular limitations are lost sight of in the general strength. Matthew Arnold said, “Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself.” But there is no mysterious value in people conceived of all together. A lot of ignorant or a lot of bad people do not acquire wisdom and virtue the moment we conceive them collectively. There is no alchemy by which the poornesses and weaknesses of the individual get transmuted in the group; there is no trick by which we can lose them in the whole. The truth is that all that the individual has or is enhances society, all that the individual lacks, detracts from society. The state will become a splendid thing when each one of us becomes a splendid individual. Democracy does not mean being lost in the mass, it means the contribution of every power I possess to social uses. The individual is not lost in the whole, he makes the whole.