The truth about democratic education is indirectly recognized in practice more and more as science and its rigidly logical methods have grown in educational importance. All our modern systems of education are based perforce, rather than by design, in part upon teaching the brain to reason. But do we realize fully as yet that for us, for our democratic purposes of self-development and self-government, teaching the brain to think is not only the whole foundation of education, but also the sustaining part of the superstructure? Take up any one of the great newspapers of the country, the great reflectors of the public mind and heart and taste. A few minutes’ searching among the advertisements will discover columns on columns of notices of astrologers and palmists and clairvoyants, of mediums and crystal gazers and cure-all doctors with their cure-all medicines. To whom do these dealers in the secrets of life and death, the future and the beyond, appeal for their comfortable incomes? To those who cannot read? Manifestly not. To the people in the humbler walks of life? Certainly not. No, they are inviting the educated classes to call--merchants and bankers and artisans, their wives and their daughters, the “well-to-do,” the reading public, the “substantial,” the part of the people which is commonly called “the backbone of the republic.” Go on to the news columns. You find some account of the doings of a band of thieves who have got possession of some department or departments of the city or state government, and have substituted for the statute law the law of loot. Who turned over the keys to them? The illiterate, the dishonest, the criminal? Not at all. Look at the primary rolls of the organization whom these wretches disgrace, and you find a thoroughly respectable, in the main intelligent, certainly honest, body of voters. By no stretch of the meaning could you call them uneducated in the sense in which that term is commonly used. In the very next column, perhaps, you read how a statesman of pious mien and impressive manner has been assuring his fellow-countrymen that they have a commission from the Almighty (which he begs leave to execute) calling them from their peaceful and orderly occupations and sending them forth to slaughter certain other men of whom they had not heard until a few months ago, to seize persons and property and to administer upon them arbitrarily. And who cheered wildly as these tidings of morality and civilization were proclaiming? Illiterates? Certainly not; but educated men, many of them highly educated, men who would hardly characterize such performances in private life as “manifest destiny” and “plain duty.”