When it comes to invention and initiative, as already indicated, democracy has the advantage, immediately, as in the long run. We are the most inventive people on earth, and that quality is a direct result of our democratic individualism. It is a significant fact that most of the startling inventions used in this War were made in America--but _developed and applied in Germany._ There, again, are evident the contrasting results of the two types of social organization. The indefatigably industrious and docile German mind can work out and apply the inventions furnished it, with marvelous persistency and effectiveness, under paternal control. We have the problem of achieving by voluntary effort and cooperation a persistent thoroughness in working out the ideas and inventions that come to us in such abundant measure. The path of democracy is education. XIX THE SOLUTION FOR DEMOCRACY When we say that the path of democracy is education, we do not mean that there is an easy solution of its problem. There is no patent medicine we can feed the American people and cure it of its diseases. There is no specific for the menaces that threaten. Eternal vigilance and effort are the price, not only of liberty, but of every good of man. Let things alone, and they get bad; to keep them good, we must struggle everlastingly to make them better. Leave the pool of politics unstirred by putting into it ever new individual thought and ideal, and how quickly it becomes a stagnant, ill-smelling pond. Leave a church unvitalized, by ever fresh personal consecration, and how quickly it becomes a dead form, hampering the life of the spirit. Leave a university uninfluenced by ever new earnestness and devotion on the part of student and teacher, and how soon it becomes a scholastic machine, positively oppressing the mind and spirit. There is a true sense in which the universe exists momentarily by the grace of God. Take light away, and you have darkness. Take darkness away, and you have not necessarily light; you might have chaos. Take health away, and you have disease. Take disease away, and you have not necessarily health; you may have death. Take virtue away, and you have vice. Take vice away, and you have not necessarily virtue; you might have negative respectability. Thus it is the continual affirmation of the good that keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the step toward to-morrow. Nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of the problem, there are certain big lines of attack. If we are right in our diagnosis, that the problem of democracy is a problem of education, then our whole system of education, for child, youth and adult, should be reconstructed to focus upon the building of positive and effective moral personality.