And yet, as Mr. Bryce pointed out in his lectures at Yale on “The Hindrances to Good Citizenship,” this willingness to accept as conclusions the scare-heads in newspapers which are not, and never were intended to formulate serious opinions, lays us open to the charge of indolence; “the neglect to think” thus becomes a serious phase of a deficient sense of civic duty. In countries where men are imperfectly educated, or in rural districts where means of acquiring knowledge are small and scant--where men lead isolated lives out of reach of libraries and learning--they ask advice of the priest or the village schoolmaster, and thus vicariously discharge the duties of citizenship without any real knowledge of the problems before them and without contributing to the solution of those difficulties to which the ever-increasing complexity of our civilization gives rise. Now if we apply this line of thought to the study of such economic problems as arise in our country from time to time, we find that the same conditions apply. We fancy ourselves immeasurably better off than the uncultured frontiersman who must rely for his information upon the priest or the schoolmaster, but in our dumb submission to the rant of the hustings and the scare of the headlines are we really discharging the functions of good citizenship? Are we not indolent? I can have a lively sympathy for the half-breed in the Canadian woods seeking information as best he may, but for the man in our populous and cultivated communities who is too lazy to turn to our great public libraries for light on the vexed and vexing economic problems of the day, contenting himself with the half-baked opinions of demagogues and quacks--for such a man it is difficult to say a good word. There is hope for the one; the other is the most menacing and discouraging type in our citizenship. Take up the morning newspaper almost every day and we find the crude essence of this misinformation paraded in a way that makes us sorry for a public that cries for such stuff. A custodian of public funds, collected for the purpose of erecting a monument, is found very recently to have squandered the money entrusted to him. One of his co-trustees, who must have been somewhat lax in his duties, bewails the loss and seeks to enlist sympathy for himself by hazarding the opinion that “the money _must have been_ lost in speculation in that hell-hole, the Stock Exchange.”