So, here’s a task that we may not shirk, For the toiling thousands plead; We must give them comfort while they work And help in every need; We must lend them strength if their souls are weak And teach them how to live; Nor let us, all to meanly seek Return for all we give, As we lift our eyes for the gladdening ray Of the golden Dawn of a Better Day. If this light that leads us shall not dim They will see, ere the course is run, That the worker’s weal and the weal of him Who owns the shops are one. Then each shall have his rightful gain Ungrudged—and great and small Shall give their best of hand and brain For the good of each and all,— And we’ll stand together, come what may In the brighter Dawn of a Better Day! CIVICS THE SCHOOL CENTER HENRY S. CURTIS Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image. His head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms were of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, and his feet part of iron and part of clay; and a stone smote the image upon the feet that were of iron and clay and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken in pieces together.” This image might represent America nearly as well as the empire of “the great king.” In the original democracies of Greece, the freemen met together in the market place to elect from their friends and acquaintances the officers who determined the policy of the state. The weakness of American democracy is that we have not organized this primitive element or _demos_ on which it is supposed to stand. Politics in our cities have been corrupt, because there have been no meetings of the community to discuss community affairs. The individual has often been reckless in conduct, because he was not acquainted in the section in which he lived and consequently had no social accountability to public opinion. Foreigners have come among us and drifted in and out of the city slum, bearing with them their racial antipathies to each other, and casting no anchor in the locality because at no time have they become a real part of a community. We have had no real city communities or neighborhoods but mere districts of people in no way organized or related to each other. The feet of the image are of miry clay.