With justice comes the virtue of democracy. We learn all too early in youth the undemocratic way of thinking, the divisions and discriminations which the society around us makes among people. But youth cannot be swept by love or fired by the passion for justice without feeling a wild disgust at everything that suggests artificial inequalities and distinctions. Democracy means a belief that people are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the average man. The chief reason why the average man is not now worthy of more trust, the democrat believes, is simply that he has not been trusted enough in the past. Democracy has little use for philanthropy, at least in the sense of a kindly caring for people, with the constant recognition that the person who is kind is superior to the person who is being done good to. The spirit of democracy is a much more robust humanity. It is rough and aggressive; it stands people up on their own feet, makes them take up their beds and walk. It prods them to move their own limbs and take care of themselves. It makes them strong by giving them something to do. It will have nothing more to do with the superstition of trusteeship which paralyzes now most of our institutional life. It does not believe for a minute that everybody needs guardians for most of the serious concerns of life. The great crime of the past has been that humankind has never been willing to trust itself, or men each other. We have tied ourselves up with laws and traditions, and devised a thousand ways to prevent men from being thrown on their own responsibility and cultivating their own powers. Our society has been constituted on the principle that men must be saved from themselves. We have surrounded ourselves with so many moral hedges, have imposed upon ourselves so many checks and balances, that life has been smothered. Our liberation has just begun. We are far from free, but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us. No virtue is more potent for youth.