loyalties that are accepted unquestioningly if the duties of daily life are to be met. It is with fear and trembling therefore that many parents entrust their boys and girls to the tender mercies of the college instructor. His insistence upon akademische Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit is not understood and is therefore suspected. His critical attitude towards conventional ethics or orthodox theology seems a useless and cruel disturbance of the highest and holiest loyalties. The average man or woman following the prosaic round of daily life feels no imperative obligation to submit ultimate spiritual or moral loyalties to a searching examination. To criticize when action is constantly necessary is to paralyze life at its source. The practical problem of proclaiming the truth after it has been discovered must of course be solved in the interest of a progressive social order. It is ultimately a question of developing habits of reflection and of poise in the community so that the truth can be proclaimed as soon as discovered and that without disrupting the social order. When once the habit of moral thoughtfulness has become general among a people new truth or radical discoveries are disarmed of their revolutionary effects. Reason is the best safeguard against the radicalism of reason.

The question of academic freedom and of the ability of the scholar to shape the social conscience of the future is ultimately a question of the status of the teaching profession. To a very large element of the American public the university instructor has no status worth the name. He is considered a member of an institution the policy of which he does not shape and towards which he sustains the relation of a hireling. Outside the pale of some of our oldest institutions the scholar's position in this country is hardly ideal.

The problem of securing to the teacher freedom and an assured and respected place in American democracy is beset with difficulties. To ensure the efficient exercise of the rôle of investigator and censor morum there must exist a measure of that social poise that comes with a self-conscious social order and the accumulation of cultural traditions. American

democracy has as yet very little of either. We have been so preoccupied with the creation of the material basis of civilization that we have had little time or inclination for culture or critical reflection. It is to be feared the applause that greets the Rev. "Billy" Sunday's characterization of the university scholar as "an intellectual feather duster" is not without its social significance.

This does not mean that the sympathies of the American public are not on the side of the victim when some academic auto-da-fé occurs. As a rule they are. But these sympathies are such as are naturally extended to one engaged in a struggle where the odds are against him. They may even be prompted by a vague sense of justice which the average uninformed individual feels somehow has been violated. The sympathies of the masses in such cases do not center around any clear-cut notions of the rights of the individual or of the interests he represents. The very indefiniteness of the scholar's status makes it hard to grasp the ideals for which he contends. Hence the public sentiment aroused in his behalf is dissipated because of the lack of interpretation and rational direction. This is inevitable so long as the issues involved are at the mercy of the well-meaning but uninformed impulses of the community at large. Public sentiment can not be trusted to make sharp distinctions or to follow with patience and understanding questions that demand detailed or theoretical knowledge. The public must do its thinking en bloc. Public opinion, therefore, in order to be effective must to a very large extent be institutionalized. It must find expression through chosen groups or professions. These groups must themselves have self-determining power in the process of shaping the ideals and solving the problems of the community.

The problem of academic freedom is, then, one of establishing a recognized status for the profession of the teacher. Such a status involves well-defined rights and duties, which the profession itself must determine in its own interest and in the interest of the community it serves. It involves also an intelligent understanding by the community of what those

rights and duties are and of their significance for the community itself; in a democracy, of course, rights have validity directly in proportion to the extent to which they are understood and sanctioned by the community.

We arrive, therefore, at a somewhat paradoxical conclusion, namely, that there can be no real academic freedom except where that freedom is protected by the state. An enlightened democracy must freely and generously extend to its schools and its scholars not only the right to discover the truth and to proclaim it freely but also the right to determine what phases of truth shall be taught and how. Academic freedom, in other words, is but another phase of the problem of expert control, through which alone democracy can hope to solve its complex problems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books: ADDAMS, J.: Democracy and Social Ethics, Ch. VI; BETTS, G. H.: Social Principles of Education, 1912; BROWN, E. E.: The Making of our Middle Schools, 1903; BROWN, S. R.: The Secularization of American Education, 1912; BAGLEY, W. C.: Educational Values, Chs. 1-6, 15; CHAPIN, F. S.: "Education and the Mores." Columbia Studies in Economics and Public Law, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1911; CUBBERLEY, E. P.: Changing Conceptions in Education, 1909; DEWEY, JOHN: The School and Society. The Ethical Principles Underlying Education. The Educational Situation; DEXTER, E. G.: The History of Education in the United States, 1904: ELIOT, C. W.: Educational Reform, 1898; GIDDINGS, F. H.: Democracy and Empire, Chs. 13, 14; HENDERSON, E. N.: A Text-Book in the Principles of Education, Chs. 14-18; JENKS, T. W.: Citizenship and the Schools, Chs. 1-5; ROBBINS, C. L.: The School as a Social Institution, Chs. 2-10; SHARP, F. C.: Education for Character, 1917; VINCENT, G. E.: The Social Mind and Education, 1897; WARD, L. F.: Dynamic Sociology, Chs. 13, 14.

CHAPTER XVII

THE ETHICS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY

§ 1. THE NATURE OF THE RIGHT OF PRIVATE PROPERTY A RIGHT is simply a way of acting, of developing capacities or of exercising functions, that is sanctioned by the moral sentiment of the community. The basis of all rights, therefore, including that of private property, is found in the constraining sense of well-being that is common to all the members of the group among whom the right is exercised. The distinction of "mine" and "thine" depends not so much upon occupation as upon a feeling of common interest that is furthered and made articulate by this distinction. The idea of property in so far as it has any ethical element, therefore, and is not measured in terms of the good old rule that he shall take who has the power and he shall keep who can, presupposes this feeling of common interest. Society assures to each of its members in the right of private property the power to secure and exercise the means necessary for the expansion of personality and the development of capacity as moral creatures. The general will that provides the sanction for the right must also determine the scope and purpose of the right. It must be exercised in the interest of the social good.

The fact that property is primarily a social trust conditions fundamentally the ethical implications of property. For to exercise the right of property as a social trust forces the individual to reflect upon the bearing of its exercise upon the welfare of the community as a whole. There arises a constant need for correlating the laws that govern the right of property and the human values it is designed to serve. The control of the time, the talents and the persons of others that goes with the right of property must

then be exercised not from the narrow and selfish point of view of the individual's own immediate interests but with an eye to the interests of that larger social complex of which the property owner and his employees are constituent elements. It is only through a keen sensitiveness to the social values always associated with the right of property that the institution can ever play the rôle it should play as society's chosen instrument for the discipline and development of character.

The institution of private property must be emancipated from the moribund legal abstractions of the eighteenth century. It must cease to be a dead juridical entity and serve the needs of a progressive society, and that without surrendering its economic or ethical value. It is doubtless true that much of the opposition to the institution of private property in the past and much of the criticism of the present rest upon outworn ideas of its character. There is no surer way in which to discredit private property than to seek its justification in eighteenth century philosophy or even in the arbitrary deliverances of courts and the rubrics of the law. These are only of value in so far as they enjoy the moral sanction of the community. Where laws, whether dealing with property or otherwise, do not have this sanction of the enlightened conscience of the community, they are already in process of abrogation. The radical easily finds support for his attack upon the right of private property in the gap that has arisen between the institution as it actually exists and the demands of the enlightened social conscience as to what it should be. To widen that gap or to refuse to bridge it is to play into the hands of the radical.

The real safeguard of private property, therefore, is not to be found in the provisions of the Constitution nor in the judicial interpretations of that great document by learned judges, but in a sane and intelligent adaptation of the institution to the needs of the community. The real menace to private property arises from an arbitrary and unintelligent use of it contrary to the demands of society as a whole. The problem of