The Neighborhood Group
Chapter XXIII
An Integrated Neighborhood

HOW can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then
how can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized?
How can neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through their own initiative? In other words how can the force generated by our neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national life? How can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a civic and national responsibility?

There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real union. This neighborhood
consciousness can be evolved in five ways:

1. By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional meetings for specific objects.
2. By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings.
3. By learning together - through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one another's experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life.
4. By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the neighborhood.
5. By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments.

The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize community forces and to get these forces expressed in
our social and political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of the whole city. But these inner forces most be freed and utilized for public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the potential values of
neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration, it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood Associations -- there are many names for the many forms in which this vital need is finding expression.

Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use. In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums, gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as in Chicago, the
field-houses in the parks are used as community centres, in addition to the school-houses. In many smaller towns or villages, where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red schoolhouse at the cross-roads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar
underneath the district school), "community buildings" are being built. Their name is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical entertainments.

And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or rather to help neighborhoods to organize them-selves, much spontaneous initiative in both rural and urban communities, springing from the daily needs of the people, is finding neighborhood organization to be the result of concerted effort.
Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes, men want to discuss local improvements, young men and women want recreation, there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some form
of community art expression, music or drama. Yet whichever of these motives leads us to the school house or the community building, the result is always the same -- a closer forging of the neighborhood bond. Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the Community Centre -- a parents' association, a men's civic club, a mothers' club, a committee of citizens, the city council, the board of education - the result is always the same, a closer forging of the community bond.

The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last ten years. All over the country new Centres are springing up constantly. That the impulse for their organization is almost as varied as there are different towns and cities is evidence of their real need. I have had letters in regard to the organization of
Centres from as widely different sources as the city council of a western city, girls teaching in rural schools, the mayor of a small city, and young working men in a big city. Indeed Centres have become so much the fashion that one man came to me and said, "We want a School Centre in our district -- will you help us to get one- what is a School Centre ?"

In the year 1915-16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in public school buildings after 6 P.M. in addition to evening school work [1].

But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the satisfaction of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community bond, for the expression of that bond in communal action, -- they also give the training necessary to bring that activity to its highest fulfillment. We all need not merely opportunities to
exercise democracy, but opportunity for a training in democracy.
We are not going to take any kind of citizen for the new state, we intend to grow our own citizens. Through group activities, through classes and lectures, through university extension, through actual practice in self government by the management of their own Centres and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may prepare themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy [2].

1. Since April, 1917, with the rapidly extending use of the schoolhouse as a centre for war services, these numbers have probably greatly increased.
2. See Appendix, The Training for the New Democracy.

Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular meetings of neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in connection with the School Centres, the so-called "East Boston Town-Meeting," the "Charlestown Commonwealth," etc. At such
meetings neighborhood needs can be discussed, and the men and women of those neighborhoods, while getting to know one another and their local conditions, can be training themselves to function with
government and as government. The first advantage of such meetings is their regularity.

I am urging _regular_ meetings of small groups of neighbors as a new method in politics. Neighbors now often meet for one object or two or three, and then when these are accomplished think that they need not meet again until there is another definite end to be gained. But in the meantime there should be the slow building up of the neighborhood consciousness. A mass-meeting will never do this.
But this neighborhood consciousness is far more important than to get a municipal bath-house for a certain district. If the bath-house is considered the chief thing, and no effort made to get the neighborhood group together again until something else, a playground for instance, is wanted, this time perhaps not enough
cohesion and concentration of purpose can be obtained to secure the playground. The question in neighborhood organization is -- Is our object to get a new playground or to create methods by which
playgrounds will become part of the neighborhood consciousness, methods which will above all educate for further concerted effort?
If neighborhood organization is one among many methods of getting things, then it is not of great value; if, however, it is going to bring about a different mental life, if it will give us an open mind, a flexible mind, a cooperative mind, then it is the greatest movement of our time. For our object is not to get certain things,
or to have certain things; our object is to evolve the kind of life, the way of thinking, within which these specific things will naturally have place. We shall make no real progress until we can do this.

Bernard Shaw has said of family life that it is often cut off equally from the blessings of society and the blessings of solitude. We must see that our neighborhood associations are so organized that we do get the advantages of society.

The second way of creating an integrated neighborhood is by learning and practicing a genuine discussion, that is, a discussion which shall evolve a true collective purpose and bring the group will of the neighborhood to bear directly on city problems. When I speak of discussion I mean always the kind of discussion which is called out by a genuine group. The group idea, not the crowd idea, is to come from discussion. What is the remedy for a "ruthless majority"? What is the remedy for an "arrogant minority"? Group discussion. Group discussion will diminish suggestion as a social force and give place to interpermeation.

When we advocate discussion as a political method, we are not advocating the extension of a method already in use. There is little discussion to-day. Talk to air our grievances or as a steam-valve for the hot-headed, the avowed intention sometimes in the organization of so-called "discussion" societies, is not
discussion. People often speak of "self-expression" as if it were a letting off of steam, as if there were something inside us that must be let out before it explodes. But this is not the use to which we must put the powers of self-expression; we must release these powers not to be wasted through a safety valve, but to be used constructively for the good of society. To change the metaphor, we must not make a petty effort to stem a stream which cannot and should not be stemmed but helped to direct itself.

Do we have discussion in debating societies? Never. Their influence is pernicious and they should be abolished in colleges, schools, settlements, Young Men's Christian Associations, or wherever found. In these societies the men as a rule take either side of the question allotted to them, but even if they choose
their side the process of the debate is the same. The object is always to win, it is never to discover the truth. This is excellent training for our present party politics. It is wretched preparation for the kind of politics we wish to see in America, because there is no attempt to think together. Someone to whom I
said this replied, "But each side has to think together." Not in the least: they simply pool their information and their arguments, they don't think together. They don't even think; that artificial mental process of maintaining a thesis which is not yours by conviction is not thinking. In debating you are always trying to
find the ideas and facts which will support your side; you do not look dispassionately at all ideas and all facts, and try to make out just where the truth lies. You do not try to see what ideas of your opponent will enrich your own point of view; you are bound to reject without examination his views, his ideas, almost I might say his facts. In a discussion you can be flexible, you can try experiments, you can grow as the group grows, but in a debate all this is impossible.

One of the great advantages of the forum movement is that here we are beginning to have discussion [1].

1. That it is also in many instances leading the way to real community organization makes it one of the most valuable movements of our time.

Let us analyze briefly the advantages of discussion. Genuine discussion is truth-seeking. First, then, it presses every man to think clearly and appreciatively and discriminatingly in order to take his part worthily. What we need above everything else is clear thinking. This need has been covered over by the demand for
"honest" men, but hardly any one would say to-day, "Give the management of your city over to a group of the most honest men you can find." A group of honest men -- what a disconcerting picture the phrase calls up! We want efficient men, thinking men, as well as honest men. Take care of your thinking and your morals will take care of themselves -- is a present which would have benefited certain reform campaigns.

The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make us think and to seek accurate information in order to be able to think and to think clearly. I belong to a civic conference lunch club which meets once a month to discuss civic questions. On one occasion the program committee discovered a few days before the luncheon that on the question to be considered (a certain bill before the legislature), we were all of the same opinion, and so the discussion did not seem likely to be very lively. But it happened that our secretary knew some one who was on the other side, and this woman was therefore invited to be our guest and
present her point of view to us. She accepted with pleasure as she said she felt strongly on the matter. On the morning of the day of our meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as she had just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so before she publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it heartily!

Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an understanding of many more. Remedies for abuses are seldom direct because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and
economic system. And if discussion induces thinking by the preparation necessary, it certainly stimulates thinking by the opposition we meet.

But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper
this advice, "Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him," and was much struck with the difference between the American and the English way of looking at the matter. The Englishman, he
said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him! I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with them.

Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to truth.

The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is to be the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future.
The value of the town-meeting is not in the fact that every one goes, but in what every one does when he gets there. And discussion will overcome much indifference, much complacency.
We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree,
with people brings you closer to them. I always feel intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which separates men.

Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win.

Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help to forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough. A true community life should be developed. If the multiplicity and complexity of interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are to be brought to the surface to form the substance of politics, people must come more and more to live their lives together. We are ignorant: we should form classes and learn together. The farmer in Virginia goes to the School Centre to learn how to test his seed corn. We need social intercourse: we should meet to exchange experiences and to have a "good time" together. We need
opportunity for bringing old and young together, parents and children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy way. We need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion pictures, not the deadening watching of other people's acting; we want the real re-creation of active participation. The leisure time of men and women is being increased by legislation, by vocational efficiency, by machinery, and by scientific management.
One of the most pressing needs of to-day is the constructive use of leisure. This need can be largely satisfied in the Neighborhood Centre. Festivals, pageants, the celebration of holidays can all be used as recreation, as a means of self-expression, and of building up the neighborhood bond.

Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a larger life, and the richer that larger life the more the family gains. The family learns its duty to other families, and it finds that its external relations change all its inner life, as the International League will change fundamentally the internal history of every nation. I knew two sisters who were ashamed of their mother until they could say to their friends, "Mother goes to the lectures every Saturday night at the School Centre." I know men and wives who never went out together until they found an extended home in a School Centre. I know a father, an intelligent policeman, who never had any real friendship with his four daughters until he planned dances for them at the School Centre so that they should not go to the public dance halls.

Families often need some means of coming to a common understanding; they are not always capable by themselves of making the necessary adjustment of points of view brought from so many sources as the different family outgoings produce. For example, food conservation taught in various ways in the Neighborhood Centre -- by cooking classes for women, by lectures for both men and women showing the relation of food to the whole present world problem, by having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from the Health Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of the new feeding -- food conservation, that is, taught as a community problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of
mothers. For if the mother makes dishes the father and children refuse to eat, the cooking classes she has attended will have no community value. To give community value to all our apparently isolated activities is one of the primary objects of neighborhood organization.

The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating families, as sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their life in the setting of the broader life is continuously to interpret and explain one to the other. And if we have learned that sacred as our family life must always be, the significance of that sacredness is
its power of contributing to the life around us, the life of our little neighborhood, then we are ready to understand that the nation too is real, that its tasks are mighty and that those tasks will not be performed unless every one of us can find self-expression through the nation's needs.

We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of our daily life -- its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with all -- furthers this inner, this
spiritual union which is at last to be the core of a new politics.
The fourth way of developing the neighborhood bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that government satisfy those needs -- the satisfaction also must be found in that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI.

The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, "From Neighborhood to Nation." Party politics
are organized, "interests" are organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state.

The Neighborhood Group
Chapter XXIV
Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization

The Will of The People

MANY of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of
neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What our political life needs to-day is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer
mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be adopted from any we have hitherto known.

Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political life. There is a wide-spread idea that we can do away with the evils of the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the surface are the
forces which have allied business and politics; far below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly mated couple.

Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most important are: to give a knock-out blow to party organization, to make a direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and
needs and our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy; or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to make a creative citizenship the force of American political life.

An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party, by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people [1], (2) by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party.

1 Public opinion in a true democracy is a potential will. Therefore for practical purposes they are identical and I use them synonymously.

First, there is at present no real unity of the people.

It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be obtained by the manipulation of other men's minds or by the evolving of the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his people -- the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come, therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of pseudo
collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No "independent" method of voting can
ever vie with the organized party machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine.

The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives -- whether they are to adhere to party or to be "independent" -- is futile. Personal honesty exhausts no man's duty in life; an effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness. When we go up to the gates of
another world and say, "I have been honest, I have been pure, I have been diligent" -- no guardian of those Heavenly gates will fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with the counter thrust: "How have you used those qualities for making blossom the earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues here. Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity, personal honesty, personal growth?"

To make our "independence" effective, to vie success-fully with party organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in those true collective action. No particularistic theory of politics will ever be strong enough to take the place of party. The political consciousness of men must be transferred from the party to the neighborhood group.

We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their births on. But there is no will of the people [1]. We talk glibly about it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the crowd
often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated.
Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion? Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole.

1. Our federal system of checks and balances thwarted the will of the people. The party system thwarted the will of the people. Our state governments were never designed to get at the will of the people.

We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will, but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express. A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to represent. It isn't that we need one kind of government more than another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn't that we need honest intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation.

The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The average American citizen says to himself, "It doesn't matter very much what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core. It is our Great Illusion.
There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can't put a wreath round "the popular will" and call it democracy. The popular will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will -- the true will of the people.

Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of the "people." We are told that we must elevate the "people." There are no "people." We have to create a
people. The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the people. The people are the integration of every development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found
by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd or counting the votes in the ballot-box.

The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared because it has spread among large numbers by "unconscious imitation," then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all the men on the "tops of busses," or the opinion made by "banks, stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world," or the opinion "imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers." All this is, no doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for public opinion to-day is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of this than
formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about
by crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there is no real progress here.

Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by
those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and file of men and women to-day, and which must be brought clearly to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful future for our political life under the present scheme of party domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is a tilting at wind-mills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We need to-day: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible
citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship -- a citizenship building its own world, creating its own political and social structure, constructing its own life forever.

Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood
groups will give us this machinery.

Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine public opinion.

First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people.
Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that
they have nothing to do with us.

Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of government through the increased social legislation of all our states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social pro-grams into party platforms means that a
powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little
to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen's compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis, mothers' pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment agencies etc.

Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long view: votes are not crudely bought -- always; the boy is found a job, the father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers' pensions, Tammany is being shorn of much of its power.

We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus politics would be too confusing and could not be "handled." Neighborhood organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In non-partisan neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same question in different years.
Thus the rigidity of the party organization disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a good government organization as well as of a Tammany
organization -- it is true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money -- keeping its members together -- is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to
show any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship and vote for the thing you want.
The reason more of our real wants have not got expressed in our politics is just because people cannot be held together on many issues.

Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we shall not have to ask, "How will the management of this affect the power and prestige of our party?"

Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of problems is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the ephemeral comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or the particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question brought forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue.

Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A party gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are stereotyped, conventional. Under a party system we have no spontaneous political life. The party system gives no exercise to the judgment, it weakens the will, it does away with personal
responsibility. The party, as the crowd, blots out the individual.
Mass suggestion is dominating our politics to-day. We shall get rid of mass influence exactly as fast as we develop the group consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood organizations will not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party has prevented us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any chance get a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition to party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life.

Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective thinking in the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to his neighborhood group pledged beforehand to any particular way of thinking. The object of the party system is to stifle all difference of opinion. Moreover, in partisan discussion you take
one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an infinitely varied number of points of view can be brought out, and thus the final decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on every question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our
views. If we get into the habit of suppressing our differences, these differences atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their demands. And we have found that the expression and the maintenance of difference is the condition of the 'full and free development of the race.

But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive public opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be constantly understanding anew. At the same time that we see the necessity of creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because it is the expression of the common will.
It is right for to-day but not for to-morrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is, leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself as the moment demands.
Constitutional conventions are seeking the machinery by which the reason and justice which have existed among us can be utilized in our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the springs which will
reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their day. This is life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet with our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts, but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then indeed will our government be no longer directed by a "body of law," but by the self-renewing appearing of the will of the people.

The chief need of society to-day is an enlightened, progressive and organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion. When public opinion becomes conscious of itself it will have a justified confidence in itself. Then the
"people," born of an associated life, will truly govern. Then shall we at last really have an America.