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Comment upon these two heroes often narrows down to the complaint that one is not like the other, that Tom is not more reflective and Philip not more active. And this complaint is sometimes enlarged into the demand that all the Philips of the twentieth century return to the robust frame of mind which prevailed in the eighteenth. It is a vain demand. To make it is to assume that the intellectual ferment of the intervening epoch has worked no serious changes in mankind. Time cannot be set back as a clock can. It has but one direction. All that may be hoped is that eventually some kin or heir of Philip will be able to balance his knowledge against his doubt, and from that balance will derive the courage to proclaim a new pattern, more inclusive than Tom's, more decisive than Philip's. Though it cannot be so final that no one will take exceptions to it, it may, if outlined with enough vigor, manage to convince the general run of men, and may become as much a standard as that which satisfied Tom. Perhaps it will bring such peace that for an era there will be no more Philips. The Philips, however, recur as certainly as the Toms. By and by the increase of knowledge will disturb the firmness of the pattern, and doubt will break it gradually to pieces. Other Philips will level their questions, will discover that the customary paths no longer lead where men must go, will flounder in other wildernesses. So the cycle will be complete. And then life, it may be guessed, will begin a new cycle, to repeat the ancient process.

Meanwhile, here are Tom and Philip, made more or less contemporary by art. However representative of two

ages, they are also representative of two types of character to be met, not infrequently, in the same generation. Neither yields to the other in interest, but, as Fielding and Mr. Maugham prove, they call for different treatments. Tom can be dealt with partly as a type, because, as a matter of fact, he is a type. Individuality is not his essence. His traits are assembled from various quarters; he is compact of experience from without. Reading his story, many persons each recognize something which recalls their own stories. His sentiments are so little refined upon that they mystify no one. His deeds are so downright that they call for no minute analysis. Philip, on the other hand, is first of all an individual. His entire career, except for his marriage, seems not to have been invented upon the analogy of many careers, but to have been reported from some single, actual career. Tom's life, being measured by a pattern, can have its distinct chapters; Philip's life, which weaves its own pattern while vainly looking for a standard one, is unbrokenly consecutive. Being thus specific, Philip does not so much suggest something to every reader as suggest everything to some readers. If "Tom Jones" and "Of Human Bondage" make a total appeal which is about the same, it is because quantity and quality can be almost equal. Fielding reached out his hands in all directions and drew England upon his stage. Mr. Maugham thrust his hands deep into the secrets of a single man and revealed them with a terrible accuracy. That the two novels should accomplish so nearly the same thing is another evidence, if another were needed, that in fiction the whole is not necessarily greater than the part.

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AST summer, at the University of Michigan, I discussed, in all too fugitive fashion, the sort of relation between university, church, and state that would, in my judgment, make for the most virile and veracious national life.

In this paper I want to set down tentatively certain considerations regarding one angle of this problem, namely, the relation of our state universities to our state governments.

In the Michigan address I emphasized the fact that university and church and state are engaged in a common enterprise. "I dislike," I said, "to speak of education, religion, and politics as if they were three distinct fields. They are, or should be, an indivisible unity. Isolate any one of them from the other two, and it is orphaned and ineffective. . . . The professor, the parson, and the politician are at work on the same job, not on three separate jobs. And that job is the achievement of 'the good life' for the citizen and for the nation."

I suggested, in addition, that the unity of aim shared by these three cardinal institutions of society cannot be served by the successful attempt of one of the institutions to rule the roost by imposing on the other two its particular notions, thus turning the na

tion into a vast Shaker village, with a drab uniformity of outlook and action. "Now and then," I said, "the professor, the parson, and the politician can best coöperate by valiantly opposing one another. Times come when only out of a clash between university and church and state can corrected vision and creative policy arise. But even in these hours of necessary opposition, university and church and state are engaged in a common task."

These hours of necessary opposition come, however, only intermittently, when society faces crises in the determination of policy. We need a technic of coöperation between university and state in those long stretches of time when the life of society runs on at its normal pace, undisturbed by dramatic crises of policy.

The need of sustained coöperation between university and state is obvi

ous.

Certainly the state needs it. The present divorce between the theory and practice of politics must be ended somehow. It is not safe, as Dean Inge has suggested, to go on with the theory of government in the hands of scholars who have knowledge, but no power, and the practice of government in the hands of politicians who have power, but no knowledge. After all, the art of government con

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sists in bringing knowledge and power into a working partnership. As I said in these columns last January, the politics of the future ought to be simply humanity's technic of bringing the world's knowledge to the service of the world's life. Politics should be the point at which knowledge meets life and becomes socially effective. Only so can we protect ourselves from the assaults of those catchwords, snap judgments, prejudices, passions, and special interests which, thief-like, infest the Jericho road of partizan politics. Politics needs a better underpinning of facts. Politics needs more laboratory workers and fewer logrollers. Theoretically, at least, a state university should be the rallyingground and repository for the knowledge needed for the wise management of the life of the State. A state government is the rallying-ground and repository for the power needed for the effective management of the life of the State. Obviously a State must contrive to harness both the power of the government and the knowledge of the university if it is to achieve "the good life" for its citizens. A State dare not allow the knowledge of its university to languish for lack of power, or permit the power of its government to run amuck for lack of knowledge.

Then, too, it may well be that the university needs this sort of coöperation. Learning is most significant when its roots are set deeply in the soil of current life. The absentminded professor, walking about as a sort of human incubator in which great ideas are brought to life by some sort of spontaneous generation, is a creation of the jester and the caricaturist. More and more education is

finding its point of departure not in the past, but in the present. There are enough things in the day-to-day life of our Missouris, our Wisconsins, and our Michigans, things in which the students of these state universities are of necessity interested, things they can see and touch and handle, to serve as vivid points of departure for the study of every field of knowledge known to university curricula. The closer learning can come to life, the more virile and valid learning is likely to be, if learning can keep from getting lost in the shuffle and can keep from adopting the standards of the marketplace in uncritical surrender to the common life. John Stuart Mill was probably a better scholar because he served in the East India Company.

In our more naïve moments we are likely to think that the problem is easy. Simply adopt, we may say, a working arrangement under which the experts of the university will be called upon to provide the politicians of the government with the knowledge they need in order to form realistic judgments upon the problems of state government. This, we may say, will put a fact basis under our politics and save our scholars from the subtle dampness of the cloister that has mildewed so many otherwise first-class minds.

But because a need is obvious, it does not follow that meeting it is an easy enterprise.

At the outset we are faced with a difficulty that is, perhaps, inherent in a democratic society. There is nothing to be gained by scouting the fact that the scholar is not the idol of democracy. The scholar finds the road to service to the State blocked by two things that have, at least up to date, characterized modern democ

racies. These two things are the jealousy of the majority and the tyranny of the majority.

In any democracy, the majority is, and probably always will be, jealous of its superior men. It rarely elects its superior men to office save by accident, or when a superior man succeeds in masking his essential superiority of mind by the slouch of his hat, the mountebankery of his manner, and a vernacular raciness of speech. Democracies apparently are not out looking for representatives who know more than the majority; they are looking for delegates who are nearly as possible like the majority. The crowd hates the expert, and we may as well acknowledge that fact.

In any democracy, the majority tends, and probably always will tend, to exercise a tyranny over minority opinion. And the scholar who has greater reverence for a fact than for the past is pretty sure to turn up a minority opinion now and then. This, again, works against the scholar in politics. As I have said before, despite the fact that the majority has never taken an advance step on its own initiative, despite the fact that the majority has always had to be prodded into progress by a minority, the majority still insists upon using the device of majority rule for silencing controversy as well as for settling contests. The majority hates the man who thinks differently from it, and seeks to standardize thought, and we may as well acknowledge that fact.

The scholar in politics starts with this dual handicap which lies in the mental habits of the electorate. And he faces still another handicap when he attempts to work side by side with

the politicians in a state government. For here he faces an inevitable conflict between the scientific mind and the political mind. The scientific mind thinks from facts to policy; the political mind thinks from policy to facts. The scientific mind is sublimely indifferent to such catchwords and labels as "conservatism" or "liberalism" or "radicalism." The political mind lives in terror of these labels. The scientific mind, it has been suggested, regards the unborn as belonging to its constituency, even if the unborn exert little influence at the polls. Obviously all this means far from smooth sailing for the professor when he leaves his class-room and journeys to the state capital to serve the state government.

One thing is clear, I think, as we face these facts. There is little danger that our state universities will run away with our state governments. The age-old conflict between majority opinion and minority opinion, between the scientific mind and the political mind, will see to that. It is clear also, I think, that we cannot afford to let our state governments run away with our state universities. A too intimately political domination of our state universities will, in time, produce in America a "reptile university" to serve current political ends as Bismarck's "reptile press" served the political ends of the German Empire.

Is there, then, any workable coöperation between state and university possible?

Here and there and now and then very effective coöperation has been and will be possible. A really great governor or a really great university president can, in any given State, go far towards driving the knowledge of

the university and the power of the State abreast. The research technic of the university can, through such agencies as legislative reference departments and through the part-time service of professors on various state commissions, be used to supplement the good will of honest legislators and to obstruct the anti-social will of dishonest legislators. But such service is sickeningly sporadic. We see it in full swing in one State, while fifty miles away across the state line a neighborState allows the intellectual resources of its university to go to waste politically while the politics of its state capitol degenerate into a mere logrolling between private interests. Aside from the occasional emergence of a great governor or a great university president, how much can we hope for in the way of coöperation between state universities and state governments?

Frankly, I doubt that we shall see the full and intimate coöperation that a rational view of politics suggests as long as we insist upon centralizing so many of our interests in politics. As long as we put our major trust in politics, the State will be supreme, and in any attempted coöperation between university and State, the State will sooner or later dominate the situation and bend the university to its will. And this defeats the very purpose of the coöperation, which is to bring into politics the impartiality and objectivity of the scientific mind that is more interested in the results of a test-tube than in the results of a ballot-box.

The real hope of putting the knowledge of the university at the service of the life of the State is, I think, dependent upon an extensive decentralization of public affairs. I do not mean by

this the sort of decentralization that the defenders of states' rights are talking about so much now. Last month I tried to suggest the hollow unreality of the argument that social progress can be served by taking things away from the National Government and giving them back to the state governments. As I said then, the real decentralization that we need is not from a big political unit to small political units, but a decentralization from politics back to the functional groups that are doing the work of the world and determining the tone and temper of life by the way they do it. If ballot-box democracy is, at heart, a sort of conspiracy against the leadership of its superior men, then the hope of democracies lies in the development through the right kind of education of unofficial statesmen who shall manage the businesses, the industries, and the professions of the nation with such socially minded vision and technic that we can afford to restrict political government more and more to the policing of life while the real management of life goes on outside the halls of legislatures and cabinet rooms. Here, I think, is the real political function of our universities: the training of a race of unofficial statesmen we can trust to manage the life of society when society has passed out of the age of politics. But this will involve a more intimate relating of state universities to the life of the States. The statesmanship of our university presidents, in the future, must be expressed not so much in wire-pulling at state capitols as in the development of a more realistic and statesmanlike education that shall enhance and enrich the common life of the State as well as educate the individual students.