conform to certain conditions.  They must not be carried to the point of refusing obedience to the law.  When private interests are injured by the national policy, the protestants must be able to show either that such injuries are unnecessary, or else they involve harm to an essential public interest.  All such protest must find an ultimate sanction in a group of constructive democratic ideas.  Finally, the protest must never be made the excuse for personal injustice or national disloyalty.  Even if the national policy should betray indifference to the fundamental interests of a democratic nation, as did that of the United States from 1820 to 1860, the obligation of patient good faith on the part of the protestants is not diminished.  Their protests may be as vivacious and as persistent as the error demands.  The supporters of the erroneous policy may be made the object of most drastic criticism and the uncompromising exposure.  No effort should be spared to secure the adoption of a more genuinely national policy.  But beyond all this there remains a still deeper responsibility—­that of dealing towards one’s fellow-countrymen in good faith, so that differences of interest, of conviction, and of moral purpose can be made the agency of a better understanding and a firmer loyalty.

If a national policy offends the integrity of the national idea, as for a while that of the American nation did, its mistake is sure to involve certain disastrous consequences; and those consequences constitute, usually, the vehicle of necessary national discipline.  The national school is, of course, the national life.  So far as the school is properly conducted, the methods of instruction are, if you please, pedagogic; but if the masters are blind or negligent, or if the scholars are unruly, there remains as a resource the more painful and costly methods of nature’s instruction.  A serious error will be followed by its inevitable penalty, proportioned to the blindness and the perversity in which it originated; and thereafter the prosperity of the country’s future will hang partly on the ability of the national intelligence to trace the penalty to its cause and to fix the responsibility.  No matter how loyal the different members of a national body may be one to another, their mutual good faith will bleed to death, unless some among them have the intelligence to trace their national ills to their appropriate causes, and the candid courage to advocate the necessary remedial measures.  At some point in the process, disinterested patriotism and good faith must be reenforced by intellectual insight.  A people are saved many costly perversions, in case the official school-masters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate; but if the lessons are foolishly phrased, or the pupils refuse to learn, the school will never regain its proper disciplinary value until new teachers have arisen, who understand both the error and its consequences, and who can exercise an effective authority over their pupils.