We don’t look around; we know the voice.  And when the secretary has computed the rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear the buzz of multiplications and additions which is going on in each man’s head as he calculates exactly how much the addition will mean to him in taxes on his farm, his daughter’s piano his wife’s top-buggy.

And many a man is saying to himself: 

“If we build this addition to the schoolhouse, I shall have to give up the new overcoat I have counted upon, or Amanda won’t be able to get the new cooking-range.”

That’s real politics:  the voluntary surrender of some private good for the upbuilding of some community good.  It is in such exercises that the fibre of democracy grows sound and strong.  There is, after all, in this world no real good for which we do not have to surrender something.  In the city the average voter is never conscious of any surrender.  He never realises that he is giving anything himself for good schools or good streets.  Under such conditions how can you expect self-government?  No service, no reward!

The first meeting that I sat through watching those bronzed farmers at work gave me such a conception of the true meaning of self-government as I never hoped to have.

“This is the place where I belong,” I said to myself.

It was wonderful in that school meeting to see how every essential element of our government was brought into play.  Finance?  We discussed whether we should put the entire $800 into the next year’s budget or divide it paying part in cash and bonding the district for the remainder.  The question of credit, of interest, of the obligations of this generation and the next, were all discussed.  At one time long ago I was amazed when I heard my neighbours arguing in Baxter’s shop about the issuance of certain bonds by the United States government:  how completely they understood it!  I know now where they got that understanding.  Right in the school meetings and town caucuses where they raise money yearly for the expenses of our small government!  There is nothing like it in the city.

The progress of a people can best be judged by those things which they accept as matters-of-fact.  It was amazing to me, coming from the city, and before I understood, to see how ingrained had become some of the principles which only a few years ago were fiercely-mooted problems.  It gave me a new pride in my country, a new appreciation of the steps in civilisation which we have already permanently gained.  Not a question have I ever heard in any school meeting of the necessity of educating every American child—­at any cost.  Think of it!  Think how far we have come in that respect, in seventy—­yes, fifty—­years.  Universal education has become a settled axiom of our life.

And there was another point—­so common now that we do not appreciate the significance of it.  I refer to majority rule.  In our school meeting we were voting money out of men’s pockets—­money that we all needed for private expenses—­and yet the moment the minority, after full and honest discussion, failed to maintain its contention in opposition to the new building, it yielded with perfect good humour and went on with the discussion of other questions.  When you come to think of it, in the light of history, is not that a wonderful thing?