The failures of democratic governments in the past have been
attributable, in part, to the lack of intelligence and
self-consciousness among the mass of those who were given a voice in the
government of their country. Citizenship, like morality, was allowed to
grow by instinct; it was never systematised as a science, or applied as
an art. Sparta and Athens approached towards a system of civics much
less elaborate than that expounded by Professor Geddes; but in Sparta
citizenship became inseparable from Nationalism, and in Athens it
scarcely rose above Municipalism. In more modern times, civic education
has had to encounter the same difficulty as in America, where the young
citizen's first duty is to salute his flag, and as in London, where
"Civics" is distributed in doles of local [Page: 134] history in which
the municipality plays a part altogether out of proportion to its
relation to the country, the age, and the world. Civics, as the applied
sociology of each individual and each body of interests, has but begun
to be dreamed of; and before it can be properly developed it is
desirable, if not necessary, that the general public should know
something more than at present both of the historic development of the
"civic" idea, and of the psychology of aggregations as differentiated
from the psychology of the individual. Not until we can make "the man in
the street" a conscious citizen, instead of a political automaton, shall
we be able to enlist his sympathies with "Civics"; and without those
sympathies the sociologist's "Civics" will, I fear, be but partial and
inaccurate.


From MR. G. BISSET SMITH

(H.M. Registration Examiner for East of Scotland).