The whole round of superficial educational machinery--books, subsidies, resolutions, lectures, congresses--may be of the highest value, provided they are used to digest and popularize the results of a genuine individual and national educational experience, but when they are used, as so often at present, merely as a substitute for well-purposed individual and national action, they are precisely equivalent to an attempt to fly in a vacuum.
That the direct practical value of a reform movement may be equaled or surpassed by its indirect educational value is a sufficiently familiar idea--an idea admirably expressed ten years ago by Mr.John Jay Chapman in the chapter on "Education" in his "Causes and Consequences." But the idea in its familiar form is vitiated, because the educational effect of reform is usually conceived as exclusively individual.

Its effect _must_, indeed, be considered wholly as an individual matter, just so long as reform is interpreted merely as a process of purification.

From that point of view the collective purpose has already been fulfilled as far as it can be fulfilled by collective organization, and the _only_ remaining method of social amelioration is that of the self-improvement of its constituent members.

As President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia says, in his "True and False Democracy": "We must not lose sight of the fact that the corporate or collective responsibility which it (socialism) would substitute for individual initiative is only such corporate or collective responsibility as a group of these very same individuals could exercise.

Therefore, socialism is primarily an attempt to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, in the hope that they will cancel each other." But what is all organization but an attempt, not to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, so much as to make use of many men's varying individual abilities by giving each a sufficient sphere of exercise?
While all men are imperfect, they are not all imperfect to the same extent.