There are cases where open country communities have become so thoroughly conscious of their own cohesion and their own capacity to act that these units have been incorporated. At least one commonwealth has responded to this demand by the enactment of a state law granting incorporation privileges to such rural areas.

"Local government is a matter of primary concern, . . not only on account of the immediate services which it is capable of performing, but also because of the place which it can be made to assume in a reorganized social system," says G. D. H. Cole, and thereupon he proceeds to outline a system of local government for the whole of England. Nothing so elaborately comprehensive has been attempted by the political scientists of this country, but on the other hand, our political thinkers have given considerable attention to municipal ownership of public utilities, to commission forms of government, to the city-manager type of municipal government, to proportional representation, and to various other experiments which tend to increase local responsibility and consciousness. It is not too much to say that so far as municipal government is concerned, the old theory of state and national control plus the old theory of political party distinctions has broken down.

In view of the international character of economic processes, one might expect less local experimentation in this sphere. On the contrary, it is precisely here that some of the most daring reactions against outside control have appeared. Shop committees now exist in numerous local industries for the purpose of adjusting questions arising within the local plant. The shop steward's movement and the Whitely Councils of Great Britain are excellent examples of the demand for local control. Local commodity co-operative organization is rapidly supplanting the older and broader concept of co-operation among farmers. Local arbitration boards now sit regularly in certain of our industrial centers. And, many socialists who have abandoned the hope of a worldrevolution are now giving minute attention to the variations of guild socialism and syndicalism which is merely an attempt to localize socialist theory and practice.

The vested interests of religious organizations are slow to relinquish the power which they have so laboriously assumed during the last century. But, who has not heard the rumblings of discontent of persons thoroughly interested in, and devoted to, religion but also thoroughly out of sympathy with the machinery and organization of the modern church? The community church is no longer a dream of ecclesiastical outcasts; it is a reality whose dimensions astonished even its adherents at the recent community church conference in Iowa. Here and there church federations, councils, and committees are at work on the practical problems of interpreting Christian ethics to their local communities. All of this is extremely disturbing to the so-called "fundamentalists" who have started a new heresy-hunt which bids fair to outdo the psychological war dance of a few years back. There are unmistakable evidences that religion is making a heroic attempt to escape through the stereotyped, stained-glass windows of the churches, and to make itself felt in a dynamic sense in the real affairs of life. This attempt may assume national proportions, but its present leadership is the fruit of local leadership and stimulus.

The conventional systems of education are sterile. This appears to be true, not only of America, but of the world. One scans the educational horizon in vain for the inspired word, the great teacher, or the intellectually aspirant youth. If exception to this statement needs to be made, it can only apply to such worn-torn nations as

The Future of Local Government.

Russia, Germany, and Austria, where there is a veritable intellectual renaissance among the young people. But even here, one must confess that the stimulus comes not from the educational systems but from within the hearts of the disillusioned youth themselves.

Outside the conventional educational systems there are experiments which bid fair to open the way to an entirely new concept of the training of the mind. The tutorial classes of Great Britain are small groups of working-class people who meet regularly in their own communities for instruction. The workers' educational movement as a whole proceeds upon the admirable theory that the means of education and its most significant resources are not hidden behind the walls of college buildings but reside rather in the minds of men and women. The materials of education are coming to represent the community, its institutions, and its processes.

The people's colleges of Denmark are beginning to exert an influence upon adult education everywhere, and it is one of the chief charms of this type of education that the local community has the power to initiate and to direct its own institutions. The curricula of no two people's colleges are the same, and forsooth, why should they be? The people of each community differ slightly, to say nothing of the wide variations in capacities and natural interests of teachers. The sokols of Czecho-Slovakia have been revived since the revolution, but now they promote the interests of education rather than mere physical training and military exercises. Reborn Bohemia presents a picture of almost universal community enterprise in education. It is much the same the world over; discontent with the stereotyped educational factories with their standardized instructors and their standardized courses and their standardized products is leading to numerous smaller educational experiments, most of which indicate a trend toward local community control.

The National Conference of Social Work may be said to be a perennial barometer of the tendencies in social work in America. A perusal of the published reports of the past five years points to a marked interest in the affairs of the local community. It is not merely that subjects dealing with the community are found on the various programs, but the promising indication is that the section meetings dealing with this phase of social process are well attended.

The most significant phenomenon relating to this subject is to be found, not in the minds of social workers, but in the minds of laymen, of citizens who furnish the funds and the moral support for the voluntary social agencies. No one who has given this problem thought or study can escape the conclusion that there has come about, during the last three years, a distinct reaction against large overhead organizations of voluntary agencies. Coupled with this tendency on the part of laymen to be suspicious of the increasing supervisory personnel of social agencies is a tendency of local communities to experiment with various phases of social work without using the labels of national organizations. One of the largest agencies in America has recently held a conference whose chief purpose was to hear the complaints of its supporters in regard to overhead expenses. At least five of the largest agencies have made exceptional decreases in personnel during the past year.

Constructive suggestions regarding the place of the local community in organized society. Is it necessary to choose between Ralph Adams Cram's "Walled Town" (local community isolation), Senator Borah's resurrected "States Rights" (limitation of national power), the Union League Clubs' “Nationalism" (our country right or

wrong), and sentimental internationalism? Extreme emphases are likely to be wrong. Particularism is especially dangerous in the field of social process. Isolated, walled towns are an absurdity in the modern interrelated world; the doctrine of states rights carried to extreme caused us once to engage in a bitter war, and it may do so again; "our country right or wrong" is an immoral statement of pathological patriotism; internationalism without national units is unthinkable at this juncture of civilization. Where, then, should the emphasis be placed by men and women who are engaged in the actual process of modifying social structure and action? The ensuing suggestions may, it is to be hoped, lead to a clearer understanding of the problem which is the imperative consideration for the present.

1. The philosophy of force has had its day. It has builded powerful states and powerful combinations of states, but it has brought neither good will among men nor peace on earth. Whether or not it can be gradually diminished as an important factor in human relations is an open question, but there can be no doubt that its failure thus far warrants experimentation of other guiding philosophies. Josiah Royce bade us to be loyal to a social cause. When his questioners asked him for a symbol of such a social cause, he called it the "beloved community." As a philosophic abstraction this did very well, but we may live in Podunk or in Chicago. How can we see the "beloved community” through the sordid environments of our common lives? Only by making our common lives less sordid and less common. Whenever an ardent internationalist attempts to convert me, and I know that he is a negative sort of citizen in his own local community, I suffer the temptation of the cynic.

In government, in economics, in religion, in education, and in social work, there are daily, almost hourly, opportunities of trying the way of the understanding heart rather than force. What is most significant is the fact that wherever force is supplanted by understanding, by love, success follows. Our entire Western civilization has been built upon the superficial assumption that the short gains of force are real and permanent, while it is clearly evident that victories won by force are not won at all. The time has come for heroic examples of those who can courageously follow the Jesus way of life-the way of the open mind, the understanding heart and the free soul.

2. The machine process has played a large part in the creation of modern organizations of power in government, economics, and, in fact, in almost all spheres of life. But it has been a blind force; it needs reinterpretation and rationalization. As our lives come more and more under the sway of the machine we shall become increasingly cynical in our outlook upon life. The machine represents non-integrated force; it is impersonal, inhuman. Its final effect upon those whom it controls is materialism. The difference between a hoe and a machine is simply this: the hoe is an extension of the human body, while the machine causes the human body to become its extension. Control is inverted. The only way that human beings can rise above the machine is to understand it and to modify its action so that it becomes subject to conscious control.

3. The egoistic basis of life demands renewed attention and explanation. The power organizations of the past century have brought into existence a type of living which makes us all members of "anonymous mobs." Crass collectivism promises to submerge the individual entirely. All Western nations decry the Prussian system of collectivist nationalism, and forthwith proceed to imitate it. We have carried the

concept of extreme altruism so far that we even justify ourselves in using force to do good to others. Altruism and egoism are not antitheses; they are parts of the same process of behavior. No one can be a good altruist unless he is also a good egoist. If the individual first loses his self-respect in some larger imagined group allegiance, it is logical to expect that his community will also lose its self-respect as it becomes subordinated to larger groups.

4. The specialist in modern society is a sorry spectacle. He knows what needs to be done but he finds it impossible to do it. He is under suspicion. People who know too much are always doubted. They are likely to assume an air of superiority which gives their special knowledge a certain occult tinge. The specialist is a social amphibian; he can make his living only by utilizing his specialty, but the people refuse to pay for his specialty because they fail to understand it. An autocracy is an ideal environment for the specialist. Here he does not need to be understood if only the rulers appreciate what he can do for them. In a democracy, the people assume that they have a right to understand everything and control everybody.

Walter Lippman has recently suggested that our democratically chosen representatives can no longer hope to maintain a knowledge of the various details of the modern complications of society, and, therefore, need the advice of intelligence bureaus. He places the intelligence bureau between the government officials and the people who elect them. The assumption is that the intelligence experts would be able to quickly furnish the government officials with the needed information for any technical emergency. This is all very well so far as it goes, but it still leaves the way clear for the demagogue who can deal with crowds, and it leaves the crowd as ignorant as before. To Mr. Lippman it seems impossible to acquaint the so-called average citizen with the technical aspects of modern life. But, difficult as it seems, this is exactly what will need to be done. Intelligence agencies are needed to stand midway between the specialist and the people. It would be absurd, of course, to expect our combined educational organs to provide the citizen with the same technical information which the specialist requires. The average citizen, for example, does not need to know how to build a sewer in order to know enough about sewers to make this information a part of his representative knowledge. If the newspapers provided as much space for this sort of interpretation of the specialist's function as they now offer to news which is devoid of educative influence, we should soon develop an understanding between the people and the expert.

Local community government continues to be inefficient and uninteresting to the average citizen. This will continue until the technological aspects of community affairs become related to the mind of the voter. Wherever there are evidences of local community interest in governmental affairs, there will also be found a population alert to the technical as well as the merely political aspects of government.

5. The art and culture which has set new standards in the world has invariably come from small local communities or nations. In America, everyone appears to be standing in reverent expectation for the coming of the national art, the national literature, the national culture. Unless social laws change materially, these expectations will be in vain. Small communities have abandoned the hope of becoming centers of creative art—with the exception of those small communities in small countries who capture all the Nobel prizes! But, it is exactly in small local groups that the best stimuli for creative art is likely to appear. If half the energy now wasted on making

some large city an art center could be diverted to the encouragement of local community art, we should soon witness a revelation of undiscovered creativeness.

6. Americanization is too long and too ambitious a term for local community use. We need a simpler phrase to describe the process by which a human being from Russia becomes related to human beings in America in a small neighborhood or community. To "Americanize" sounds too much like using force; a good neighbor cannot be forced to be a good neighbor. We ought to assume that the immigrant has good reasons for wanting to live in America; we ought further to assume that he has learned some things of value in his own native land before coming. What he gets from America will not be what is forced upon him by some official or private agency for cultivating citizenship, but rather what his community values highest. If that happens to be money or power, he will get that; if it happens to be art, or literature, he may give even more than he gets.

Those who believe that one may wave a mysterious wand of patriotism and convert a citizen of Vienna into an American are too credulous. The former citizen of Vienna needs first of all to become a citizen in the community in which he has chosen to live. If Americanism has any real and dynamic relationship to the common life, the immigrant will absorb its gift soon enough. Americanization ought to become a natural, normal process, the expected outgrowth of citizenship in an American community.

7. Social work loses its real social and, hence, its spiritual significance in proportion to its mechanization. When it can all be done by having the assistant clerk request the filing clerk to consult File Z, social work will have lost its zest, its spirit, its appeal-in short, its soul. There are dangers of overspecialization and overprofessionalization in this field which do not apply with equal importance in other fields. After all, human relations are adjusted in human ways. If it is assumed that only the trained social worker has any part to play in social adjustment, will not this assumption separate the social worker from normal social process? And, if the social worker is thus separated, will he or she not become eventually so abnormal as to make the entire relationship anomalous? (Last autumn I sat with a child welfare committee in a small community of Denmark. It was composed of the local pastor, the teacher and two mothers and two fathers of the community. I could not discover that the dispositions which they made of the cases brought to their attention were less scientific than similar cases dealt with by trained specialists. But, what seemed most important to me was the fact that the whole community was being educated to understand social work, and it had lost its mysticism.) The next decade or two should provide numerous examples of social work experimentation on the basis of the local community. It may be that this experimentation will only indicate that the larger state and national organizations need to be re-emphasized, but at any rate, we shall know something about the place of the local community in regard to social work.

8. Conflict is a normal and natural condition of growth. To evade conflict teaches no lesson. "He who agrees with me leaves me unchanged." The primary conflicts of life occur in local communities. Until we shall have developed some technique for dealing with community conflict it will be folly of us to expect national or international peace. A vast field of original research lies before us. How can we secure a basis for values in conflict? How may conflicting groups be induced to state their real purposes as distinguished from the stated purposes which merely befog the issue? How large should a joint committee be? What size group lends itself best to the integration of all