426 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
whom he does not know to forswear altogether the right of going their own way, and to be convinced of the beauty and value of his way.
Because their idealism was of the type that is afraid of experi- ence, these founders of our American cities refused to look at the difficulties and blunders which a self-governing people was sure to encounter, and insisted that the people would walk only in the paths of justice and righteousness. It was inevitable, therefore, that they should have remained quite untouched by that worldly wisdom which counsels us to know life as it is, and by that very modern belief that, if the world is ever right at all, it must go right in its own way.
A man of this generation easily discerns the crudeness of that eighteenth-century conception of essentially unprogressive human nature, in all the empty dignity of its " inborn rights of man," because he has grown familiar with a more passionate human creed, with the modern evolutionary conception of the slowly advancing race whose rights are not " inalienable," but are hard- won in the tragic processes of civilization. Were self-government to be inaugurated by the advanced men of the present moment, as the founders were doubtless the advanced men of their time, they would make the most careful research into those early organiza- tions of village communities, folkmotes, and mirs, those primary cells of both social and political organization where the people knew no difference between the two, but quite simply met to con- sider in common discussion all that concerned their common life. They would investigate the craft guilds and artels, which com- bined government with daily occupation, as did the self-governing university and free town. They would seek for the connection between the liberty-loving mediaeval city and its free creative architecture, that most social of all the arts.
But our eighteenth-century idealists, unconscious of the com- pulsions of origins and of the fact that self-government had an origin of its own, timidly took the English law as their prototype, "whose very root is in the relation between sovereign and sub- ject, between lawmaker and those whom the law restrains," and which has traditionally concerned itself more with the guarding
