THE FABLE OF THE FROGS

"Politics" in a new American thesaurus might be bracketed with "unfairness", "laxity", "bribery", "corruption", "venality", "nepotism", and "fraud". These terms fly about whenever our thick political mud is stirred by investigation, reform, or election. By a process of association these ideas are inseparably connected. We laugh at humorists who use this condition as a theme, yet it is the thoughtless laughter which reflection stifles.

American optimism has pointed to education as the remedy, an evolutionary process producing superior and respected public officials. But experience has shown that the educated man does not enter politics; the corruption he sees discourages him even as he casts his ballot. This condition of civic life is no recent development. Aristophanes wrote: "Our sterling townsmen, nobly born and nobly bred,...these we treat with scorn; worthless sons of worthless fathers, yellow scum, these for every task we, choose."

Education will give us governors "nobly born and nobly bred" eventually, but what we need at once is practical political training. The college man has no political party and no political mind; Republican and Democratic Clubs have few members and fewer present at meetings. If we become interested in politics it is not as a profession but as a diversion, and by accident. The answer "Politics" to the question of a purpose in life brings the retort. "Yes, but what are you going to do?"

A move in the right direction has been made by the Women's Municipal League of Massachusetts, which makes its main purpose to "prepare women to fill positions now open to them in municipal and state departments." But such opportunities ought not to be limited to women alone. The need of men of a high type to make a business of politics instead of politics of their business was never more in evidence than today. As Colonel Roosevelt once put it, "to be effective in politics a man must make it his profession. An amateur politician is like an expert fencer trying to use a forty-five against a two-gun man. He is helpless because it is not in his line."

In England, the Oxford Union has been developed into just such a training school for politics as will help a man to make it "his line". Its members definitely belong to political parties; its meetings are well attended and are conducted as a session of Parliament. There is obtained schooling in public speaking, economics, history and party politics. No questioning follows the young Englishman's choice of politics as a profession.

The political orientation in this country is different, of course, from that in England. But such a training in political science as that given by the Oxford Union could be effectively established in our universities; a combined form of the two political clubs, enlivened by the Liberal Club and supervised and criticised by the departments of History, Government, and Economics. Then with no false qualms we might claim politics as a vocation not as an avocation.