The community center aims to realize its ideal by promoting free trade in friendship among all individuals and classes of the community. This is its most efficient means for producing results, because men are more influenced through their feelings than their intellects. This is the reason why "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." For the same reason friendship is the chief solvent of social and industrial difficulties. When David Grayson sat at dinner with a factory owner, Mr. Vedder, and was helping him to settle a strike then in operation, Mr. Vedder asked him what kind of social philosopher he called himself. "I do not call myself by any name," said Grayson, "but if I chose a name, do you know the name I would like to have applied to me?" "I can not imagine," was the answer. "Well, I would like to be called 'an introducer.' My friend, Mr. Blacksmith, let me introduce you to my friend, Mr. Plutocrat. I could almost swear that you are brothers, so near alike You will find each other wonderfully interesting, once you get over the awkwardness of the introduction." "It is a good name," said Mr. Vedder, laughing. "Its a wonderful name," said Grayson, "and its about the biggest and finest work in the world—to know human beings just as they are and to make them acquainted with one another just as they are. Why, its the foundation of all the democracy there is or ever will be. Sometimes I think that friendliness is the only achievement of life worth while, and unfriendliness the only tragedy." The community center is a factory for the manufacture of friendship, and the chief business of a community secretary is to be "an introducer."

you are.

Just as the mere statement of a problem is half of its solution, likewise free trade in friendship among men would break down half the barriers which separate them, because it would remove the chief cause of their strife. For a community to carry on its work without cultivating the spirit of friendship is like drawing a harrow over frozen ground. This is so essential to success that one of its chief aims should be to promote free trade in friendship by producing a collection of community center songs, so that the people could sing the sentiment as it is expressed in such poems as Richard Burton's

If I had the time to find a place

And sit me down full face to face,

With my better self, that can not show

In my daily life that rushes so:

It might be then I would see my soul
Was stumbling still toward the shining goal,
I might be nerved by the thought sublime-
If I had the time!

If I had the time to let my heart
Speak out and take in my life a part,

To look about and to stretch a hand

To a comrade quartered in no-luck land;
Ah, God! If I might but just sit still

And hear the note of the whippoorwill,

I think that my wish with God's would rhyme-
If I had the time!

If I had the time to learn from you

How much for comfort my word could do;
And I told you then of my sudden will

To kiss your feet when I did you ill;

If the tears aback of the coldness feigned
Could flow, and the wrong be quite explained—
Brothers, the souls of us all would chime,

If we had the time!

The community center seeks to promote friendship, not only in local communities but also among communities, and not only among communities in a single state or nation, but among the larger communities of the nations themselves, by stimulating devotion to common ideals, for there can be no friendship unless there is similarity of aims and purposes. There is, perhaps, no more accurate or beautiful expression of that which separates and unites national communities than is to be found in the following letter sent to America by a pupil in Paris and made public by John H. Finley:

It was only a little river, almost a brook; it was called the Yser. One could talk from one side to the other without raising one's voice, and the birds could fly over it with one sweep of their wings. And on the two banks there were millions of men, the one turned toward the other, eye to eye. But the distance which separated them was greater than the stars in the sky; it was the distance which separates right from injustice.

The ocean is so vast that the sea gulls do not dare to cross it. During seven days and seven nights the great steamships of America, going at full speed, drive through the deep waters before the lighthouses of France come into view; but from one side to the other hearts are touching.

Manifestly the task of the community center is complex and difficult. Our business, however, is not to debate the possibility of reaching the goal, but to make a start toward it. When Socrates was asked, "How shall we get to Mount Olympus?" he answered, "By doing all your walking in that direction." While we keep Mount Olympus in sight to give us direction, we must recognize that the amount of possible progress toward it is determined by conditions as we find them. Our choice does not lie between the ideal and the actual. We must always choose both. We must know not only the goal but the road to it. Our practical problem is to desire a working plan which includes what is both ideally desirable and actually possible. If we are ever to arrive at Mount Olympus, we must start

from where we are, we must take things "as is; " we must "accept the universe" and try to fashion it as best we may with patience and good humor.

Although the road to the community center goal is difficult, nevertheless the hope of ultimate success has the best of guarantees. It is buttressed by unescapable necessity. The solid basis on which this hope rests is the lack of self-sufficiency. On this fact society itself is founded. On this principle, Plato constructed his republic. No community nor nation, as well as no individual, is self-sufficient. This applies both to the supply of physical necessities and the supply of food for minds and souls. No nation, as no man, can long live a Robinson Crusoe type of existence. They have a community of interests. All men are political animals. They must have with each other some kind of business, either good or bad. The community center movement merely aims to make this business good instead of bad. The obvious sanity of this policy is the guarantee of its ultimate triumph.

While a lack of knowledge concerning both the spirit and method of democracy makes the road to this goal a difficult one to travel, yet the rewards by the way are always in proportion to the hardships. The satisfaction of working for a cause bigger than one's private advantage is never lost, whatever be the fortunes of the cause itself. Eric, a dying soldier boy in France writing his last letter to his father and mother, well expressed both the satisfaction and its cause when he said: "To a very small number it is given to live in history; their number is scarcely 1 in 10,000,000. To the rest it is only granted to live in their united achievements." This is the experience not only of vision-seeing, chivalrous youth who have not yet exchanged their ideals for their comforts, but it is the experience also of a mature man like Thomas Jefferson. When the long shadows fell across his life and he came to write his epitaph, this is what he wrote:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson author of the DECLARATION of

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

of the

Statute of Virginia
for

Religious Freedom

and father of the

University of Virginia.

It is highly significant that he never mentions the fact that he had been governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, minister to France, twice President of the United States. That is to say, he never mentions any personal rewards, anything that the people had done for him, but only what he had done for the people, only the service which his genius and loyalty had rendered to the community causes of democracy and education. This alone is what he cared to remember with joy and pride. This is why the community-center

movement is justified in claiming the major loyalty of all soldiers of the common welfare.

PART III.

A SUGGESTED CONSTITUTION.

The following is the constitution prepared by the writer for a community center in Washington, D. C., and is reproduced here as a suggestion to other communities:

PREAMBLE.

We, the people of the Wilson Normal Community of the City of Washington, D. C., in order to secure the advantages of organized self-help, to make public opinion more enlightened and effective, to promote the education of adults and youths for citizenship in a democracy, to organize the use of the public school as the community capitol, to foster a neighborhood spirit through which the community may become a more efficient social unit, to prevent needless waste through the duplication of social activities, to engage in cooperative enterprises for our moral and material welfare, and to create a social order more in harmony with the conscience and intelligence of the Nation, do ordain and establish this constitution.

ARTICLE I.-NAME,

The name of this organization shall be the Wilson Normal Community Association, and its headquarters the Wilson Normal School Building.

ARTICLE II.-LOCATION.

The community shall be defined as follows: Beginning at Fourteenth and W Streets, thence north on the east side of Fourteenth Street to Monroe Street, thence east on the east side of Monroe Street and Park Road to Georgia Avenue, thence south on the west side of Georgia Avenue to Irving Street, thence east on the south side of Irving Street to Soldiers' Home, thence south on west side of Soldiers' Home, McMillan Park, and Reservoir to College Street, thence west on north side of College Street and Barry Place to Tenth Street, thence south on the west side of Tenth Street to W Street, thence west on the north side of W Street to Fourteenth Street, the place of beginning.

ARTICLE III.-MEMBERS.

The members of the association shall be all the white adult citizens of this community, both men and women. A limited number of nonresident, members may be received into membership, provided they are not registered members of any other organized community. Organizations now in operation which are nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and whose aim is the public welfare, such as