Three things are necessary to success in any practical cooperative enterprise a desire to save, good business sense, and the spirit of cooperation; of these the greatest is the last, because cooperation is primarily a state of mind; it is a matter of education. It is significant that the cooperative societies of England not only gave the name "society" to their organization, but also devote 2 per cent of their annual profits to the education of their members in the principle and practice of cooperation.

Thus there grew up in these stores real social-center activities. In America social and civic activities are already started in the schoolhouses, and out of them practical cooperation is now developing. Our approach is the reverse of the English experience, but the principle is the same. It is highly important to see clearly that the other community-center activities are an educational necessity to the suc cess of its practical cooperative enterprises. A buying club unattached to the means of creating the cooperative spirit is almost sure to fail.

It will save time to recognize at the beginning that to acquire the spirit and method of cooperation is a slow process of education. The chief danger to be guarded against is the common tendency on the part of Americans to demand fruit the day the tree is planted. While the spirit of cooperation is difficult to acquire, like all other good things, yet it is worth all it costs. Cooperation in buying and banking is itself the best of means for moral culture. Its educational value is of the highest. It minimizes the evils of debt, cultivates selfcontrol and self-reliance, checks reckless expenditure, develops a sense of responsibility, quickens intelligence and a public spirit, and prepares citizens for self-government in a democratic state. The schoolhouse is not only the appropriate place to acquire these educational values and cooperative virtues, but it also furnishes the inspiration for success in the process, bécause the American public school is itself the most successful social enterprise yet undertaken in this or any other nation.

THE CHILD'S RIGHT OF WAY.

It is because there exists in America a marked degree of independence and initiative, and consequently a wide divergence in local conditions, that community centers differ widely in the kind and number of their activities. While variety in unity is the democratic law of development, yet unity in variety is the other half of the same law. There are certain kinds of activities required by universal human needs. The activities herein described are the typical activities adapted to the average normal community, both rural and urban. If then one were asked what a community center aims to be, it is a

sufficiently full and accurate answer to say that it is, what has just been briefly described, a people's university, a community capitol, a forum, a neighborhood club, a home-and-school league, a community bank, and a cooperative exchange. It is all of these in one organization. The unity among them is vital and organic like the unity of the fingers in a hand.

Whatever the number and variety of activities undertaken, the distinguishing mark of the community center is the fact that it is organized not on the basis of personal pleasure or private profit or any political or religious creed, but on the basis of responsibility for the welfare of children. The "house of the people" in which it meets is the symbol of its central idea. The public school is the only national institution primarily dedicated to the welfare of the child.

Here as nowhere else men and women forget their partisan and sectarian divisions and breathe an atmosphere which accentuates their resemblances and minimizes their differences. Childhood is the ground floor of life. It takes us beneath all superficial and artificial distinctions.

Centuries ago a great statesman and philosopher said that the key to any right solution of our social and economic problems is to be found by "setting the child in the midst of them." Jesus regarded the child as the model citizen in the Kingdom of God, which was his term for democracy. The child is still the most respectable citizen we have. The position of Jesus on the place of the child has been shown by John Fiske to be abundantly supported by the biological history of the race. The prolonged infancy of the human baby is the factor which developed motherhood and all our altruistic sentiments. And it will be by keeping the child in the midst of our thought, by giving the child the right of way in our economics, by making the child's welfare the formative principle in our social and civic activities that we will transform these activities into community interests.

This the community center aims to do. In brief, it is a movement for the extension of the spirit of the home and fireside, the spirit of childhood, of good will, of intelligent sympathy, of mutual aid—the extension of this spirit to all the activities of the community. The indispensable importance of this spirit can not be overemphasized, for without it a community center is a body without a soul, and a body without a soul is not a living thing. A community center's capacity to produce practical results is always to be measured by its capacity to create such a spirit. For, as John Dewey wisely says:

The chief constituent of social efficiency is intelligent sympathy or good will. For sympathy, as a desirable quality, is something more than mere feeling. It is a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.

PART II.

HOW TO ORGANIZE A COMMUNITY CENTER.

66

What needs to be done is fairly clear; how to do it is the difficult thing. "If," said the shrewd Portia, " to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces." Nevertheless, to discover how, while diffi cult, is an inspiring task. In the organization of a community center the essential factors to be considered are its membership, its size, its executive officer, its board of directors, its finances, and its constitution. The suggestions here offered concerning them, together with the reasons for the suggestions, are the product of experience and have been tested in operation.

A LITTLE DEMOCRACY.

The organization of a community around the schoolhouse as its capitol is the creation of.a new political unit, a little democracy. It is new in the sense that it is the revival and enlargement of an old institution that we ought not willingly to let die. Thomas Jefferson did not exaggerate when he said:

Those wards called townships in New England are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation. * * * As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, "Carthago delenda est," so do I conclude every opinion with the injunction, "Divide the counties into wards."

The movement to organize local self-governing communities takes us back not only to the New England town meeting but still further back to the Teutonic "mark," the Russian "mir," and to the ancient Swiss cantonal assembly. The fact that free village communities in some form have existed in so many parts of the world is a significant indication of a universal conviction that such organization is a necessity to human welfare.

The community center aims to form such a free village community, a town, a borough, a little democracy, both in the cities and the open

BUREAU OF EDUCATION.

BULLETIN, 1918, NO. 11 PLATE 2.

A SUGGESTED SYMBOL FOR THE USE OF COMMUNITY CENTERS.

See page 21.