Perhaps the supreme man of genius is he who, like Virgil, Leonardo, or Shakespeare, has a message for his own time and a message for all times, a message which is for ever renewed for every new generation.
The need for insisting on the intimate relations between Socialism and Individualism has become the more urgent to-day because we are reaching a stage of civilization in which each tendency is inevitably so pushed to its full development that a clash is only prevented by the realization that here we have truly a harmony.
Sometimes a matter that belongs to one sphere is so closely intertwined with a matter that belongs to the other that it is a very difficult problem how to hold them separate and allow each its due value.
At times, indeed, it is really very difficult to determine to which sphere a particular kind of human activity belongs. This is notably the case as regards education. "Render unto Cæsar the things that be Cæsar's, and unto God the things that be God's." But is education among the things that belong to Cæsar, to social organization, or among the things that belong to God, to the province of the individual's soul? There is much to be said on both sides. Of late the Socialist tendency prevails here, and there is a disposition to standardize rigidly an education so superficial, so platitudinous, so uniform, so unprofitable—so fatally oblivious of what even the word education means 10—that some day, perhaps, the revolted Individualist spirit will arise in irresistible might to sweep away the whole worthless structure from top to bottom, with even such possibilities of good as it may conceal. The educationalists of to-day may do well to remember that it is wise to be generous to your enemies even in the interests of your own preservation.
In every age the question of Individualism and Socialism takes on a different form. In our own age it has become acute under the form of a