Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 225, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1916 — Mobility of the Individual [ARTICLE]

Mobility of the Individual

By DR. JOHN M. FINLEY

CommiMloner of Education, State of New York

Tha whole problem of society,. generally, is to. determine to what degree the mobility of the individual shall be restrained, predestinated and merged in the aim of all the collectivity. I translate this experience into the terms of our everyday life, and I make it graphic to myself by thinking that every man has an imaginary uniform, an imaginary uniform of his own measurements always in readiness in home or shop or office or in some public locker, that he may don at call of his community, state or nation, or perhaps of a world need: when under compulsion he goes to vote, to pay his taxes, to fight against dishonesty, inefficiency or waste, to inform himself upon public questions or upon public duties; when, in short, he performs any one of the hundred offices that are required of him as an efficient unit in an organized society. lam today a maker of meerschaum pipes, a peasant gathering my harvest, a college professor, a surgeon. Tomorrow I slip on this invisible garment, and lam a selfless, nameless, numbered patriot. And the next day I am working at my delicate pipes again; I am back m my field, or at my desk, or in my private laboratory; that is, if I am not killed or wounded in battle or suffocated in the trenches.