the purpose of furnishing every possible means for individual self-expression along constructive, creative, cultural lines. After many centuries of acquaintance with the democratic ideal (contrasted with our many failures to attain it) it has become commonly understood that man's individual goal in life is not essentially materialistic, nor primarily reproductive. It has become a modernstyle platitude, for example, that "You can't take it with you," and it is also generally agreed upon that men and women have cultural possibilities in society which far outreach the biological urge to procreation, both in terms of social significance, and in terms of the spiritual potentialities and dimensions of the human personality itself. No life seems quite so barren as that which is enslaved to material acquisition, or which has never discovered reality in human values other than those associated with biological needs and relationships. In the ideal democracy, on the contrary, we have learned to view man's individual goal in life as one of character-establishment, and of personality growth. We have also recognized that this can be achieved only if we can determine our own individual actions in accordance with our own individual needs, and then only if these self-determined actions are guided and criticized by means of the highest possible ethical principles. We have become convinced that there can be no true liberty or personal growth apart from a sound understanding of ethics, and of the basic, subjective needs of human welfare which ethics seeks to discover and describe. We have long since understood that individual "welfare" or "happiness" attained at the expense of others is neither welfare nor happiness, that we do not act rightlyi.e., that we do not express or deserve our individual rights-if our actions in any way subvert or disturb the exercise of these same rights by others. The democratic ideal is built from these basic conceptions.

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Despite

espite all of the theoretical conclusions on the subject of democracy which we have reached during the past twenty-five hundred years, our social regulations are still a confused mixture of universal ethical precepts and arbitrary moral compulsions. In all its phases, our society today is in the midst of serious growing-pains; what is growing is our capacity to know what it means to be governed by universal social principles, in distinction to being regimented by local. social mores; and, conversely, it is these. local or limited social mores which are acting, inevitably, as impediments to the practical evolution of larger social insights. Intelligent and ethical sexual deviants have long suffered under one aspect of these growing-pains; intellectual deviants from traditional social or scientific conceptions have also been long familiar with other aspects, which have assumed great current significance against the background of political arrogance and dictatorialism which now menaces so much of humanity. Most of us realize that we are supremely tortunate in living in that part of the world where the democratic right of individual self-determination is still recognized, even though, sometimes, it must assert itself against great odds.

All of the profound and constructive social developments in human life have begun from tiny centers of growth, from "minority groups" at variance with traditional social conceptions or habits. There are, of course, minorities and minorities; some may be nuclei of social progress, while others may be only stagnant relics of the past, obsolescent and decaying. How well we succeed, as minorities, in enlarging the social insight and the social outlook all rests upon what kind of a minority we are, and this depends upon what we stand for, and on how we approach the task of deepening and defining the social conceptions of human welfare and of human rights. It will be entirely according to its knowledge and definition of these

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