THE LITTLE DEMOCRACY
of government to bear on the personality of the common man, which means all of us. We must discover some way to enlist a passionate and continuous personal response from the individual so that he will, as he alone can do, shape himself through coöperating in the common purpose."
The Community Center Movement seems to answer this need, for its underlying purpose is to bring the mass of people into day-by-day working relations with constructive operations of the government. This of course establishes a very important relation between the Community Center and the whole problem of government. The Community Center proposes that the people should govern themselves; it asserts that there are vast stores of unreleased energy in every neighborhood; and that the organization of the neighborhood is the power that helps to release these energies to the interest of the whole of society.
The Glorified Mill-Pond.—But back of the Community Center Movement there is something more—something that lies at the base of
14
