Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3 SCHOLAR'S OPPORTUNITY JOHN B. CLARK, LL.D. An Address Delivered at the Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of a Chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity at Amherst College, and Published in the Political Science Quarterly for December, 1897 PRINTED BY CINN and COMPANY THE SCHOLAR'S POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY.1 A feature of recent presidential elections has been a distrust of the educated class. It is the day of the plain people ; and a claim to superior knowledge often injures a man's chance of gaining a hearing. It may seem, then, that this attitude of the public makes the scholar in politics a superfluity. What I hope to show, however, is that it creates a demand for scholarship of a high order, and that it offers to scholarship of this superior grade a larger field of influence than has ever before been open to it. The uprising of the plain people is the opportunity of the true scholar. The knowledge that is to be a political power is not, indeed, of a kind so advanced that it cannot be imparted to the public. As there can be no esoteric politics, no knowledge that is worth anything in politics can bear a label of exclusiveness. Government is by the people. There should be a certain communism in the holding of intellectual property that is needed for public uses. Yet knowledge that is not at present common property must in some way make itself effective in the politics of the future. If it comes in the form of clear demonstrations it will be welcomed. The great democratic power that rules the state — except when bosses rule it and the state — is still ready to welcome one thing from any one who may offer it, namely, light. It knows its own interests and is glad to learn how to promote them. If any man is able to reveal the occult forces that, when they...