The principal circumstance that retards our university development doubtless is that the ideal of American life itself, which the university is to express and to promote, is as yet undefined in the minds of the American people. But without presuming to anticipate what must be the outcome of gradual and prolonged growth, it may still be serviceable to clear our minds as to the goal towards which we desire that the development shall tend. The fundamental ideal of the American people is that of freedom! The notion of freedom is crude as yet, but is capable of being ennobled and refined. To be free is to express power. To be free in the highest sense is to express the highest kind of power. The highest kind is that which is exercised in such wise as to elicit unlike yet cognate power in others. A people is to be called free when all the different social or vocational groups of which it is the integrated whole spontaneously react upon one another, and when in each group each member of it realizes some mental gift of his own. A free people is not one which is merely released from the authority of autocrats. That is only a condition of freedom, not freedom itself. A free people is not one in which strong individuals are permitted to thrive parasitically at the expense of the weak. Nor yet one in which merely equal opportunity is afforded to all in the race for material well-being. A free people is one in which the essential energies of all effectuate themselves unhindered, the life of each swelling the surrounding tide of life, and being enriched in turn by the returning tide. This to my mind is liberty,—the liberation of what is best in each. This is freedom,—the free flow of life into life. The ideal American University is one which expresses and promotes this ideal of freedom. A university is a group of vocational schools. A truly democratic university is an organic system of vocational schools, one which in the relations that subsist between its schools affords a shining, stimulating example of the kind of relations that ought to subsist between the vocational groups in the state. The aim of an American university should be to furnish leaders for all the various groups who will undertake the great business of truly organizing democracy. _Education for Adults_