And with peace he relapses--the American in general relapses into the old discontinuity. The crisis of self-defense over, our ideals once more begin to seem impractical, traditionary. As long as the patriotism lit by the war and danger crackled under the pot, our liberalism bubbled ardently; but peace chills the brew. For peace means that we drop our ardors and face again the insistent reachings of the democracy for a greater share in wealth, for a greater control over productivity, for representation in industry as well as in politics. Peace means that we must face not war, with its romantic thrills and its common enemy, but the prosaic causes of war that hide among friends as well as enemies, that for cure demand self-criticism, self-denial, and humbleness of spirit, a struggle in which the Croix de Guerre is likely to be reproach and contumely. The break between our education and the life we are living again widens, and it is this break which emasculates our liberalism. Viewed alone, the fine ideals of our education are easily defensible; the hustling vigor of our life is also defensible. The trouble is that in ordinary times they fail somehow or another to connect. Education grows bloodless. Life becomes aimless or merely self-regarding. What we believe grows pallid and fades before it transmutes into what we do. Indeed, I would go further and say that Americans, and especially the graduates of universities, are somewhat weakened by their education. They go out into life with an enormous appetite for living and a set of ideals like a row of preserved vegetables canned and hermetically sealed for future contingencies. In 1917 and 1918 we opened some of those jars and found the contents good for a special emergency. But ordinarily the lids are tight, while we go about our business proud of our stores of education, but inwardly uncertain, like the housewife, as to whether or not those ideas that seemed so good when our teachers packed them away in the season of youth will not be sour to the taste of practical modernity. The clamor for vocational education is a protest against this ineffectiveness of the merely traditional. But the cure does not lie in such a medicining. Vocational education is well enough, and we need more of it, but training of the hands and of the brain to purely material accomplishments will never save liberalism in America. The strength of vocational education is that it looks forward and prepares for things as they are. Its weakness, when administered alone, is that it neglects the directing mind. In any large sense it is aimless, or, rather, it aims at successful slavery quite as much as at successful freedom. Liberal education also must look forward, must put its traditions to work, must germinate, and become alive in the mind of the American, and then teach him by old principles to attack new problems.