The labor party is not immediately responsible for the saving or the freeing of the religious instinct. Its first objectives are the comforts and material opportunities of civilization; and until these are reached we have no right to expect religious leadership from the proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the old American, the bourgeois American. He has inherited the spiritual tradition of his ancestors; he has profited by emancipation from superstition and institutional tyranny; he has lived in a comfortable world with opportunities to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts and education. He is not going to be crushed or driven out of his inheritance; there are too many of him, and he too closely resembles in everything but habit of life the proletariat that is rising. Upon this American rests the burden of spiritualizing as well as educating his new masters--upon the moral enthusiasts, the traditionalists, the seekers, most of all. It is such a task as the church faced in the dark ages, when barbarians had to be not only spiritualized, but civilized as well. It is a lesser task, for our new invaders are not barbarians, and their leaders are intellectually the equal of ours. Whether the outlook for success is greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our will that man should make more than a market of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the great wills of earlier centuries? No one can answer; but of this we can be assured, that the solution rests in American indifferentism. If the commercial American is as material as he looks, if common sense is his only good, if his idealism is merely inherited habit, if he responds to two impulses only, restlessness and sentimentality, then he will go over to socialism in its most mechanical phase and, instead of saving the new party, he will ruin it. Potentially the most ardent supporters of a purely materialistic socialism, in which the individual person counts for nothing aside from his appetites, are precisely the “practical” business men who now curse the new order most loudly because it threatens their accumulations. For them it is civil war between seekers for the dollar; and civil war is always the bitterest, and the soonest healed. Such men have been our leaders. Is the army behind them?