Is the bourgeois conception of security for all, and superiority (other than economic) for none, to be forced upon the years ahead? Is our democracy, as Brooks Adams thinks, a democracy of degradation, a level to which all must be either lifted, or lowered? Will we hold back, as long as our power lasts, the proletariat, feeding them, clothing them, converting them, but suppressing them, so that we may be secure? Will we tyrannize the exceptional in art, in literature, in statesmanship, in pure thinking, freezing it by distrust, or exploiting it for sensation and reducing its fruits to vulgarity? Will we resolve religion into a social emotion and poetry to rhythmic prose? Must the poor fragments of the privileged classes that still remain, and the little shopkeepers, and the teachers with their hankerings after an intellectual aristocracy, and the skilled workman with the feverish zeal of a new convert to security still upon him--must they all unite with the industrial magnate in a holy alliance of things as they are to crush into uniformity a humanity where only rebels against our authority and the uncivilized remain? This would be the imperialism of the bourgeoisie. And neither our churches, which are rigidly bourgeois, nor our universities, which are ponderously bourgeois, and both trading in security, offer leadership that guarantees escape. Or will we attempt to federalize this world that apparently we have conquered, allowing autonomy for races of ideas, nations of customs, and room enough for plantations of new desires in our fat fields? Will we tolerate fineness, encourage variety, permit heresy, prepare for change? It is said by way of compliment that here in America we have neither aristocrats nor peasants. Will we preserve, or destroy, the peasant virtues, the ideas of the aristocrat, the desires of the intellectual. Will we make possible a nation where to be average is not the highest good? I have no answer, naturally. There is no reply that can now be formulated. But the solution is already present in the problem itself. It is to be found in men and women, in boys and girls especially, who will belong to the new order and who will answer in their time. If you wish to speculate upon what will become of the post-bellum American, whose traits as they exist to-day have been the subject of this book, study, on the one hand, the younger leaders in the labor parties, and on the other, the college undergraduates. In them lies the future. * * * * * * Transcriber’s note: Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original. The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.