It was with some such vision as this that he had gone abroad. If that super-culture was ever to come it could only be through some prodigious spiritual organization of the youth of America, some organization that would have to begin with small and highly self-conscious groups; these groups, moreover, would have to depend for a long time upon the experience of young Europe. The very ideas of spiritual leadership, the intellectual life, the social revolution were foreign to a modern America that had submitted to the common mould of business enterprise; even philosophers like Professor Dewey had had to assume a protective coloration, and when people spoke of art they had to justify it as an “asset.” For Bourne, therefore, the European tour was something more than a preparation for his own life: he was like a bird in the nesting season, gathering twigs and straw for a nest that was not to be his but young America’s, a nest for which old America would have to provide the bough! He was in search, in other words, of new ideas, new attitudes, new techniques, personal and social, for which he was going to demand recognition at home, and it is this that gives to his “Impressions of Europe 1913-1914”--his report to Columbia as holder of the Gilder Fellowship--an actuality that so perfectly survives the war. Where can one find anything better in the way of social insight than his pictures of radical France, of the ferment of the young Italian soul, of the London intellectuals--Sidney Webb, lecturing “with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward children,” Shaw, “clean, straight, clear, and fine as an upland wind and summer sun,” Chesterton, “gluttonous and thick, with something tricky and unsavory about him”; of the Scandinavian note,--“one got a sense in those countries of the most advanced civilization, yet without sophistication, a luminous modern intelligence that selected and controlled and did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the chaos of twentieth century possibility”? We see things in that white light only when they have some deeply personal meaning for us, and Bourne’s instinct had led him straight to his mark. Two complex impressions he had gained that were to dominate all his later work. One was the sense of what a national culture is, of its immense value and significance as a source and fund of spiritual power even in a young world committed to a political and economic internationalism. The other was a keen realization of the almost apostolic rôle of the young student class in perpetuating, rejuvenating, vivifying and, if need be, creating this national consciousness. No young Hindu ever went back to India, no young Persian or Ukrainian or Balkan student ever went home from a European year with a more fervent sense of the chaos and spiritual stagnation and backwardness of his own people, of the happy responsibility laid upon himself and all those other young men and women who had been touched by the modern spirit.