It was not merely the exigencies of journalism that turned his mind at first so largely to the problems of primary education. In Professor Dewey’s theories, in the Gary Schools, he saw, as he could see it nowhere else, the definite promise, the actual unfolding of the freer, more individualistic, and at the same time more communistic social life of which he dreamed. But even if he had not come to feel a certain inadequacy in Professor Dewey’s point of view, I doubt if this field of interest could have held him long. Children fascinated him; how well he understood them we can see from his delightful “Ernest: or Parent for a Day.” But Bourne’s heart was too insistently involved in the situation of his own contemporaries, in the stress of their immediate problems, to allow him to linger in these long hopes. This young intelligentsia in whose ultimate unity he had had such faith--did he not see it, moreover, as the war advanced, lapsing, falling apart again, reverting into the ancestral attitudes of the tribe? Granted the war, it was the business of these liberals to see that it was played, as he said, “with insistent care for democratic values at home, and unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace that should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.” Instead, the “allure of the martial” passed only to be succeeded by the “allure of the technical,” and the “prudent, enlightened college man,” cut in the familiar pattern, took the place of the value-creator, the path-finder, the seeker of new horizons. Plainly, the younger generation had not begun to find its own soul, had hardly so much as registered its will for a new orientation of the American spirit.