Had it not occurred before, this general reversion to type? The whole first phase of the social movement had spent itself in a sort of ineffectual beating of the air, and Bourne saw that only through a far more heroic effort of criticism than had yet been attempted could the young intelligentsia disentangle itself, prevail against the mass-fatalism of the middle class, and rouse the workers out of their blindness and apathy. Fifteen years ago a new breath had blown over the American scene; people felt that the era of big business had reached its climacteric, that a new nation was about to be born out of the social settlements, out of the soil that had been harrowed and swept by the muck-rakers, out of the spirit of service that animated a whole new race of novelists, and a vast army of young men and young women, who felt fluttering in their souls the call to some great impersonal adventure, went forth to the slums and the factories and the universities with a powerful but very vague desire to realize themselves and to “do something” for the world. But one would have said that movement had been born middle-aged, so earnest, so anxious, so conscientious, so troubled, so maternal and paternal were the faces of those young men and women who marched forth with so puzzled an intrepidity; there was none of the tang and fire of youth in it, none of the fierce glitter of the intellect; there was no joyous burning of boats; there were no transfigurations, no ecstasies. There was only a warm simmer of eager, evangelical sentiment that somehow never reached the boiling-point and cooled rapidly off again, and that host of tentative and wistful seekers found themselves as cruelly astray as the little visionaries of the Children’s Crusade. Was not the failure of that movement due almost wholly to its lack of critical equipment? In the first place, it was too naïve and too provincial, it was outside the main stream of modern activity and desire, it had none of the reserves of power that result from being in touch with contemporary developments in other countries. In the second place, it had no realistic sense of American life: it ignored the facts of the class struggle, it accepted enthusiastically illusions like that of the “melting-pot,” it wasted its energy in attacking “bad” business without realizing that the spirit of business enterprise is itself the great enemy, it failed to see the need of a consciously organized intellectual class or to appreciate the necessary conjunction in our day of the intellectuals and the proletariat. Worst of all, it had no personal psychology. Those crusaders of the “social consciousness” were far from being conscious of themselves; they had never broken the umbilical cord of their hereditary class, they had not discovered their own individual lines of growth, they had no knowledge of their own powers, no technique for using them effectively. Embarked in activities