It is worth while to analyze such a persistent and almost universal conception. Just what do we mean when we say[Pg 243] that America is young? Has the idea any validity, and what is the effect on the minds of those who so easily use it? By America, of course, we must mean the American people or the American nation. It is obvious, however, that we cannot use the word nation in this connection in a purely political sense. So rapidly does the loom of history weave that we can now be ranked as among the older nations of western civilization. As an independent and unified nation we long antedate, for example, Italy, which was created only in 1860, or Germany, which was first welded into a nation in 1870, to say nothing of many of even later growth. II It is possible that in some minds the idea stems from that popular analogy which would identify a nation or a society with an organism. This analogy, however, like most analogies, is extremely dangerous. It may illuminate certain likenesses between society and a physical organism, but it is not a safe instrument with which to try to discover new likenesses. Because we may fancy that certain functions of society resemble those of an organism, it by no means follows that we can interpret one in terms of the other. In spite of many sociologists and writers on history, like Spengler, there is nothing to prove that a society has its birth, growth, and death in the same way as has a physical organism. Such a metaphor is merely suggestive, and is not only unscientific but may be disastrously misleading. The individual appears in his personal development to repeat the broad stages of our racial development, but I fail to find any law supported by the facts of history indicating that nations[Pg 244] infallibly do the same. To force the attempt to make any such law is to glide blindly over such innumerable exceptions as would certainly invalidate any law in scientific thinking. Not only do certain manifestations of cultural life—æsthetic, intellectual, and other—appear in some nations and not in others, but there seems to be no definite sequence in which they appear when they appear at all. We may speak of a human being as young, middle-aged, or old, but such terms lose all meaning when applied to a nation as an organism. Let us take Greece for example. Was Athens old or young in 450 B.C.? It is not fair to say that she had just reached full maturity because within a half century her architecture flowered in the completion of the Parthenon, her sculpture in the works of Phidias, her poetry in Æschylus, or her philosophy in Socrates and Plato. That is a mere begging of the question. It is estimating the age by the achievement, whereas, when we say that America is young, we are deferring the possibility of achievement upon the score of age.