Is America still young? Is it not rather, perhaps, if we must use such figures of speech, that she was born at Jamestown in 1607, grew to promising maturity by the second half of the eighteenth century, and then, abandoning herself to the desire for expansion and sudden wealth, deliberately turned her back on the way in which she had been going? Those who say that America is young, still point to the future as the time when we may be expected to begin to devote ourselves to other things than “subduing a continent and accumulating the necessary material resources on which to build a civilization.” In the name of every high ideal that man has ever cherished, when are we going to be rich enough to begin as a nation, if we are not now, now that we have gutted our heritage, piled up the greatest accumulation of wealth in the world, accumulated the most stupendous material basis for living that man has ever known? I think it is at this point that the dangerous evil of our being forever told by friendly or hostile critics that we are young comes in. A boy who is really young realizes that there are some things he cannot do until he is a man. He waits, but at the same time he prepares himself. If we tell a child he is too young to do this or that, the child is justified in believing it and in refraining from trying to do it. Is there not danger in telling our people, young and old, that America is young? Will it not merely serve to make them contented to go on piling up wealth, to do what they have been doing for a hundred years, and to keep them from playing the part of men as they should? Many critics have pointed to the immaturity of the American mind.[Pg 255] There is a time to stop telling a boy he is young. There comes a time when we must tell him to be a man, to do a man’s work and try to think a man’s thoughts. If we keep on coddling him and telling him he is a child of whom nothing is expected, we are not likely ever to make a man of him. Why should we be content to wait a hundred, two hundred, or seven hundred years more before we think we shall be old enough to do something besides provide the material foundation for a civilization which we are told will somehow come of itself when we are grown up? If we are told and come to believe that no matter what we do we cannot lead a more spiritual life or have the culture of an “old” country in less than so many centuries, any more than a boy of fourteen can make himself twenty by trying, are we not giving ourselves an excuse to go on piling up riches and exploiting the world without making an effort to attain to a spiritual instead of a material plane of civilization?