culminate late, and it is just these that our civilization, that brings such excessive strains to middle life, now so tends to dwarf, making old age too often _blasé_ and _abgelebt_, like the middle age of those roués who in youth have lived too fast. There are many who now think more or less as does H. G. Wells[27] that the human race is just at its dangerous age and has, within the last few years, passed its prime; also that henceforth we must trust less to nature and place all our hope in and direct all our energy to nurture if the race is to escape premature decay. There is only too much to indicate that mankind, in Europe at least if not throughout the world, has reached the “dangerous age” that marks the dawn of senescence and that, unless we can develop what Renan calls “a new enthusiasm for humanity,” a new social consciousness, and a new instinct for service and for posterity, our elaborate civilization with all its institutions will become a Frankenstein monster escaping the control of the being that devised and constructed it and will bring ruin to both him and to itself. Progressive eugenics, radical and world-wide reëducation, and the development of a richer, riper old age, are our only sources of hope for we can look to no others to arrest the degenerative processes of national and individual egoism. At any rate, we have to face a new problem, namely what is the old age of the world to be and how can we best prepare for it betimes? As contrasted with Ireland, in which Ross[28] tells us “one-eighth of her people are more than sixty-five years old,” we have considered ourselves as _par excellence_ the land of young people and ideas. Our growth has been phenomenal and began and proceeded most opportunely, so that we profited to the full by steam, rapid transportation, invention, by our coal, oil, forests, and virgin soil, and especially by the ideals of liberty that were brought here by the first waves of immigrants to our shores. These were followed later, however, by those who had failed in the old world, by inferior and often Mediterranean stocks imported as tools or coming only in the hope of gain; but even this tide is now ceasing to flow. We are within measurable distance of the limits of our natural resources. Although the great war, the most stupendous, was also the most inconclusive ever fought, and although we reached our pinnacle in the idealism of Wilson’s first visit to Europe, when the world came nearer than ever before since early Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire, and Comenius, to a merger of national sovereignty and a new world law backed by a new world power, this brief vision of a federated world has faded and we now realize that if we cannot make a break with history and leave much of it to the dead past, if we cannot transcend the boundaries that, especially in Europe, are now far too narrow for modern conditions, and if we cannot fearlessly enter upon the longer apprenticeship to life, which is now