Thus the chief thesis of this book is that we have a function in the world that we have not yet risen to and which is of the utmost importance--far greater, in fact, in the present stage of the world than ever before, and that this new and culminating service can only be seen and prepared for by first realizing what ripe and normal age really is, means, can, should, and now must do, if our race is ever to achieve its true goal. For both my purposes, the personal and later public one, it has seemed wisest to give much space to a conspectus of opinions by way of epitomes of the views of those who have considered the subject from the most diverse standpoints, and thus to let them speak for themselves. Both my own standpoint and my conclusions I believe to be justified by these data. But, first, in a lighter and more personal vein and by way of further introduction, let me state that after six years of post-graduate study abroad, two of teaching at Harvard, and eight of professoring at the Johns Hopkins, I found myself at the head of a new university, from which latter post, after thirty-one years of service, I have just retired and become a pensioner. In this last left position I had to do creative educational work and shape new policies. I was given unusual freedom and threw my heart and soul into the work, making it more or less of a new departure. I nursed the infancy of the institution with almost maternal solicitude, saw it through various diseases incident to the early stages of its development, and steered it through several crises that taxed my physical and mental powers to their uttermost. In its service I had to do, as best I could, many things for which I was little adapted by training or talent and some of which were personally distasteful. But even to these I had given myself with loyalty and occasionally with abandon, as my “bit” in life, remembering that while men come and go, good institutions should, like Tennyson’s brook, “go on forever.” There is always considerable publicity in such work and one has always to consider, in every measure, its effects upon the controlling board in whom the prime responsibility for its welfare is vested, the public, the faculty, and the students; and between the points of view of these four parties concerned there are often discrepancies so wide that if any of them knew how the others felt there might be serious trouble. Occasionally, too, my own opinion differed from all the others, and this involved a fifth factor to be reckoned with. Thus, much effort had to be directed toward compounding different interests and not infrequently the only way open seemed to be concealment, temporary at least, of the views of one of these elements, because untimely disclosure might have brought open rupture. However, I had muddled on as best I could, learning much tact and diplomacy and various mediatorial devices as the years rolled by.