It is obvious that the day for the old individualism has passed. Whether one looks at art and literature or at the general activities of American society, it is clear that the isolated individual is incompetent to carry on his necessary tasks. This is not saying that we have outgrown the individual. We shall never outgrow the individual. We need for every page of literature and for every adequate performance of society more highly perfected individuals. Some one said of Edgar Allan Poe that he did not know enough to be a great poet. All around us and every day we find individuals who do not know enough for their specific job; men who do not love enough, men in whom the power of will is too feeble. Such men, as individuals, must know and love and will more adequately; and this not merely to perfect their functioning as individuals, but to fulfill their obligations to contemporary society. A true spiritual democracy will never be reached until highly trained individuals are united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every individual defect in training, defect in aspiration, defect in passion, becomes ultimately a defect in society. Let us turn, then, to those conditions of American society which have prepared the way for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellowship. We shall instantly perceive the relation of these general social conditions to the specific performances of our men of letters. We have repeatedly noted that our most characteristic literature is what has been called a citizen literature. It is the sort of writing which springs from a sense of the general needs of the community and which has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat," is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master. This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of fellowship.