Felix Adler, lecturer and writer on moral and ethical subjects, was born in Alzey, Germany, in 1851. He received the degree A.B. from Columbia University, and continued his studies at Berlin and at the University of Heidelberg. From 1874 to 1876 he was professor of Hebrew at Cornell University. Since 1902 he has been professor of political and social ethics at Columbia. He has produced numerous works on moral and ethical topics. In 1915 there was published his book, “The World Crisis and its Meaning,” the third chapter of which is here quoted in part. Adler’s keen interest in international ethics has been expressed in several addresses delivered before the New York Society of Ethical Culture, which was founded by him in 1876. Among other things he pleads for altruism among the nations, and truthfulness, and believes in a purified nationalism instead of anti- or inter-nationalism. THE AMERICAN IDEAL The American ideal is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man. Necessarily it is an ethical ideal, a spiritual ideal; otherwise it would be nonsense. For, taking men as they are, they are assuredly not equal. The differences between them, on the contrary, are glaring. The common man is not uncommonly fine spiritually, but rather, seen from the outside, “uncommonly” common. It is therefore an ethical instinct that has turned the people toward this ethical conception. It is true that in Germany and in England, side by side with the efficiency and the mastery ideals, there has always existed this same spiritual or religious ideal; side by side with the stratification and entitulation of men, the labelling of them as lower and higher, as empirically better or worse, there has always been the recognition that men are equal,--equal, that is to say, in church, but not outside, equal in the hereafter, but not in this life. If we would fathom the real depth and inner significance of the democratic ideal as it slumbers or dreams in the heart of America, rather than as yet explicit, we must say that it is an ideal which seeks to overcome this very dualism, seeks to take the spiritual conception of human equality out of the church and put it into the market place, to take it from far off celestial realms for realization upon this earth. For men are not equal in the empirical sense; they are equal only in the spiritual sense, equal only in the sense that the margin of achievement of which any person is capable, be it wide or narrow, is infinitesimal compared with his infinite spiritual possibilities.