But material gains may not be the summum bonum of the express business. The express service is much more than an important business undertaking, and it is much more even than a valuable agent in quickening the industrial activities of the United States--it is, or rather it can be, one of the most serviceable media for the development of an American culture as that culture expresses itself in the economic processes of the nation. The future of the nation's express service is basically a problem of national morale. In the decades before April 6, 1917, there was no United States esprit, no United States national life, no United States unity. There were only separatist esprits; there was only class life; there was only geographical unity. The war found us an unintegrated miscellany, and our Government a creature strangely and even desirably aloof from the thoughts and aspirations of our daily lives. And now, almost overnight, sacrifice in France and at home has welded us into one people. Shall we remain one, or shall we revert to factions, to factions either at loggerheads with one another, or else indifferent one to the other? Assuredly we shall soon re-degenerate into warring factions unless our still largely inchoate strivings for national unity can discover vehicles to carry them forward. A Government which has become truly a people's Government will long continue in the United States only as it draws unto itself and maintains both the material and the immaterial agencies which dive down to the depths of our national daily existence and bind us together. More powerfully than any other of these forces, our vast public utilities can, as an integral part of the Government, retain our Government as the hub of our universe. And although of all the public utilities the railroads undoubtedly present the most hopeful source of this re-vitalization of our national life, yet a Government express service can also help in no small degree, both in itself and as a sharer in the entire general urge towards a democratically-socialized state, to preserve and even to invigorate the national morale.