=Difficulty in Being a Good American Citizen.=--We have the most mixed of populations. We have the greatest variety of inherited national and racial backgrounds in the electorate. We have the widest stretches of country, and therefore the most difficult adjustments to any centralized system of government. We have the most mobile common life, our people moving from State to State, and from one sectional interest to another with bewildering frequency. We have as yet no universal schooling even in the rudiments of reading and writing of the English language to serve as common basis for common knowledge. We have a lack of ethical unity in many basic problems of the family, the industrial order, the type of tax-supported schooling, and the ideals of patriotism. These conditions seem to make it more difficult to become a first-class American citizen than to achieve political competency in any other government on earth. Even with the confusion in countries abroad, even in the European tangles of feuds and suspicions and the horrible weight of starvation and physical weakness of the Old World, we may yet, if serious in our judgment of American life, soberly acknowledge the greatest difficulties of all political adjustment which lie within our own political life. Such acknowledgment is not to any true American of the older stock and the more noble patriotism a confession of discouragement or an apology for social failures in our common life. It is rather, for all nobler and wiser citizens, a stimulant to constant vigilance in defence of inherited liberties and a call to deeper consecration and more devoted service in our political relationship. Finally, the father and the mother state does not try or want to live to itself alone. We have learned that selfishness in the private family leads to social ills and weakness which society in general, which surrounds all private families, must correct and amend. Are we not learning in the awful light of the recent world conflagration that selfishness in nations leads to social ills and weakness which can be corrected only by world organization for world well-being? =Our Country a Member of the Family of Nations.=--That America we love and would serve with a higher patriotism and a wiser political method is a part of the great family of nations, and if it has learned any lessons of fatherly and motherly function of state care and development of the individual life, it has learned those lessons not for isolated national culture, but as a part of the universal schooling in the gospel of human brotherhood.