The Klan disperses, goes back to mingle with men, to meet all the stresses and the exigencies of life. But in each man there is a light that never before fell on sea or shore, that will lie upon the task that he is set to do, and, however hard and menial it may be, will transform that work into a beatitude. More than this: We have daily evidence that this light, in honor, kindness and charity, falls upon our fellow men along the pathway that they and we walk together. Surely there can be no hidden dangers in the assembling of men under such conditions, impelled by such motives, capable of such inspiration. If we undertake to build or maintain a civilization in which the moral and social idealisms of men are not mixed with the mortar in the structure, we shall most surely build for decline and decay. But if Americanism becomes a holy cause in which the souls of men are enlisted, in which service of our country and our country's service of the world is made first and foremost, then we shall build an empire indestructible; because, mingled with the cruder material there will be the elements that are everlasting. In such workmanship alone can there be security for those American institutions which we seek to save by the consecration of all we have and all we are. CHAPTER X Democracy as a Social System is on Trial In a preceding chapter I stated that we Americans are barely reproducing our numbers on our own soil. In comparison with the colored and foreign elements our percentage is every year being reduced. In full view, within a few decades at most, lies the new America. Perhaps it has been fear of giving offense to others, more likely it has been pure carelessness and individual selfishness on our part, which has prevented us from discussing our country of to-morrow. The new America, if the present tendencies continue, will be a nation composed of a majority of American white farmers only in the middle western and plains states. Black farmers will ultimately predominate throughout the coastal regions of the South and the Mississippi Delta, and Japanese farmers will rapidly multiply their numbers on the Pacific coast. But the ever-increasing city population already numbers over half the nation. This city population in the North and East contains to-day about fifteen per cent. of original Americans. Presently this diminishing element will count only a few capitalists and professional persons. The majority of the business class, even, will be composed of Greeks, Jews, Germans, Italians and their descendants. The great working class of the cities is even now composed of two elements. First, there are the skilled workers, mainly British, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians, with their immediate descendants. The unskilled working people of the cities, always tending to submerge the skilled, are composed of Italians, Negroes, Slavs, Jews, French-Canadians, and thirty-odd other elements from the south and east of Europe and from Asia.