The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual activity of its citizens. There is no state except through me. James’ deep-seated antagonism to the idealists is because of their assertion that the absolute is, always has been and always will be. The contribution of pragmatism is that we must work out the absolute. You are drugging yourselves, cries James, the absolute is real as far as you make it real, as far as you bring forth in tangible, concrete form all its potentialities. In the same way we have no state until we make one. This is the teaching of the new psychology. We have not to “postulate” all sorts of things as the philosophers do (“organic actuality of the moral order” etc.), we have to _live_ it; if we can make a moral whole then we shall know whether or not there is one. We cannot become the state imaginatively, but only actually through our group relations. Stamped with the image of All-State-potentiality we must be forever making the state. We are pragmatists in politics as the new school of philosophy is in religion: just as they say that we are one with God not by prayer and communion alone, but by doing the God-deed every moment, so we are one with the state by actualizing the latent state at every instant of our lives. As God appears only through us, so is the state made visible through the political man. We must gird up our loins, we must light our lamp and set forth, we must _do_ it. The federal state can be the moral state only through its being built anew from hour to hour by the activity of all its members. We have had within our memory three ideas of the individual’s relation to society: the individual as deserving “rights” _from_ society, next with a duty _to_ society, and now the idea of the individual as an activity _of_ society. Our relation to society is so close that there is no room for either rights or duties. This means a new ethics and a new politics. Citizenship is not a right nor a privilege nor a duty, but an activity to be exercised every moment of the time. Democracy does not exist unless each man is doing his part fully every minute, unless every one is taking his share in building the state-to-be. This is the trumpet call to men to-day. A creative citizenship must be made the force of American political life, a trained, responsible citizenship always in control creating always its own life. In most of the writing on American politics we find the demand for a “creative statesmanship” as the most pressing need of America to-day. It is indeed true that with so much crystallized conservatism and chaotic radicalism we need leadership and a constructive leadership, but the doctrine of true democracy is that every man is and must be a creative citizen.