The seeing of self as, with all other selves, creating, demands a new attitude and a new activity in man. The fallacy of self-and-others fades away and there is only self-in-and-through-others, only others so firmly rooted in the self and so fruitfully growing there that sundering is impossible. We must now enter upon modes of living commensurate with this thought. What American politics need to-day is positive principles. We do not want to “regulate” our trusts, to “restrain” our bosses. The measure of our progress is never what we give up, but what we add. It may be necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile of the dead branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of the flourishing state of the garden. The group organization movement means the substitution of intention for accident, of organized purpose for scattered desire. It rests on the solid assumption that this is a man-made not a machine-made world, that men and women are capable of constructing their own life, and that not upon socialism or any rule or any order or any plan or any utopia can we rest our hearts, but only on the force of a united and creative citizenship. We are asking for group organization in order to leap at once from the region of theory, of which Americans are so fond, to a practical scheme of living. We hear a good deal of academic talk about “the functioning of the social mind”; what does it all amount to? We have no social mind yet, so we have no functioning of the social mind. We want the directive force of consciously integrated thought and will. All our ideas of conscious self-determination lead us to a new method: it is not merely that we must be allowed to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern ourselves; it is not only that we must be given “free speech,” we must learn a speech that is free; we are not given rights, we create rights; it is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will created. Politics have one task only—to create. To create? But what are politics to create? The state? The state is now discredited in many quarters. The extremists cry, “The state is dead, Down with the state.” And it is by no means the extremists alone who are saying that our present state has played us false and that therefore we are justified in abolishing it. An increasing number of men are thinking what one writer has put into words, “We have passed from the _régime_ of the state to that of the groups.” We must see if it is necessary to abolish the state in order to get the advantage of the group.