The most important fact we can realize about society is that to every one of us that comes into the world it is something given, irreducible. We are as little responsible for it as we are for our own birth. From our point of view it is just as much a non-premeditated, non-created, irrational portion of our environment, as is the weather. Entering it in the closing years of the Nineteenth century, we find it as it exists and as it has developed through the centuries of human change. We had nothing whatever to do with its being as it is, and by the time we have reached such years of discretion as dimly to understand the complex of institutions around us, we are implicated in it and compromised by it as to be little able to effect any change in its irresistible bulk. No man who ever lived found himself in a different relation to society from what we find ourselves. We all enter as individuals into an organized herd-whole in which we are as significant as a drop of water in the ocean, and against which we can about as much prevail. Whether we shall act in the interests of ourselves or of society is, therefore, an entirely academic question. For entering as we do a society which is all prepared for us, so toughly grounded and immalleable that even if we came equipped with weapons to assail it and make good some individual preference, we could not in our puny strength achieve anything against it. But we come entirely helpless. II THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS (June, 1917) To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will