If now we look into our American life we are brought face to face with the fact that in our haste to get rich or even to meet new conditions that must legitimately be met we are in danger of losing all of our old standards of conduct, of training, and of morality. America is still _bourgeois_. We have hardly begun to reap the real fruits of rich, abiding culture, and because we have not we are still wasteful, superficial, and insincere, in our economic life, in our church life, in our courts, in literature, in education, in every phase of activity. Consider national organization. We were beguiled into thinking that our country as a whole was rich, well arrayed, amply prepared to take care of itself, invincible beyond question. As the first six months of the war slowly dragged by in their agonizing course, the conviction gradually forced itself upon us that we were only in the elementary class in economics, that we were neither organized nor prepared, and that it was after all vitally necessary for the government to assume official charge of the railroads. With our ideas of democracy we had slowly drifted into crass individualism, and sooner or later that was forced to mean selfishness. One year after the opening of the war we still had the sad spectacle of senators fiercely assailing the administration because of the tardiness of its shipping and airplane programs. We should not be too hasty in finding a scapegoat for what after all is a national delinquency. We had indeed produced such masters in large organization as Morgan and Hill and Harriman; but the talents of such men had not been utilized in Washington. Slowly we have learned that our country needs its very best brains, needs them always, and that it is folly to play petty politics when questions of great national interest are at stake. To _politics_ as we have long understood the term the present war should give the death-blow. Let responsibilities gravitate to those who are able to shoulder them without the endless coil of officialdom. Let democracy mean the perfect freedom of the individual, the _equal_ freedom of _all_ individuals, but _not_ license, and not that the rights of one individual shall endanger the rights of most. When the war began we availed ourselves of the talents of Thomas Alva Edison. Suppose we had done this ten years before. No, we were rich, comfortable, safe, invincible. Suddenly our smug self-complacency received a shock. One great result of this war is going to be to give us new ideas of efficiency in our national government. We shall place greater emphasis on having not only experts in important minor positions, but also men of supreme business talents in the places of greatest responsibility. We shall have a new searching of our whole system of party government, with its arbitrary exits and entrances, and its despicable spoils system. We shall have a glorified, a chastened, a regenerated United