had, as we all
realize, thus far an unusual career. We have been able to assimilate
foreign elements with great rapidity. We may not be so fortunate in
the future. Distances which have severed our new peoples from their
old ties have become strangely shortened by the war. Our problems of
adjustment have become more subtile and complex. The necessity of
succeeding in unifying our population is more urgent. Therefore our
future development, as a nation, becomes to a greater extent a process
of conscious direction; what we have done naively and by sheer force
of our powers of growth, we must do now, it is likely, more
deliberately and efficiently.

We have before us in America the highly important and by no means
easy task of harmonizing, under new conditions, all sorts of forces
and desires by directing them in ways and toward ends which cannot
now be wholly determined. There is both a psychological and a
pedagogical aspect of the situation. Psychology must perform for
American life something very much like a psycho-analysis; we should
expect to see as a result of the war a greatly increased interest, on
the part of the American people, in themselves; self-understanding
and self-interpretation, we should suppose, would be advanced; all
the sciences of human nature we should think would be called upon to
help us to make a new American history and to formulate the purposes
of our national life.

On the pedagogical side we might expect reasonably to see a deepened
sincerity on the part of all who in any way stand in the position of
teachers. We are dependent upon leaders in a democratic country, and
all leaders in whatever place in society would now, one might hope,
feel a heightened sense of duty, both to understand and to influence
American life, to represent in their own persons and teachings the
highest ideals, and indeed to become truly creative forces in
society. Boutroux says that Germany is a product of an external
phenomenon--_education_. America, we should say, must become more and
more a product of an internal phenomenon--_education_. That is, the
forces that will continue to shape our country must be in the form of
leadership growing out of the best impulses and the true meaning of
our civilization. No forces will make of us something we are not by
nature; our strength must continue to come from within, but it is the
aristocratic spirit, the aristocracy of genius in the fields of
intellect, morality and art t