t of which they are in search, so
that we may think the only way to thwart them is to find some object
closely resembling theirs which may surreptitiously be substituted for
them. These motives are indeed broad and general. We must do with them
what education must do all along the line, find the fundamental
desires they contain and utilize the energies expressed in these
desires in the performance of functions--these functions being the
purposes most fundamentally at work in the social life or representing
our social ideals.

Such an ideal of education invites us to work beneath the political
and all formal, institutional and merely practical affairs and to lay
our foundations in the depths of human nature. There we shall begin to
establish or to lay hold upon continuity, and there bring together the
fragments of purpose which we find in the life we seek to direct. This
which one can so easily say in a sentence is, of course, the whole
problem of education. These things are what we must work for in
establishing and sustaining our democracy, for we must, to this end,
make forces work together, instead of separately and antagonistically
as they themselves tend to do. It is the same problem, at heart, in
the education of the individual--to harmonize desires, and to create a
higher synthesis of energies than nature itself will yield. And in the
new and wider field of international life that opens up before us, the
problem is still educational. The educational forces of the world must
begin now the gigantic task of national character building. The spirit
of the nations, the divergent motives of power, of glory, of comfort
and pleasure-seeking that are said to dominate nations, the justice,
and loyalty, and steadfastness and truth which at least they put upon
their banners and into their songs must be made to work together in a
practical and progressive world, or to make such a world possible.

The Germans like to interpret the tricolor of their flag as signifying
_Durch Nacht und Blut zur Licht_. But plainly the night and bloodshed
do not always lead to light, and of themselves they cannot. Nor, must
we think, need the world continue always to seek its way toward light
only through the blackness and guilt of wars and revolutions. In some
distant day, let us think, justice and morality will have been bred
into all the social life, and life will be lived more in the spirit of
art and religion. Then they will see that, under t