nal fulfillment by means of intelligent collective
action. American nationality will never be fulfilled except under the
leadership of such men; and the American nation will never obtain the
necessary leadership unless it seeks seriously the redemption of its
national responsibility.

Such being the situation in general, how can the duty and the
opportunity of the individual at the present time best be defined? Is he
obliged to sit down and wait until the edifying, economic, political,
and social transformation has taken place? Or can he by his own
immediate behavior do something effectual both to obtain individual
emancipation and to accelerate the desirable process of social
reconstruction? This question has already been partially answered by the
better American individual; and it is, I believe, being answered in the
right way. The means which he is taking to reach a more desirable
condition of individual independence, and inferentially to add a little
something to the process of national fulfillment, consist primarily and
chiefly in a thoroughly zealous and competent performance of his own
particular job; and in taking this means of emancipation and fulfillment
he is both building better and destroying better than he knows.

The last generation of Americans has taken a better method of asserting
their individual independence than that practiced by the heretics of the
Middle Period. Those who were able to gain leadership in business and
politics sought to justify their success by building up elaborate
industrial and political organizations which gave themselves and their
successors peculiar individual opportunities. On the other hand, the men
of more specifically intellectual interests tacitly abandoned the
Newer-Worldliness of their predecessors and began unconsciously but
intelligently to seek the attainment of some excellence in the
performance of their own special work. In almost every case they
discovered that the first step in the acquisition of the better
standards of achievement was to go abroad. If their interests were
scholarly or scientific, they were likely to matriculate at one of the
German universities for the sake of studying under some eminent
specialist. If they were painters, sculptors, or architects, they
flocked to Paris, as the best available source of technical instruction
in the arts. Wherever the better schools were supposed to be, there the
American pupils gathered; and the consequence was d