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Period has become the exception. The earlier homogeneity of American
society has been impaired, and no authoritative and edifying, but
conscious, social ideal has as yet taken its place.

The specialized organization of American industry, politics, and labor,
and the increasingly severe special discipline imposed upon the
individual, are not to be considered as evils. On the contrary, they are
indications of greater practical efficiency, and they contain a promise
of individual moral and intellectual emancipation. But they have their
serious and perilous aspects, because no sufficient provision has been
made for them in the national democratic tradition. What it means is
that the American nation is being confronted by a problem which the
earlier national democracy expected to avoid--the social problem. By the
social problem is usually meant the problem of poverty; but grave
inequalities of wealth are merely the most dangerous and distressing
expression of fundamental differences among the members of a society of
interest and of intellectual and moral standards. In its deepest aspect,
consequently, the social problem is the problem of preventing such
divisions from dissolving the society into which they enter--of keeping
such a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole.

In this country the solution of the social problem demands the
substitution of a conscious social ideal for the earlier instinctive
homogeneity of the American nation. That homogeneity has disappeared
never to return. We should not want it to return, because it was
dependent upon too many sacrifices of individual purpose and
achievement. But a democracy cannot dispense with the solidarity which
it imparted to American life, and in one way or another such solidarity
must be restored. There is only one way in which it can be restored, and
that is by means of a democratic social ideal, which shall give
consistency to American social life, without entailing any essential
sacrifice of desirable individual and class distinctions. I have used
the word "restoration" to describe this binding and healing process; but
the consistency which would result from the loyal realization of a
comprehensive coherent democratic social ideal would differ radically
from the earlier American homogeneity of feeling. The solidarity which
it would impart to American society would have its basis in feeling and
its results in good fellowship; but it must always r