influence of the West as a form of
society, brings with it new problems of social adjustment, new demands
for considering our past ideals and our present needs.

Let us recall the conditions of the foreign relations along our borders,
the dangers that wait us if we fail to unite in the solution of our
domestic problems. Let us recall those internal evidences of the
destruction of our old social order. If we take to heart this warning,
we shall do well also to recount our historic ideals, to take stock of
those purposes, and fundamental assumptions that have gone to make the
American spirit and the meaning of America in world history.

First of all, there was the ideal of discovery, the courageous
determination to break new paths, indifference to the dogma that because
an institution or a condition exists, it must remain. All American
experience has gone to the making of the spirit of innovation; it is in
the blood and will not be repressed.

Then, there was the ideal of democracy, the ideal of a free
self-directing people, responsive to leadership in the forming of
programs and their execution, but insistent that the procedure should be
that of free choice, not of compulsion.

But there was also the ideal of individualism. This democratic society
was not a disciplined army, where all must keep step and where the
collective interests destroyed individual will and work. Rather it was a
mobile mass of freely circulating atoms, each seeking its own place and
finding play for its own powers and for its own original initiative. We
cannot lay too much stress upon this point, for it was at the very heart
of the whole American movement. The world was to be made a better world
by the example of a democracy in which there was freedom of the
individual, in which there was the vitality and mobility productive of
originality and variety.

Bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance of
unlimited resources open to all men for the taking, and considering the
recoil of the common man when he saw the outcome of the competitive
struggle for these resources as the supply came to its end over most of
the nation, we can understand the reaction against individualism and in
favor of drastic assertion of the powers of government. Legislation is
taking the place of the free lands as the means of preserving the ideal
of democracy. But at the same time it is endangering the other pioneer
ideal of creative and competitive in