any one party to hamper their free action,
and who, being indebted to progressive party leaders in every one of
the political divisions, have friends in every one, may and should do
much to help progressive and independent men voters to solve the
deeper problems of our political situation with clarity of judgment
and true patriotic devotion.[21]

=Difficulty in Being a Good American Citizen.=--We have the most mixed
of populations. We have the greatest variety of inherited national and
racial backgrounds in the electorate. We have the widest stretches of
country, and therefore the most difficult adjustments to any
centralized system of government. We have the most mobile common life,
our people moving from State to State, and from one sectional interest
to another with bewildering frequency. We have as yet no universal
schooling even in the rudiments of reading and writing of the English
language to serve as common basis for common knowledge. We have a lack
of ethical unity in many basic problems of the family, the industrial
order, the type of tax-supported schooling, and the ideals of
patriotism. These conditions seem to make it more difficult to become
a first-class American citizen than to achieve political competency in
any other government on earth. Even with the confusion in countries
abroad, even in the European tangles of feuds and suspicions and the
horrible weight of starvation and physical weakness of the Old World,
we may yet, if serious in our judgment of American life, soberly
acknowledge the greatest difficulties of all political adjustment
which lie within our own political life. Such acknowledgment is not to
any true American of the older stock and the more noble patriotism a
confession of discouragement or an apology for social failures in our
common life. It is rather, for all nobler and wiser citizens, a
stimulant to constant vigilance in defence of inherited liberties and
a call to deeper consecration and more devoted service in our
political relationship. Finally, the father and the mother state does
not try or want to live to itself alone. We have learned that
selfishness in the private family leads to social ills and weakness
which society in general, which surrounds all private families, must
correct and amend. Are we not learning in the awful light of the
recent world conflagration that selfishness in nations leads to social
ills and weakness which can be corrected only by world organization