he evil only in so far as we
strive to make it. We shall advance along the old lines of progress,
but faster, perhaps, and with life attuned to a higher note.

The writer of this book must confess that he belongs in a general way
to the third species of these prophets. There is a natural order of
progress, but the good must, we may suppose, also be worked for step
by step. The war will have placed in our hands no golden gift of a new
society; both the ways and the direction of progress must be sought
and determined by ideals. The point of view in regard to progress, at
least as a working hypothesis, becomes an educational one, in a broad
sense. Our future we must make. We shall not make it by politics. The
institutions with which politics deals are dangerous cards to play.
There is too much convention clinging to them, and they are too
closely related to all the supports of the social order. The
industrial system, the laws, the institutions of property and rights,
the form of government, we change at our own risk. Naturally many
radical minds look to the abrupt alteration of these fundamental
institutions for the cure of existing evils, and others look there
furtively for the signs of coming revolution, and the destruction of
all we have gained thus far by civilization. But at a different level,
where life is more plastic--in the lives of the young, and in the vast
unshaped forms of the common life everywhere, all this is different.
We do not expect abrupt changes here nor quick and visible results.
Experimentation is still possible and comparatively safe. There is no
one institution of this common and unformed life, not even the school
itself, that supports the existing structures, so that if we move it
in the wrong way, everything else will fall. When we see we are wrong,
there is still time to correct our mistakes.

Our task, then, is to see what the forces are that have brought us to
where we stand now, and to what influences they are to be subjected,
if they are to carry us onward and upward in our course. Precisely
what the changes in government or anywhere in the social order should
be is not the chief interest, from this point of view. The details of
the constitution of an international league, the practical adjustments
to be made in the fields of labor, and in the commerce of nations,
belong to a different order of problems. We wish rather to see what
the main currents of life, especially in our own national l