tion and competition. There can be no real
compromise in the field of these moral possessions and appreciations.
_We_ must be Americans, and react with American ideas. True
nationalists everywhere appear to recognize and to be guided by this
truth. We cannot voluntarily lay aside our own beliefs nor help
believing they are right, although we may see that were we differently
situated we might change them.

There are three things at least, as regards our mores that cannot be
accomplished. For this we may take our evidence and our warning from
Germany. Culture cannot be spread by force, since force does not
conquer spirit. Devotion to the basic principles of one's civilization
cannot rationally nor safely be extended to include all customs and
manners, so that we may assume that there is a right way in everything
which is ours and a wrong way which is foreign. The mores of a people
cannot be changed or manipulated by education and propaganda without
uprooting the moral structures of society. When we begin to practice a
Social-politik we enter upon dangerous ground.

Are we not, then, to take the attitude in education that _our culture
is an experimental culture and represents an experimental
civilization_? Although for us our ways and beliefs are final criteria
of values in conduct, and we cannot hope or wish to free ourselves
from them or to be guided by objective data, still we put them forward
in the spirit of the enquirer, rather than as eternal principles. If
this be right, we are not to guard our civilization jealously, hedge
it about with national jealousy and bigotry but rather send our
culture abroad on a mission. We are to understand and to teach the
culture of every other nation sympathetically, trusting to our own
foundations to hold firm. We must be so fortified in our own virtue
that we shall not be afraid to send our spirit abroad to compete with
whatever it shall meet in the old world or the new. This impulse to
extend one's culture and philosophy is a deep one, and we believe it
to be well-grounded. It has been said that the deepest impulse of
British imperialism has been to extend English ways of thought
throughout the world. There is truth in this. We may conclude also
that unless a nation can feel sincerely that it is founded upon
something that ought to endure and at least to have an opportunity to
become universal, it lacks a growth principle and its civilization is
not very secure. Certainly it lac