they look for revolutions, mutations, a new era in politics and everywhere in the social life. For them, after the war, the world is to be a new world. Fate will make a new deal. Others appear to believe that after the flurry is over we shall settle down to something very much like the old order. These are conservative people, who neither desire nor expect great changes. Others take a more moderate course. While improvement is their great word, they are inclined to believe that the new order will grow step by step out of the old, and that good will come out of the 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 life, are, and what in the most general way we are to think and do, if the present generation is to make the most of its opportunities as a factor in the work of conscious evolution.

The bibliography shows the main sources of the facts and the theories that have been drawn upon in writing the book. Some of the chapters have been read in a little different form as lectures before President G. Stanley Hall's seminar at Clark University. More or less of repetition, made necessary in order to make these papers, which were read at considerable intervals, independent of one another, has been allowed to remain. Perhaps in the printed form this reiteration will help to emphasize the general psychological basis of the study.

CONTENTS