TO THE AMERICAN STUDENT.

What is the American student going to do with American civilization and what part does he intend that it shall play on the world's stage?

For, if American civilization is not to be in his hands, his education has little meaning. Civilization is a matter of ideas. The character of any societywhether that of a cannibal island or Catholic nunneryis determined by the ideas of the units which compose it. The Indians who inhabited this country five hundred or five thousand years ago were, in point of physical strength, emotional vigour, bravery, readiness to fight certainly the equal of ourselves; they were dealing with the same soil and raw materials of nature. The factors which make our society somewhat different from theirs are intellectual and moral.

The work of the American student stands for the perpetuation and development of these intellectual and moral factors-if his work touches the heart of things at all. If you say that your education does not bear upon the things which account for the difference between ourselves and palaeolithic man, upon the perceptions which make that difference possible and are, let us hope, destined to widen it; if the kind of ideas now being absorbed in American universities is not the kind of ideas which have any influence upon American society and determine its character -then obviously your education is not bearing upon

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the vital realities. It means either that its teachings. are not concerned with the perceptions upon which civilization rests, (in the development of which of course the exact and physical sciences are as important an element as, or a more important one than, the moral and social sciences, philosophy and speculation properly speaking) or that it has not included the problem of keeping that structure upon its proper foundations-the problem of applying the result of your work to real ends in your society.

Now no person whose life, like that of the present writer, happens to have been passed in large part abroad, can fail to have some dim realization of the fact that the generation now upon us in the New World might play a dominant role in achieving for the new society, and consequently for human society as a whole, one of those intellectual transformations which are at the base of all real social development. Such a transformation, for instance, was that conception of toleration which gave western mankind a certain measure of religious and political freedom; or, the establishment of that inductive reasoning as a method of testing truth which alone made possible our modern science and the conquest of nature which it accomplishes.

Not that it is necessarily America's mission to save the world. The first duty of every country is to her own people, and perhaps America has her work cut out in settling her own destiny, in liberating American civilization from the grosser evils which the older communities have bequeathed to her.

But in the accomplishment of this latter task, in the creation on the Western Hemisphere of a better human

society than has yet been evolved, she must in the nature of things also achieve the former. To the degree to which the New World succeeds for itself it must by virtue of its special position be the teacher of mankind as a whole.

So far, unhappily, America has taken over without fundamental correction those basic conceptions of the methods of human association which have shaped and colored and which explain the character of older European society; and so long as the intellectual foundations are the same, built upon the same mechanism, guided by the same principles, the structure is pretty certain to possess the same deep-seated defects; of more imposing appearance perhaps, with the paint a bit fresher, but with all the dangers none the less real and none the less failing to fulfil the needs and aspirations of its builders.

Now if at this point you hurry on to see what this open letter really is about and conclude that it deals with the problem of war and international peace, you will wonder why I have indulged in this portentous introduction which you may deem to have little relevance to that problem.

Well, as a matter of fact, this letter deals only incidentally with war, for that is only one of the effects which flow from a cause creating a far wider range of evils than those which we generally associate with it. You will probably agree readily enough that the diversion of national wealth, energy and attention which goes to war and its preparation among all the peoples of the world pushes into the background a whole series of deep and pressing political, social and industrial problems; and involves a treatment of them