duce as much as possible, nor to get as large a share as you can of what has been produced. The ideal will rather be that every man shall enjoy his day's work and that a good article shall come out at the end of it. Beauty, which we have banished from our common life, with such dreadful consequences to us all, so that many of us have almost lost the taste for excellence; beauty, which cannot be bought for gold and riches and is so shy of the places where men make money, will return with healing on its wings.

The creation of beauty-by which I do not mean mere pictures to hang in our drawing-rooms or ornaments to place on the chimney piece-but excellent articles of every description, things which it will be a delight to make, a delight to have, a delight to use things which plainly declare that the workman has enjoyed his day's work and that a good article has come out at the end of it-this will provide a slowly widening field for human intelligence and human energy. It will not do away with competition: but instead of competing as heretofore as to who can produce most, we shall compete as to who can produce besta very different thing-a kind of competition in which men can freely indulge without the least danger that they will learn to hate one another in the process. It will teach them to love one another. Meanwhile the true state will remain just as invisible as it now is. But wherever two or three are gathered together, there it will be in the midst of them.

In conclusion I will add one word more in the hope of persuading the reader that the invisible state is the real state. Who are the members of the state? What are they? Where are they? Shall we say that the members of the state are the sum total of the persons who happen to be alive at the moment? Shall we say that a man remains a member of the state only so long as he draws the breath of life and ceases to be a member the moment that breath goes out of his body? What then of the thousands, of the tens of thousands of men, who have laid down their lives for the state in these three years? When the bullet struck them down, when the bursting shell blew them to fragments, did they cease then and there to be members of the state for which

they had sacrificed their lives? I trow not. I claim them as the dearest and the closest and the most influential of all my fellowcitizens in the great commonwealth. And yet they have no votes, and yet they are invisible! Votes? If votes could be given to those who have most influence, to whom would they be given first? They would be given to the invisible multitudes of the mighty dead-not to these recent dead alone, but to millions behind them, rank behind rank in the long tale of the buried generations. That is not the language of psychical research. It is the language of severe political philosophy. It is the statement of a fact.

WHAT SHALL WE WIN WITH THE WAR?1

ERNEST HUNTER WRIGHT

[Ernest Hunter Wright (1882- was born in Virginia and prepared for college in the schools of that state. He was graduated from Columbia University in 1905, and received the Doctor's degree from the same institution in 1910. Since 1910 he has been a member of the English Department of Columbia University, and now holds the rank of Assistant Professor. The article here reprinted is an interesting forecast of some of the consequences of the war.]

In material gain we do not ask a groat's worth from the war; that is understood. We shall give billions for freedom, but do not want a cent in booty. We are ready to pour out our blood that the world may be rescued, but we would not barter a drop of it for patches of territory. If the words in which we renounce the spoils in advance have grown common with us to the point of triteness, that very fact is truly remarkable. Except that we would avoid the semblance of satisfaction, at present, of all times, we might pause to wonder how often hitherto such an ideal as this, now commonplace, has moved a people of free choice to an equal strife and sacrifice. What nation before has offered all the gold and all the lives that may be needed solely 1From The Century, vol. xcvi, p. 339 (July, 1918).

that an idea may prevail? But let the question be anything except a boast. It implies a mere fact, accepted as self-evident among us, and we have not thought to plume ourselves upon it. Not we, but the world, has learned it. It is one great thing that we have already won out of the war.

Of immaterial things there are also a number that we do not ask. We crave no vengeance. Less than twenty years ago millions of us made patriotism vocal in the cry, "Remember the Maine!" Now, despite hymns of hate turned finally against ourselves especially, no one is urging us to remember the Lusitania. We are not trying to forget it, but we have no need to spur our zeal with slogans clamoring for penalties unpayable for deeds irreparable, done to us or done to others. Nor are we in the lists to win mere honor. We would not lose it; we dearly hope that when the clouds of battle pass we shall have as ample a measure of it as our friends in the struggle have already gained. Yet we should never have plunged into a national duel, any more than our citizens engage in private ones, to settle a point of honor solely, however important that may be. On the contrary, even in humiliation we were willing to endure, as in settlement we stand ready to propose "any unprecedented thing" that promises to make the world safer. It is solely because safety will come in no other way that we commit ourselves to fight to the last ounce of our manhood for its preservation. Whoever hopes for less than that, or whoever lusts for more, is not of us. Of that we are certain.

And yet it may be that, if we fight like men for that cause, we shall win much more. That we do not demand more is the best reason for believing that we may receive it. Mainly the gain may come, as is usual with immaterial gains, unsought, inevitably; but we may possibly do much to speed its coming and assure its permanency if we form some anticipation of it. Changes of vast extent are certainly coming upon us. The body social cannot be stirred and shaken in unprecedented action only to relapse into its former habitudes. Ancient questions reviewed by us in this crisis will, some of them, receive new answers, and new questions will arise. We shall have need more than ever

to "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." May we, then, with our eyes still fastened on the one goal that must be won, consider for a moment, even thus early, what other winnings may be ours?

We may win unity. To many of the more discerning among us, of whatever social creed, the lack of it has long seemed one of our failings. "La France," in Michelet's appealing phrase, "est une personne," and lovers of that land have always felt the term as something more than a figure of speech. Hardly could the warmest admirer of the United States have used it of his own country a year ago. America was not a "person;" she was an aggregation. We had begun as disunited colonies uncommonly diverse in social or religious or economic aims, and the crisis that made us free came far short of making us one. Contrarieties persisted through the years when each state was going its own precarious way, and, when the intolerable result forced a closer federation, burst into flames of antagonism that were smothered with difficulty, and only partly, by the compromises of the Constitution. For two more generations they smoldered on, and then flared up in a wall of fire searing its wide way between the two camps of hatred into which it had parted the land. The first of our crises failed to unite us, and the second was disastrously divisive.

All that is over now, we say, and thank Heaven. Well, yes, if we mean that the notion of secession is dead and that the memory of Mosby on the one hand, or of the march through Georgia on the other, is all but obliterated. But if we mean that, in the mass of the people especially, no prejudice hangs over from the ancient time, that none arises out of the still different social ideals of New York and Charleston, or out of the far more different interests of the Southern planter and the Northern banker and merchant, we might be nearer to the truth.

Whatever was happening in Massachusetts, south of the Potomac boys even of the second generation after Appomattox were brought up in considerable distrust of the offspring of the Yankee. I can vouch for it that the scion of the new-comer from the North had a hard time in school in my day in the nineties.

Many a day we sent him home blubbering his r's to his mother, and the principal was not very hard on us for it. One morning we had a holiday to see the soldiers go off to Cuba. We sped them on their way with clamorous patriotism, and when the train was out of sight we turned our surplus energy to pummeling the little carpet-bagger from Vermont. A few months later the President passed through our town, and in a speech gave thanks that a common cause had at last made us into "one country and one people." But it was not quite true, as the little carpet-bagger had reason to know later; the cause had not been great enough, the struggle intense enough, to bring unison. There was still a North and a South.

More strikingly there is an East and a West, or several Easts and several Wests. A land so vast and so diversified has enforcedly developed different types and clashing interests, and its rapid growth has left its people little leisure to reason themselves into like-mindedness. And state governments have aided physical geography in this matter. In one state you may do business for which in another you would go to jail; in one you may be married and crazy, in another single and sane. In the intelligent society of certain regions a young man who has no socialistic leaning is in danger of being considered unthinking, while in another region to confess to socialism would be to court the estate of outcast.

However little we may habitually think of it, the differences between the Californian and the Vermonter, the Mormon and the South Carolinian, are rather extreme for a country so young and perfectly at peace with itself. Think of the charges and countercharges we have heard recently from one part of the country accusing another part of apathy toward the Great War, think of the campaigns launched in one region with the purpose of "waking up" another. The spectacle of a prominent author in New York challenging a Kansas bishop to raise a thousand dollars for a war charity, and offering in that glad case to retract her charges against Kansan hebetude, is a case in point.

The more disquieting sight of many delegates in Washington representing one region of the country as against or at the