failure. But far severer tests may be in store for us. Within a short time our social organization has become infinitely more complex than formerly, and the dividing lines between the different classes have become more difficult to cross. It is growing harder and harder for the eastern man to understand the mental and moral attitude of his western compatriot, and for both to understand the Californian. The multitudes of our citizens whose ancestry is other than British do not think and feel in every way as the British descendant does, and in the sections where they predominate a new type of American is gradually evolving, different in many ways from the type the world used to know. We are no longer a Protestant people; and who will say that we always comprehend how our Catholic fellowcitizen looks at things. Worse than all, we now have what we used to boast of not having: a proletariat, a class of men sunk into a kind of poverty that is not merely a temporary condition from which ability and self-control can raise the poor man or his children, but a poverty which constitutes a hopeless, helpless limbo, a social cesspool of ignorance, vice, and degeneracy. Surely, here are many causes for social and political struggles that may in the future shake nation and society to their deepest foundations.

To those who see the hope of mankind in a perfected and purified Democracy, the right solution, by our democratic society, of such a problem as that of forestry reform would be of particularly

It

cheerful omen. That Democracy can repulse foreign aggression and even aggressively exert its masterfulness, we know. That it is able to cope with problems which arouse the depths of all men's emotions and bring to white heat the fire of patriotic and moral fervor, the solving of the slavery ques tion has taught us. But this question of forestry cannot be solved by sudden bursts of enthusiasm, and does not appeal to man's emotional nature. must be solved by seventy millions of men and women, each of whom has his own particular interests to make him indifferent to what concerns him little individually. This must be done by simple, cold-blooded, calculating reason, in the face of all the opposition which can be generated by habits contracted during seven generations, conflicting interests of private parties, and the dead-weight of unreasoning conservatism. If Democracy is able to perform such a feat as this, it need not shrink from the more exciting tasks which the future may have in store for it.

It looks as if American Democracy were going to perform the feat. Let every lover of his country do his part in the work.

INDEX