And just as we might judge completely and criticise and improve that
outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants and with an
entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
births and development. _Any collective human enterprise,
institution, movement, party or state, is to be judged as a whole and
completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful
births, and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due
to its influence made by each generation of citizens born under its
influence towards a higher and ampler standard of life_.

Or putting the thing in a slightly different phrasing, the New
Republican idea amounts to this: the serious aspect of our private
lives, the general aspect of all our social and co-operative
undertakings, is to prepare as well as we possibly can a succeeding
generation, which shall prepare still more capably for still better
generations to follow. We are passing as a race out of a state of
affairs when the unconscious building of the future was attained by
individualistic self-seeking (altogether unenlightened or enlightened
only by the indirect moralizing influence of the patriotic instinct and
religion) into a clear consciousness of our co-operative share in that
process. That is the essential idea my New Republic would personify and
embody. In the past man was made, generation after generation, by
forces beyond his knowledge and control. Now a certain number of men
are coming to a provisional understanding of some at least of these
forces that go to the Making of Man. To some of us there is being given
the privilege and responsibility of knowledge. We may plead lack of
will or lack of moral impetus, but we can no longer plead ignorance.
Just as far as our light upon the general purpose goes, just so far