the beginning of realism in social and political life, we seek it and
we are resolved to find it."

So we attempt to give a general expression to the forces that are new
at this time, to render something at least of the spirit of the New
Republic in a premature and experimental utterance. It is, at any rate,
a spirit that finds itself out of intimacy and co-ordination with all
the older movements of the world, that sees all pre-existing formulae
and political constitutions and political parties and organizations
rather as instruments or obstacles than as guiding lines and precedents
for its new developing will, its will which will carry it at last
irresistibly to the conscious and deliberate making of the future of
man. "We are here to get better births and a better result from the
births we get; each one of us is going to set himself immediately to
that, using whatever power he finds to his hand," such is the form its
will must take. And such being its will and spirit these papers will
address themselves comprehensively to the problem, What will the New
Republic do? All the rest of this series will be a discussion of the
forces that go to the making of man, and how far and how such a New
Republic might seek to lay its hands upon them.

It is for the adversary to explain how presumptuous such an enterprise
must be. But presumption is ineradically interwoven with every
beginning that the world has ever seen. I venture to think that even to
a reader who does not accept or sympathize with the conception of this
New Republic, a general review of current movements and current
interpretations of morality from this new standpoint may be suggestive
and interesting. Assuredly it is only by some such general revision, if
not on these lines then on others, that a practicable way of escape is
to be found for any one, from that base and shifty opportunism in