freedom from ancient shackling tyrannies; it calls forth in beauty what the established order beats down and attends with pain. For it gives it high right not merely through an emotional appeal, but through coldest, clearest logic. It hails it health and sanity and wisdom through proof that the life of art and wisdom is the most practical of lives in a strictly practical world; that "interest in creatively enhancing personal and artistic life, interest in the creation of cultural values"; makes for greater sureness of observation and clarity of vision than interest devoted entirely to the problem of material increase. For Bourne was a man interested in more impassioned living for himself and others, a man who lived through art, a man disgusted with the continual frustrations and aridities of American life, apologist and exponent both of self-reliant humanity; and Bourne was right about the war; right from the first. This philosophical temperament was not one of those who, like the greater number of our practical young political thinkers, had to wait for Versailles to know that we were "like brave passengers who had set out for the Isles of the Blest only to find that the first mate had gone insane and jumped overboard, the rudder come loose and dropped to the bottom of the sea, and the captain and pilot were lying dead drunk under the wheel." The Collapse of American Strategy, written directly after the President's call for "Force, Force to the uttermost," gave warning that the dead weight of the war-technique was carrying the country entirely away from the purpose for which the war-technique allegedly was being employed; gave warning we were "a rudderless nation, to be exploited as the Allies wished, politically and materially, and towed, to their aggrandizement, in any direction they might desire"; and showed Woodrow Wilson well on the road which led to his eventual miserable failure. And Bourne became righter with every hour. Like a gigantic shadow thrown upon a wall behind the chunky little cripple, the war corroborated him at every point, and gave truth to his words scarcely after they were uttered. It is difficult to believe to-day he was writing in the summer of 1917, and not of 1920 or 1921, so accurate were his prophecies. The heresies of yesterday are become the bromides of to-day.
They were rapidly becoming banalities before Bourne died. Nevertheless, he failed of his immediate objective. He was not interested in being right for the mere pleasure of being right, but in
