any immediate and drastic attempt to substitute for the present system a national regulation of the distribution of wealth or a national responsibility for the management even of monopolies or semi-monopolies would break down and would do little to promote either individual or social welfare.  But to conclude from any such admissions that a systematic policy of promoting individual and national amelioration should be abandoned in wholly unnecessary.  That the existing system has certain practical advantages, and is a fair expression of the average moral standards of to-day is not only its chief merit, but also its chief and inexcusable defect.  What a democratic nation must do is not to accept human nature as it is, but to move in the direction of its improvement.  The question it must answer is:  How can it contribute to the increase of American individuality?  The defender of the existing system must be able to show either (1) that it does contribute to the increase of American individuality; or that (2) whatever its limitations, the substitution of some better system is impossible.

Of course, a great many defenders of the existing system will unequivocally declare that it does contribute effectually to the increase of individuality, and it is this defense which is most dangerous, because it is due, not to any candid consideration of the facts, but to unreasoning popular prejudice and personal self-justification.  The existing system contributes to the increase of individuality only in case individuality is deprived of all serious moral and intellectual meaning.  In order to sustain their assertion they must define individuality, not as a living ideal, but as the psychological condition produced by any individual action.  In the light of such a definition every action performed by an individual would contribute to individuality; and, conversely, every action performed by the state, which conceivably could be left to individuals, would diminish individuality.  Such a conception derives from the early nineteenth century principles of an essential opposition between the state and the individual; and it is a deduction from the common conception of democracy as nothing but a finished political organization in which the popular will prevails.  As applied in the traditional American system this conception of individuality has resulted in the differentiation of an abundance of raw individual material, but the raw material has been systematically encouraged to persist only on condition that it remained undeveloped.  Properly speaking, it has not encouraged individualism at all.  Individuality is necessarily based on genuine discrimination.  It has encouraged particularism.  While the particles have been roused into activity, they all remain dominated by substantially the same forces of attraction and repulsion.  But in order that one of the particles may fulfill the promise of a really separate existence, he must pursue some special interest of his own.  In that way he begins to