Such being the situation in general, how can the duty and the opportunity of the individual at the present time best be defined?  Is he obliged to sit down and wait until the edifying, economic, political, and social transformation has taken place?  Or can he by his own immediate behavior do something effectual both to obtain individual emancipation and to accelerate the desirable process of social reconstruction?  This question has already been partially answered by the better American individual; and it is, I believe, being answered in the right way.  The means which he is taking to reach a more desirable condition of individual independence, and inferentially to add a little something to the process of national fulfillment, consist primarily and chiefly in a thoroughly zealous and competent performance of his own particular job; and in taking this means of emancipation and fulfillment he is both building better and destroying better than he knows.

The last generation of Americans has taken a better method of asserting their individual independence than that practiced by the heretics of the Middle Period.  Those who were able to gain leadership in business and politics sought to justify their success by building up elaborate industrial and political organizations which gave themselves and their successors peculiar individual opportunities.  On the other hand, the men of more specifically intellectual interests tacitly abandoned the Newer-Worldliness of their predecessors and began unconsciously but intelligently to seek the attainment of some excellence in the performance of their own special work.  In almost every case they discovered that the first step in the acquisition of the better standards of achievement was to go abroad.  If their interests were scholarly or scientific, they were likely to matriculate at one of the German universities for the sake of studying under some eminent specialist.  If they were painters, sculptors, or architects, they flocked to Paris, as the best available source of technical instruction in the arts.  Wherever the better schools were supposed to be, there the American pupils gathered; and the consequence was during the last quarter of the nineteenth century a steady and considerable improvement in the standard of special work and the American schools of special discipline.  In this way there was domesticated a necessary condition and vehicle of the liberation and assertion of American individuality.

A similar transformation has been taking place in the technical aspects of American industry.  In this field the individual has not been obliged to make his own opportunities to the same extent as in business, politics, and the arts.  The opportunities were made for him by the industrial development of the country.  Efficient special work soon became absolutely necessary in the various branches of manufacture, in mining, and in the business of transportation; and in the beginning it was frequently necessary to