The intellectual power required to criticise one’s own experience with a formative result will of course vary considerably in different occupations.  Technical mastery of the occupation of playwriting, criticism, or statesmanship, will require more specifically intellectual qualities than will be demanded by the competent musician or painter.  But no matter how much intelligence may be needed, the way in which it should be used remains the same.  Mere industry, aspiration, or a fluid run of ideas make as meager an equipment for a politician, a philanthropist, or a critic as they would for an architect; and absolutely the most dangerous mistake which an individual can make is that of confusing admirable intentions expressed in some inferior manner with genuine excellence of achievement.  If such men succeed, they are corrupting in their influence.  If they fail, they learn nothing from their failure, because they are always charging up to the public, instead of to themselves, the responsibility for their inferiority.

The conclusion is that at the present time an individual American’s intentions and opinions are of less importance than his power of giving them excellent and efficient expression.  What the individual can do is to make himself a better instrument for the practice of some serviceable art; and by so doing he can scarcely avoid becoming also a better instrument for the fulfillment of the American national Promise.  To be sure, the American national Promise demands for its fulfillment something more than efficient and excellent individual instruments.  It demands, or will eventually demand, that these individuals shall love and wish to serve their fellow-countrymen, and it will demand specifically that in the service of their fellow-countrymen, they shall reorganize their country’s economic, political, and social institutions and ideas.  Just how the making of competent individual instruments will of its own force assist the process of national reconstruction, we shall consider presently; but the first truth to drive home is that all political and social reorganization is a delusion, unless certain individuals, capable of edifying practical leadership, have been disciplined and trained; and such individuals must always and in some measure be a product of self-discipline.  While not only admitting but proclaiming that the processes of individual and social improvement are mutually dependent, it is equally true that the initiative cannot be left to collective action.  The individual must begin and carry as far as he can the work of his own emancipation; and for the present he has an excuse for being tolerably unscrupulous in so doing.  By the successful assertion of his own claim to individual distinction and eminence, he is doing more to revolutionize and reconstruct the American democracy than can a regiment of professional revolutionists and reformers.