THE NEW PATRIOTISM The people of the United States are on the verge of one of the great quiet decisions which determine national destinies.

Crises happen in peace as well as in war, and a peaceful crisis may be as vital and controlling as any that comes with national uprising and the clash of arms.

Such a crisis, at first uneventful and almost unperceived, is upon us now, and we are engaged in making the decision that is thus forced upon us.

And, so far as it has gone, our decision is largely wrong.
Fortunately it is not yet final.
The question we are deciding with so little consciousness of what it involves is this: What shall we do with our natural resources?
Upon the final answer that we shall make to it hangs the success or failure of this Nation in accomplishing its manifest destiny.
Few Americans will deny that it is the manifest destiny of the United States to demonstrate that a democratic republic is the best form of government yet devised, and that the ideals and institutions of the great republic taken together must and do work out in a prosperous, contented, peaceful, and righteous people; and also to exercise, through precept and example, an influence for good among the nations of the world.

That destiny seems to us brighter and more certain of realization to-day than ever before.