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 provides against their extinction. Meanwhile our societies, national and international, do not run as smoothly and efficiently as men who hate waste and confusion desire. They seem to clamor from their discordant and jarring gear for some motive and regulative power other than the simple elementary passions. What nature has overlooked and neglected or inadequately attended to is the development of those feelings which fit men to live harmoniously in complex civil societies. So that the special task for those who would ameliorate our modern world is to bring forward and glorify an order of emotions quite unknown to the Cave Man—a mutual understanding and imaginative sympathy which begin to develop and operate only when the elementary urges of our nature have been checked and subdued by a reflective culture. Over most of the once-called great statesmen of Whitman's period and of our own generation—the Bismarcks, the Disraelis, the Roosevelts—there falls the shadow of great tasks from which they shrank and the darker and still present shadow of a great calamity which their fostering of the elementary passions helped to bring upon us. In the present posture of the world I think we should not scorn so resolute a patriot as Whitman, who had lived through two or three wars, for confessing the growth in himself and for promoting the growth in others of a sense like this: