hitherto have very much simplified its fulfillment, and he fails
sufficiently to realize that the conditions and processes are one thing
and the ideal Promise quite another. Moreover, these underlying social
and economic conditions are themselves changing, in such wise that
hereafter the ideal Promise, instead of being automatically fulfilled,
may well be automatically stifled. For two generations and more the
American people were, from the economic point of view, most happily
situated. They were able, in a sense, to slide down hill into the valley
of fulfillment. Economic conditions were such that, given a fair start,
they could scarcely avoid reaching a desirable goal. But such is no
longer the case. Economic conditions have been profoundly modified, and
American political and social problems have been modified with them. The
Promise of American life must depend less than it did upon the virgin
wilderness and the Atlantic Ocean, for the virgin wilderness has
disappeared, and the Atlantic Ocean has become merely a big channel. The
same results can no longer be achieved by the same easy methods. Ugly
obstacles have jumped into view, and ugly obstacles are peculiarly
dangerous to a person who is sliding down hill. The man who is
clambering up hill is in a much better position to evade or overcome
them. Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier vision of
their national Promise as soon as they give it a house on a hill-top
rather than in a valley.

The very genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism
rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous
inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have
been drawing this inference. They have been coming to see themselves
more as others see them; and as an introduction to a consideration of
this more critical frame of mind, I am going to quote another
foreigner's view of American life,--the foreigner in this case being an