the time being a good deal of medical attendance, and many of them
anticipate that even after the doctors have discontinued their daily
visits the patient will still need the supervision of a sanitary
specialist. He must be persuaded to behave so that he will not easily
fall ill again, and so that his health will be permanently improved.
Consequently, just in so far as reformers are reformers they are obliged
to abandon the traditional American patriotic fatalism. The national
Promise has been transformed into a closer equivalent of a national
purpose, the fulfillment of which is a matter of conscious work.

The transformation of the old sense of a glorious national destiny into
the sense of a serious national purpose will inevitably tend to make the
popular realization of the Promise of American life both more explicit
and more serious. As long as Americans believed they were able to
fulfill a noble national Promise merely by virtue of maintaining intact
a set of political institutions and by the vigorous individual pursuit
of private ends, their allegiance to their national fulfillment remained
more a matter of words than of deeds; but now that they are being
aroused from their patriotic slumber, the effect is inevitably to
disentangle the national idea and to give it more dignity. The
redemption of the national Promise has become a cause for which the good
American must fight, and the cause for which a man fights is a cause
which he more than ever values. The American idea is no longer to be
propagated merely by multiplying the children of the West and by
granting ignorant aliens permission to vote. Like all sacred causes, it
must be propagated by the Word and by that right arm of the Word, which
is the Sword.

The more enlightened reformers are conscious of the additional dignity
and value which the popularity of reform has bestowed upon the American