the desire for personal freedom; if not political liberty, why
then economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the
opportunity to raise the standard of life. And of course all these
motives were strongest in that earlier immigration which has done
most to fix the state of mind and body which we call being
American. I need not labor the argument. Our political and social
history support it; our best literature demonstrates it, for no
men have been more idealistic than the American writers whom we
have consented to call great. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Whitman--was idealism ever more thoroughly incarnate than in them?

And this idealism--to risk again a platitude--has been in the air of
America. It has permeated our religious sects, and created
several of them. It has given tone to our thinking, and even more
to our feeling. I do not say that it has always, or even usually,
determined our actions, although the Civil War is proof of its
power. Again and again it has gone aground roughly when the ideal
met a condition of living--a fact that will provide the
explanation for which I seek. But optimism, "boosting," muck-
raking (not all of its manifestations are pretty), social service,
religious, municipal, democratic reform, indeed the "uplift"
generally, is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the
inherited American tendency to pursue the ideal. No one can doubt
that in 1918 we believed, at least, in idealism.
Nevertheless, so far as the average individual is concerned, with
just his share and no more of the race-tendency, this idealism
has been suppressed, and in some measure perverted. It is this
which explains, I think, American sentimentalism.

Consider, for example, the ethics of conventional American