society. The American ethical tradition is perfectly definite and
tremendously powerful. It belongs, furthermore, to a population
far larger than the "old American" stock, for it has been
laboriously inculcated in our schools and churches, and
impressively driven home by newspaper, magazine, and book. I shall
not presume to analyze it save where it touches literature. There
it maintains a definite attitude toward all sex-problems: the
Victorian, which is not necessarily, or even probably, a bad one.
Man should be chaste, and proud of his chastity. Woman must be so.
It is the ethical duty of the American to hate, or at least to
despise, all deviations, and to pretend--for the greater prestige
of the law--that such sinning is exceptional, at least in America.
And this is the public morality he believes in, whatever may be
his private experience in actual living. In business, it is the
ethical tradition of the American, inherited from a rigorous
Protestant morality, to be square, to play the game without
trickery, to fight hard but never meanly. Over-reaching is
justifiable when the other fellow has equal opportunities to be
"smart"; lying, tyranny--never. And though the opposites of all
these laudable practices come to pass, he must frown on them in
public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow--
especially in the public press.

American political history is a long record of idealistic
tendencies toward democracy working painfully through a net of
graft, pettiness, sectionalism, and bravado, with constant
disappointment for the idealist who believes, traditionally, in
the intelligence of the crowd. American social history is a
glaring instance of how the theory of equal dignity for all men
can entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and the