e in the north. America,
we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of
Europe. Nor does an "American spirit" exist; there exists instead the
spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants and
descendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful of
orientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found in
Western Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the
different European countries, but what is common to them all. What
America does, not, of course, in a moment, but with incredible rapidity,
is to obliterate distinctions. The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German,
the Scandinavian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops his
costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, and
retains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continent
all the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, and
flourish in unexampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that is
evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriant
profusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe the
American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always
the same--masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once
good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you
do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity,
intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of
ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising
nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual
life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the
conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child
with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for
what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplished
brute.

One does not then find in America anything one does not find in Europe;
but one finds in Europe what one does not find in America. One finds, as
well as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has,
broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident in
Europe, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, they
win it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result not
of American institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It is
the poor immigrant who ought to sing the pr