ortunity, mean the impregnation of our national life with a new
brilliancy.

I have said that the West is still moved by the tapering impulse of the
pioneer, and I have ventured to predict that this would soon dwindle into
an agricultural toryism. That prediction may very easily be upset.
Far-reaching mechanical inventions already threaten to transform farming
into an industry. I refer to those applications of power to agriculture
which will inevitably divorce the farmer from the ownership of his tools.
An industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture during the
nineteenth century is distinctly probable, and capitalistic agriculture
may soon cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions it
will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency, and this disturbance may
generate a new impulse to replace the decadent one of the pioneer.

Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not
immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into
classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children
of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly
with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In
many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the
people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid
sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different
civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial
success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American
college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court
judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical
habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the
"sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is
regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism
which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new
ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him.

It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating originality were
absorbed in the trivial eccentricities of fads and fashions. The obvious
novelties of machinery and locomotion, phonographs and yellow journalism
slake the American thirst for creatio