orthern States in the days of the Missouri Compromise. Yet out
of that undirected, crude and luke-warm emotion, there burst forth
within a generation the white-hot flame, which consumed the detested
institution and freed the millions of Negro slaves.

{4}

But not all Americans are idealists even of this commonplace sort. In
our ultra-keen capitalistic competition we have evolved an American of
different type. Self-centred, speculative, narrow, measuring success
by the dollars gained and spent, this individualist has a short way
with idealisms and larger ends. To him our involuntary _rapprochement_
with Europe is an opportunity not for service but for gain. War is
good or bad as it is profitable or the reverse. He is a realist, as is
the mole, attached to the earth and not worrying about the skies. His
ideal is that of a selfish nation dominated by selfish, social classes.

Here then we have the two Americanisms, both of them native and
redolent of the soil, both vital and growing. Both have appeared in
many of our national controversies, in the Philippine question, in
Porto Rico, in our relations with Mexico. The one is liberal,
democratic, often visionary, though confident because many of its
visions have come true; the other is concrete, short-sighted, intense
but with a low moral sensibility. Each appeals to a patriotism formed
in the image of the patriot.

It is upon this divided America that there comes the sense of the
impinging of Europe. These men of two opposed types (with innumerable
intermediate variations) suddenly perceive that the great war is being
fought not only near our shores but even within our borders. They
dimly perceive that the war is but an incident in a greater, though
less spectacular contest, that it is in reality a phase of a long
drawn-out economic struggle in which we too have blindly played our
part. To both groups, to all Americans, the war comes close. It is
being fought with motives like our motives and ideals like our ideals.
It is a conflict which proves to us that international peace is still
very far from attainment. War on a scale never before known:
war--deliberate, organised, scientific--fought {5} by combatants and
noncombatants alike, reveals itself as one of the central facts of our
modern life, a fact not to be ignored or preached or argued away, a
fact which for us on this side of the ocean, whatever our instincts and
our philosophies, has its deep and p