The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Essay On The American Contribution And
The Democratic Idea, by Winston Churchill
[The Author is the American Winston Churchill not the British]

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Title: An Essay On The American Contribution And The Democratic Idea

Author: Winston Churchill

Last Updated: March 6, 2009
Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #5399]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

AN ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA

By Winston Churchill

I.

Failure to recognize that the American, is at heart an idealist is
to lack understanding of our national character. Two of our greatest
interpreters proclaimed it, Emerson and William James. In a recent
address at the Paris Sorbonne on "American Idealism," M. Firmin Roz
observed that a people is rarely justly estimated by its contemporaries.
The French, he says, have been celebrated chiefly for the skill of their
chefs and their vaudeville actors, while in the disturbed 'speculum
mundi' Americans have appeared as a collection of money grabbers whose
philosophy is the dollar. It remained for the war to reveal the true
nature of both peoples. The American colonists, M. Roz continues, unlike
other colonists, were animated not by material motives, but by the
desire to safeguard and realize an ideal; our inherent characteristic
today is a belief in the virtue and power of ideas, of a national,
indeed, of a universal, mission. In the Eighteenth Century we proposed
a Philosophy and adopted a Constitution far in advance of the political
practice of the day, and set up a government of which Europe predicted
the early downfall. Nevertheless, thanks partly to good fortune, and
to the farseeing wisdom of our early statesmen who perceived that the
success of our experiment depended upon the maintenance of an isolation
from European affairs, we established democracy as a practical form of
government.

We have not always lived up to our beliefs in ideas. In our dealings
with other nations, we yielded often to imperialistic ambitions and
thus, to a certain extent, justified the cyni