spects of America as a Land of Promise
made in the preceding paragraph is sufficiently obvious, but it is
usually slurred by the average good American patriot. The better future,
which is promised for himself, his children, and for other Americans, is
chiefly a matter of confident anticipation. He looks upon it very much
as a friendly outsider might look on some promising individual career.
The better future is understood by him as something which fulfills
itself. He calls his country, not only the Land of Promise, but the Land
of Destiny. It is fairly launched on a brilliant and successful career,
the continued prosperity of which is prophesied by the very momentum of
its advance. As Mr. H.G. Wells says in "The Future in America," "When
one talks to an American of his national purpose, he seems a little at a
loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with alacrity."
The great majority of Americans would expect a book written about "The
Promise of American Life" to contain chiefly a fanciful description of
the glorious American future--a sort of Utopia up-to-date, situated in
the land of Good-Enough, and flying the Stars and Stripes. They might
admit in words that the achievement of this glorious future implied
certain responsibilities, but they would not regard the admission either
as startling or novel. Such responsibilities were met by our
predecessors; they will be met by our followers. Inasmuch as it is the
honorable American past which prophesies on behalf of the better
American future, our national responsibility consists fundamentally in
remaining true to traditional ways of behavior, standards, and ideals.
What we Americans have to do in order to fulfill our national Promise is
to keep up the good work--to continue resolutely and cheerfully along
the appointed path.

The reader who expects this book to contain a collection of patriotic
prophecies will be disappointed. I am not a prophet in any sense of the
word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing
mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism. To conceive the better
American future as a consummation which will take care of itself,--as
the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and
ideas,--persistence in such a conception is admirably designed to
deprive American life of any promise at all. The better future which
Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in
certain essential r