aditional disregard of
our full national responsibility, a critic will do well to dispense with
the caution proper to the consideration of specific practical problems.
A radical theory does not demand in the interest of consistency an
equally radical action. It only demands a sincere attempt to push the
application of the theory as far as conditions will permit, and the
employment of means sufficient probably to accomplish the immediate
purpose. But in the endeavor to establish and popularize his theory, a
radical critic cannot afford any similar concessions. His own opinions
can become established only by the displacement of the traditional
opinions; and the way to displace a traditional error is not to be
compromising and conciliatory, but to be as uncompromising and as
irritating as one's abilities and one's vision of the truth will permit.
The critic in his capacity as agitator is living in a state of war with
his opponents; and the ethics of warfare are not the ethics of
statesmanship. Public opinion can be reconciled to a constructive
national programme only by the agitation of what is from the traditional
standpoint a body of revolutionary ideas.

In vigorously agitating such a body of revolutionary ideas, the critic
would be doing more than performing a desirable public service. He would
be vindicating his own individual intellectual interest. The integrity
and energy of American intellectual life has been impaired for
generations by the tradition of national irresponsibility. Such
irresponsibility necessarily implies a sacrifice of individual
intellectual and moral interests to individual and popular economic
interests. It could not persist except by virtue of intellectual and
moral conformity. The American intellectual habit has on the whole been
just about as vigorous and independent as that of the domestic animals.
The freedom of opinion of which we boast has consisted for the most part
in uttering acceptable commonplaces with as much defiant conviction as
if we were uttering the most daring and sublimest heresies. In making
this parade of the uniform of intellectual independence, the American is
not consciously insincere. He is prepared to do battle for his
convictions, but his really fundamental convictions he shares with
everybody else. His differences with his fellow-countrymen are those of
interest and detail. When he breaks into a vehement proclamation of his
faith, he is much like a bull, who has brok