to really stupefying and perverting American tradition.
They were sturdily rebellious against all manner of respectable methods,
ideas, and institutions, but none of them dreamed of protesting against
the real enemy of American intellectual independence. They never dreamed
of associating the moral and intellectual emancipation of the individual
with the conscious fulfillment of the American national purpose and with
the patient and open-eyed individual and social discipline thereby
demanded. They all shared the illusion of the pioneers that somehow a
special Providential design was effective on behalf of the American
people, which permitted them as individuals and as a society to achieve
their purposes by virtue of good intentions, exuberant enthusiasm, and
enlightened selfishness. The New World and the new American idea had
released them from the bonds in which less fortunate Europeans were
entangled. Those bonds were not to be considered as the terms under
which excellent individual and social purposes were necessarily to be
achieved. They were bad habits, which the dead past had imposed upon the
inhabitants of the Old World, and from which Americans could be
emancipated by virtue of their abundant faith in human nature and the
boundless natural opportunities of the new continent.

Thus the American national ideal of the Middle Period was essentially
geographical. The popular thinkers of that day were hypnotized by the
reiterated suggestion of a new American world. Their fellow-countrymen
had obtained and were apparently making good use of a wholly
unprecedented amount of political and economic freedom; and they jumped
to the conclusion that the different disciplinary methods which limited
both individual and social action in Europe were unnecessary. Just as
the Jacksonian Democracy had finally vindicated American political
independence by doing away with the remnants of our earlier political
colonialism, so American moral and intellectual independence demanded a
similar vindication. This geographical protestantism was in a measure
provoked, if not justified, by the habit of colonial dependence upon
Europe in matters of opinion, which so many well-educated Americans of
that period continued to cherish. But it was based upon the illusion
that the economic and social conditions of the Middle Period, which
favored temporarily a mixture of faith and irresponsibility, freedom and
formlessness, would persist and could be tr