onstructed
rather than fulfilled of its own momentum; but at any rate, in seeking
to disentangle and emphasize the ideal implications of the American
national Promise, I am not wholly false to the accepted American
tradition. Even if Americans have neglected these ideal implications,
even if they have conceived the better future as containing chiefly a
larger portion of familiar benefits, the ideal demand, nevertheless, has
always been palpably present; and if it can be established as the
dominant aspect of the American tradition, that tradition may be
transformed, but it will not be violated.

Furthermore, much as we may dislike the American disposition to take the
fulfillment of our national Promise for granted, the fact that such a
disposition exists in its present volume and vigor demands respectful
consideration. It has its roots in the salient conditions of American
life, and in the actual experience of the American people. The national
Promise, as it is popularly understood, has in a way been fulfilling
itself. If the underlying conditions were to remain much as they have
been, the prevalent mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism
might retain a formidable measure of justification; and the changes
which are taking place in the underlying conditions and in the scope of
American national experience afford the most reasonable expectation that
this state of mind will undergo a radical alteration. It is new
conditions which are forcing Americans to choose between the conception
of their national Promise as a process and an ideal. Before, however,
the nature of these novel conditions and their significance can be
considered, we must examine with more care the relation between the
earlier American economic and social conditions and the ideas and
institutions associated with them. Only by a better understanding of the
popular tradition, only by an analysis of its merits and its
difficulties, can we reach a more consistent and edifying conception of
the Promise of American life.

II

HOW THE PROMISE HAS BEEN REALIZED

All the conditions of American life have tended to encourage an easy,
generous, and irresponsible optimism. As compared to Europeans,
Americans have been very much favored by circumstances. Had it not been
for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States
would never have been the Land of Promise. The European Powers have been
obliged from the very conditions of their existen