ngerous to a person who is sliding down hill. The man who is
clambering up hill is in a much better position to evade or overcome
them. Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier vision of
their national Promise as soon as they give it a house on a hill-top
rather than in a valley.

The very genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism
rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous
inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have
been drawing this inference. They have been coming to see themselves
more as others see them; and as an introduction to a consideration of
this more critical frame of mind, I am going to quote another
foreigner's view of American life,--the foreigner in this case being an
Englishman and writing in 1893.

"The American note," says Mr. James Muirhead in his "Land of Contrasts,"
"includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility, an almost
childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the
present and the future, a wider realization of human brotherhood than
has yet existed, a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the
individual than by the class, a breezy indifference to authority and a
positive predilection for innovation, a marked alertness of mind, and a
manifold variety of interest--above all, an inextinguishable hopefulness
and courage. It is easy to lay one's finger in America upon almost every
one of the great defects of civilization--even those defects which are
specially characteristic of the civilization of the Old World. The
United States cannot claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic
slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak,
of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws,
of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of
economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of
want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery,
of class prejudice, of respect of persons, and of a preference of the
material over the spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or
nearly attained, perfection. But below and behind, and beyond all its
weakness and evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory
founded on reason and conscience." The reader will remark in the
foregoing quotation that Mr. Muirhead is equally emphatic in his
approval and in his disapproval. He generously