ends partly on a new exercise of the "money power" now safely
reposing in the strong boxes of professional millionaires. There need be
no fundamental objection taken to the national faith in the power of
good intentions and re-distributed wealth. That faith is the immediate
and necessary issue of the logic of our national moral situation. It
should be, as it is, innocent and absolute; and if it does not remain
innocent and absolute, the Promise of American Life can scarcely be
fulfilled.

A faith may, however, be innocent and absolute without being
inexperienced and credulous. The American faith in education is by way
of being credulous and superstitious, not because it seeks individual
and social amelioration by what may be called an educational process,
but because the proposed means of education are too conscious, too
direct, and too superficial. Let it be admitted that in any one decade
the amount which can be accomplished towards individual and social
amelioration by means of economic and political reorganization is
comparatively small; but it is certainly as large as that which can be
accomplished by subsidizing individual good intentions. Heroism is not
to be encouraged by cash prizes any more than is genius; and a man's
friends should not be obliged to prove that he is a hero in order that
he may reap every appropriate reward. A hero officially conscious of his
heroism is a mutilated hero. In the same way art cannot become a power
in a community unless many of its members are possessed of a native and
innocent love of beautiful things; and the extent to which such a
possession can be acquired by any one or two generations of
traditionally inartistic people is extremely small. Its acquisition
depends not so much upon direct conscious effort, as upon the growing
ability to discriminate between what is good and what is bad in their
own native art. It is a matter of the training and appreciation of
American artists, rather than the cultivation of art. Illustrations to
the same effect might be multiplied. The popular interest in the Higher
Education has not served to make Americans attach much importance to the
advice of the highly educated man. He is less of a practical power in
the United States than he is in any European country; and this fact is
in itself a sufficient commentary on the reality of the American faith
in education. The fact is, of course, that the American tendency to
disbelieve in the fulfillment o