s Eliot Norton once said to me, with his dry humor, that there
was an infallible test of the American authorship of any anonymous
article or essay: "Does it contain the phrase 'After all, we need not
despair'? If it does, it was written by an American." In spite of all
that is said about the practicality of the American, his love of gain
and his absorption in material interests, those who really know him are
aware how habitually he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of
romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown to his prosaic day's job and
calls it "playing the game"; to work as hard as he can is to "get into
the game," and to work as long as he can is to "stay in the game"; he
loves to win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to lose fully as
much as the Englishman, but losing or winning, he carries into his
business activity the mood of the idealist.

It is easy to think of all this as self-deception as the emotional
effusiveness of the American temperament; but to refuse to see its
idealism is to mistake fundamentally the character of the American man.
No doubt he does deceive himself often as to his real motives: he is a
mystic and a bargain-hunter by turns. Divided aims, confused ideals,
have struggled for the mastery among us, ever since Challon's _Voyage_,
in 1606, announced that the purpose of the first colonists to Virginia
was "both to seek to convert the savages, as also to seek out what
benefits or commodities might be had in those parts." How that
"both"--"as also" keeps echoing in American history: "both" to
christianize the Negro and work him at a profit, "both" duty and
advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" international good will
and increased armaments; "both" Sunday morning precepts and Monday
morning practice; "both" horns of a dilemma; "both God and mammon"; did
ever a nation possess a more marvellous water-tight compartment method
of believing and honoring opposites! But in all this unconscious
hypocrisy the American is perhaps not worse--though he may be more
absurd!--than other men.

Another aspect of the American mind is found in our radicalism. "To be
an American," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." That
statement needs qualification. Intellectually the American is inclined
to radical views; he is willing to push certain social theories very
far; he will found a new religion, a new philosophy, a new socialistic
community, at the slightest notice or provocation; but he h