American Puritanism leads naturally to the mission of America, namely, to demonstrate that a great people in a vast and diversified country can govern themselves by republican institutions. Bryce says there is nothing to indicate that democracy retards or hastens the growth of science, art, learning or polite letters. These, he says, come and go from causes never yet discovered, and apparently are not affected by the form of government.1

This brings us to the character of the masses of the American people. Thinkers as a rule have too little faith in the masses. Even Emerson said, "Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah of the masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honor and their conscience." 2 And yet Emerson had faith in the Republic and believed that true democracy is reconcilable with "natural aristocracy," because elsewhere he says, "if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution." Professor Abbott says that the increase of the masses "gives one pause. The chief tendency of the past century has been the transfer of power from royalty and aristocracy to the middle class, and so to the masses. The endeavor seems to have been to find the lowest possible common denominator of politics; and we are coming to 'crowd'

3

politics. And what are the characteristics of the crowd? First, an excess of emotion over reason. The crowd is chiefly moved by appeals to its feelings, rather than to its intelligence. A catch word, a rallying cry, an apt phrase, a sudden twist of interest or attention, above all a lack of steady attention, are its peculiar characteristics. It is apt to lack humor. It is a creature of egotism, of impulse, of taboo. It delights chiefly in action; it is little interested in sustained thought; it is fond of conflict; it responds easily to hate and greed and fear. It has passion for hero-worship; it is a demon-worshiper. It has few shades of opinion; things are right or wrong, but chiefly wrong. It believes in the old royal maxim-it can do no wrong. It is the victim of phrases. It believes, and it is taught to believe, that it is superhuman. It is, in fact, sub-human. It is a tyrant. And nothing represents so accurately these qualities as what we have come to call the 'yellow press,' as nothing so indicates the increasing dominance of the crowd as its development.' Sir James Fitzjames Stephen says: "The success of equality in America is due, I think, mainly to the circumstance that a large number of people, who were substantially equal in all the more important matters, recognized that fact and did not set up unfounded distinctions. How far they actually are equal now, and how long they will continue to be equal when the population becomes dense, is quite another question. It is also a question, which I cannot do more than glance at in two words in this place, whether the enormous development of equality in America, the rapid production of an immense multitude of commonplace, self-satisfied, and essentially slight people is an exploit which the whole world need fall down and worship. Sir Lepel H. Griffin wrote, "We cannot but look with some doubt and hesitation at America of today, the apotheosis of Philistinism, the perplexity and despair of statesmen, the Mecca to which turns every religious or social charlatan, where the only God worshiped is Mammon, and the highest education is the share list;

where political life, which should be the breath of the nostrils of every freeman, is shunned by an honest man as the plague; where, to enrich jobbers and monopolists and contractors, a nation has emancipated its slaves and enslaved its freemen; where the people is gorged and drunk with materialism, and where wealth has become a curse instead of a blessing. America is the country of disillusion and disappointment, in politics, literature, culture, and art; in its scenery, its cities, and its people. With some experience of every country in the civilized world, I can think of none except Russia in which I would not prefer to reside, in which life would not be more worth living, less sordid and mean, and unlovely."1 Great Britain professes a wish to be friendly with the United States, but how can two individuals be friendly when one criticizes the other in such fashion as this?

But should the American masses, the plain people, be so condemned? Bryce says of us, "You have what Aristotle desired, the decisive voice lodged in an enormous body of citizens, wellto-do town workers, and small rural land-owners, who possess enough property to be inclined to disapprove and oppose measures of a revolutionary kind. This body of intelligent and steady men, who have something to lose, yet are not interested in maintaining abuses or excusing evasions of the law contrived by unscrupulous wealth, bridges the chasm between the extremes of wealth and poverty." 2 In every great national emergency and on every great national question the intuitions and instincts of the plain people have found the right way, and where they had no leader they produced one out of obscurity, such as Lincoln, and when diplomacy failed they produced soldiers, as in the Rebellion and the World War. The people are slow, but their instincts and intuitions are unerring, in America at least. As Bryce says, "If you can get at the people for that is the difficulty things will usually go well. But the people must have time." Judge Baldwin says, "Public sentiment is a purer

source of action, or a source of purer action, than knowledge or even wisdom. It is God-made.” 1

Nature does nothing by leaps, but slowly evolves new and higher types by mingling the best qualities of old ones. Centuries roll by while nature is producing a new race of men. Nature favors the strong, the true, the man of simple habits, the survival of the fittest; nature gives to mind a supremacy over matter. Nature loves those who live close to her. Those elements in America which are energetic, original, persevering, and conscientious will predominate. In the beginning it was New England. That Puritan type, broadened by transfer to other parts of the country, still prevails and forms the fabric of the American nation. It is true that there are distinct American types with different notions of life. There is the cultured New Englander, the trading New Yorker, the contented Pennsylvanian, the fiery Southerner, the mild Californian, the hospitable Kentuckian, the radical Wisconsonite, the suave Ohioan, the engineering Michigander, the great agricultural states of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska; states mountainous and states mining. But all play a part in the great American drama now going on; not the maelstrom of Washington, but the drama of a great experiment in self-government. They are the masses, and their typical American characteristics are most pronounced and most clearly discernible in the West, to which we now turn.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE WESTERNER

PUBLIC sentiment, the sentiment that really controls America, is still made up by the intelligent, conservative classes the farmers, merchants, bankers, lawyers, and manufacturers throughout the country. And they are what is called "good blood," a term not confined to those of distinguished ancestry nor to old families, but includes all men and women from families of intelligence and character, however lowly. Roosevelt expressed the idea in his "Winning of the West," when he said, "They were of good blood - using the words as they should be used, as meaning blood that has flowed through the veins of generations of self-restraint and courage and hard work, and careful training in mind, and in the manly virtues. Their inheritance of sturdy and self-reliant manhood helped them greatly; their blood told in their favor as blood generally does tell when other things are equal. If they prized intellect, they prized character more; they were strong in body and mind, stout of heart, and resolute of will. They felt that pride of race which spurs a man to effort, instead of making him feel that he is excused from effort." 1 These are the men who make up the public sentiment of America, the sentiment that rules.

The cities, mines, and factories of the Atlantic Coast are being inundated by foreigners. American institutions are not safe in foreign hands. It is to the West, the great Mississippi Valley, that all eyes are turned to fathom the future of the Republic. In 1920 the center of population was in Indiana, figured approximately by important towns. Professor Farrand writing in 1918 said that nearly seventy per cent of Americans live beyond the