The Promise of American Life | Page 7

its own
adequacy, and its success will constitute an enormous stride towards
human amelioration. Just because our system is at bottom a thorough
test of the ability of human nature to respond admirably to a fair chance,
the issue of the experiment is bound to be of more than national
importance. The American system stands for the highest hope of an
excellent worldly life that mankind has yet ventured,--the hope that
men can be improved without being fettered, that they can be saved
without even vicariously being nailed to the cross.

Such are the claims advanced on behalf of the American system; and
within certain limits this system has made good. Americans have been
more than usually prosperous. They have been more than usually free.
They have, on the whole, made their freedom and prosperity contribute
to a higher level of individual and social excellence. Most assuredly the
average Americanized American is neither a more intelligent, a wiser,
nor a better man than the average European; but he is likely to be a
more energetic and hopeful one. Out of a million well-established
Americans, taken indiscriminately from all occupations and conditions,
compared to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, a larger
proportion of the former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives.
Within a given social area there will be a smaller amount of social
wreckage and a larger amount of wholesome and profitable
achievement. The mass of the American people is, on the whole, more
deeply stirred, more thoroughly awake, more assertive in their personal
demands, and more confident of satisfying them. In a word, they are
more alive, and they must be credited with the moral and social benefit
attaching to a larger amount of vitality.
Furthermore, this greater individual vitality, although intimately
connected with the superior agricultural and industrial opportunities of
a new country, has not been due exclusively to such advantages.
Undoubtedly the vast areas of cheap and fertile land which have been
continuously available for settlement have contributed, not only to the
abundance of American prosperity, but also to the formation of
American character and institutions; and undoubtedly many of the
economic and political evils which are now becoming offensively
obtrusive are directly or indirectly derived from the gradual
monopolization of certain important economic opportunities.
Nevertheless, these opportunities could never have been converted so
quickly into substantial benefits had it not been for our more
democratic political and social forms. A privileged class does not
secure itself in the enjoyment of its advantages merely by legal
intrenchments. It depends quite as much upon disqualifying the "lower
classes" from utilizing their opportunities by a species of social
inhibition. The rail-splitter can be so easily encouraged to believe that
rail-splitting is his vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's

"Admirable Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his
conversion in England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief,
but that on English soil he did not in his own soul want any such
elevation and distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of
English life kept him fatuously content with the mean truckling and
meaner domineering of his position of butler. On the other hand, the
loyalty of an American to the American idea would tend to make him
aggressive and self-confident. Our democratic prohibition of any but
occasional social distinctions and our democratic dislike to any
suggestion of authentic social inferiority have contributed as essentially
to the fluid and elastic substance of American life as have its abundant
and accessible economic opportunities.
The increased momentum of American life, both in its particles and its
mass, unquestionably has a considerable moral and social value. It is
the beginning, the only possible beginning, of a better life for the
people as individuals and for society. So long as the great majority of
the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope of
substantial rewards in this world, the whole associated life of that
community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order
is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great
majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion
necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of
subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery. The
only way the associated life of such a community can be radically
improved is by the leavening of the inert popular mass. Their wants
must be satisfied, and must be sharpened and increased with the habit
of satisfaction. During the past hundred years every European state has
made a great stride in the direction of arousing its poorer citizens to be
more wholesomely active, discontented, and expectant; but our own
country has succeeded in traveling farther in this direction than has