Thus the American mind is worth troubling about; and if politically, socially, economically the spirit that we and the foreigners call American has become stagnant in its liberalism, it is time to awake. In liberalism inheres our vitality, our initiative, our strength. Its stagnation, its inertia, its blindness to the new waves of freedom sweeping upward from the masses and on in broken and muddy torrents through the world are poignant dangers. We must open eyes; we must change our ground; we must fight the evil in the new revolution, but welcome the good. Our own revolution lies before the deluge; it is no longer enough to go on; it is not now the sufficing document of a political philosophy. We must not stop with Washington and Lincoln. We must go on where the conservative Washington and the radical Lincoln would lead if they were our contemporaries. Radical-conservatism is good, and Toryism or radicalism have their uses; but conservative-liberalism, preserved, desiccated, museum liberalism, long continued in, is death to the minds that maintain it. CHAPTER II CONSERVATIVE AMERICA There is one experience that conservative-liberal America--bourgeois America, the pushing America that gets what it wants on this side of the ocean--possesses in common, and that is its education. We of the vast American middle class have all been to high school, or we have lived with high school graduates; we have all been to college, or we have worked with college graduates. Our education, when viewed with any detachment, is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given generation most of us have studied the same textbooks in mathematics and geography and history, read the same selections in literature, been inoculated with the same ethical principles from the Bible and the moralists. Ask us a question as to what makes right or wrong, as the President did in his war messages, and we will respond with a universal roar, like factory whistles when a button is punched on some celebration day. This general American experience is largely responsible for the tenacity with which we of this generation blindly conserve the liberal principles of our ancestors, even while we keep them, like the tables of the ten commandments, safe from the rude touch of practical experience. Education such as ours seldom fails to influence men’s ways of thinking even when their actions pass beyond its control. The influence, however, is too often ineffectual, bloodless. That is a lesson we need to ponder in America.