I am not so sure. Being one of those who doubted whether the successful termination of the war would forever make safe democratic ideals, I feel at liberty to doubt whether the triumph of a European proletariate will give us what we want. It depends much upon what one means by democracy. And correspondingly, whether America is fundamentally radical or conservative depends much upon what one means by radicalism. If, like Louis XIV or Napoleon, I had a leash of writers and scholars at my command, I would have them produce nothing but definitions while these critical years of transition lasted. I would make them into an academy whose fiat in general definition would be as valid as the French Academy’s in the meaning of a word. I would make it a legal offense for two men to quarrel over socialism when one means communism and the other state control of the post-office. I would, like the early Quakers, require arbitration for all disputants, especially in politics, knowing that a clear head would quickly discover that arguers on democracy conceivably meant anything from a standard collar for every one to nationalization of women. But the good old days of literary dictatorship are past. The most a writer upon the mind of the everyday American can do is to endeavor honestly to make his own definitions as he goes; and I believe that American radicalism needs a good deal of defining. It is not the doctrines of Babeuf or Marx or Lenine that have made what seems to be the indigenous variety of American radicalism. Their beliefs, and especially those of Marx, have found acceptance here. There are moments in intellectual or industrial development when men’s minds become seeding-grounds for ideas blown from without. There were centuries when the mystical ideas of the Christian East were sown and rooted in the barbarian brains of the West. There were the years when the liberal ideas of the French Revolution were blown across Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. And much that we call radical in America is simply foreign seed, growing vigorously in our soil, but not yet acclimated, as it is growing also in Russia and New Zealand. And much is not American in any sense, but rather the purely alien ideas of immigrants--individual men among us. It is not for nothing that Trotzky was here, and the Marxists, the syndicalists, the nihilists, and the communists of half Europe. We have been exposed to every germ of radicalism ever hatched in the Old World; yet neither the young professor, lecturing on the redistribution of wealth, nor the Russian stevedore, who in lower New York awaits the proletariate revolution, truly represents American radicalism. These are the ideas and these the men our restless youth are borrowing from, but they are not yet, they may never be, American.