It is fortunately not yet difficult to separate foreign from indigenous radicalism. There is that in both our heredity and our environment which makes the American mind bad soil for the seed of foreign ideologies. They rain upon us, they germinate; but they do not make a crop. We are too self-reliant, too concrete; our New World has kept us too cheerfully busy; the heavens of opportunity have leaned too low over this blessed America for discontent which leads to dreaming, oppression which makes revolt, to be common among us. We “old Americans,” at least of this generation, are poor material for Bolshevism; even as socialists we are never more than half convinced. Our radicalism has been of a different breed. Indeed, radicalism, like religion and sea-water, takes color from the atmosphere in which it is found. The French radical possesses the lucidity and the self-regarding spirit of the modern French mind. He lends ideas, but does not propagate them. The English radical seeks his ends by direct political action in good English fashion. And the native American has his own way also. That its essential quality of radicalism has often been overlooked, while the term has been bandied among soapbox orators and devotees of the bomb, is natural, but unfortunate for clear thinking. Our home-bred radicalism has been physical and moral, not intellectual. It has been a genuine attempt to tear down and rebuild, but it has not ordinarily been called radicalism, which term has been usually applied to radical thinking, to the intellectual radicalism of revolutionary organizations and protestants against the social order. Our effective radicals have been the leaders, not the opponents, of American society. They have been business men, philanthropists, educators, not strike-leaders, social workers, and philosophers. I talked recently to the head of a great manufacturing plant where technical skill both of hand and of brain was exercised upon wood and brass and steel. The modern world, according to his viewing (which was very obviously from the angle of business) is divided into two categories, executives and engineers. Executives are the men who organize and control. They are the ones chiefly rewarded. Engineers invent and carry out. They are the experts. It is the executives who lead; the experts supply ideas, work out methods, but follow.