This statement may be disputable, and it is certainly a painfully narrow bed in which to tuck American life and American ideals. Nevertheless, it has at least one element of profound truth. In the world of physical endeavor and physical organization it is executive business men who have changed, broken up, reorganized, developed the material world of America. They have fearlessly scrapped the whole machinery of production, transportation, and trade as it existed in the last generation, and in many respects improved upon, or destroyed by competition, the parallel order in the Old World. They have been true radicals of the physical category, and their achievements have been as truly radicalism as the experiments of Lenine in government ownership. That it is a physical radicalism, dealing with material values chiefly and without reference to some of the greatest needs of the human spirit, does not mean that intellect of a high, if not the highest, order may not have been required for its successful accomplishment. Our other native radicals, the philanthropists and the educators, have also been chiefly executives. Their work has been inspired by the stored-up moral force of America, especially puritan America. But their great achievements, like those of the business men, have been in organization and development rather than in thought. In earlier generations our moral radicals were such men as Emerson and Whitman. To-day they are college presidents, organizers of junior high-school systems, or heads of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations--prime movers all of them in systems of educational or philanthropic practice that uplift millions at a turn of a jack-screw. And these men in any true sense of the word are radicals--so radical in their thorough-going attempts to transform society by making it more intelligent, healthier, more productive that all Europe is protesting or imitating them. Who is exercising a greater pressure for durable change upon the largest number, who is digging most strenuously about the roots of the old order, John Rockefeller, Jr. and his co-workers or Trotzky? It is not easy to say. This essay is not propaganda, and I am not particularly concerned as to whether or no the reader accepts my broadening of the term “radicalism.” Time may force him to do so, for no one can tell in a given age just what actions and what theories will lead to the tearing up of old institutions and the planting of a new order. Those absolutist kings, Philip Augustus and his successors, who crushed together the provinces of France, were, we see now, radicals, though power and privilege were their motives. I, however, am interested in men rather than in categories, and the philanthropist radicals, the business radicals, and the educational pioneers of America already interest the world strangely.