What they are in essence is of course more important than the name we give them. And first of all I believe that in a genuine, if narrow, sense they have been idealistic; indeed, that their American idealism has made them radical. If America at present is actively, practically idealistic (something Europe and the world in general would like to have determined) it is due to them. Idealism is not a negative virtue. It is not mysticism. It is not meditation, though it may be its fruit. Whatever idealism may be in philosophical definition, in life it is the desire and the attempt to put into practice conceptions of what ought theoretically to be accomplished in this imperfect world; and the quality of the idealism depends upon the quality of the idealist. In this sense--a true sense for America, however inapplicable to the Middle Ages--who can doubt that such Americans as I have described are idealistic? Nowhere in the world are there more visible evidences of the desires of men wreaking themselves upon earth and stone and metal, upon customs and government and morals, than in this new continent. And these desires are predominantly for betterment, for perfection--a low perfection sometimes, it is true--for the “uplift,” physically, morally, intellectually of humanity. Of course the quality of American idealism is mixed. Beside the pure ambition of a St. Francis to make men brothers, beside the aspiring hope of the cathedral builders to make faith lovely to the eye, the ideal of a chain of five-and-ten cent stores, or a railroad system, or even a democratic method of education, is not a luminous, not a spiritual, idealism. But a working ideal for the benefit of the race it may be, and often is. The truth of this has not seemed obvious to Europeans or to most Americans. Our individualism has been so intense and often so self-seeking, our preoccupation since the Civil War so dominantly with matter rather than with mind or spirit, that it is easy for foreigners to call us mere money-grubbers. Yet no one who has ever talked with a “captain of industry” or the director of a great philanthropic enterprise feels doubt as to the unsoundness of this description. Unfair, narrow, material-minded we may have been, but our enterprises have had vision behind them, dreams, perhaps, imposed upon us by the circumstances of a new, raw, continent, by wealth for the seeking, by opportunities for the making, by vast battles with nature to be organized and won.