Furthermore, behind and beneath all our striving, sets of moral ideas have been active. America has never been blasé or cynical. We have never relinquished the ethics of puritanism, which are the ethics of the Bible. Even the greedy capitalist has disgorged at last, and devoted his winnings to the improvement of the society he preyed upon. But most American capitalists have not been greedy. They themselves have been devoured by a consuming desire to accomplish, to build up, to put through. When they have broken laws, it is because the laws have held them back from what seemed to them necessary, inevitable development for the greater good of all--because, in a word, they were radical. One night in war-time, at a base port in Scotland far from our own environment and our native prejudices, I heard the self-told tale of an arch-enemy of American “interests,” a pugnacious man who had fought and won, with a price on his head, sent millionaires to jail, been calumniated, been trapped by infamous conspiracies, and escaped them--a man better hated, better loved than is the fortune of most of us. My other companion was another American, a young, but celebrated, preacher, a moralist of the breed of the Beechers and the Spurgeons. And the same question rose to our lips when the story was finished. These enemies, these magnates who had been jailed and defeated, and yet still fought and often successfully, were they mere self-seekers, rascals, by any fair definition? And neither of us was satisfied with that answer, nor was the hero of the story. Two of us at least agreed that it was rather a case of “enterprise” _versus_ “social justice,” of individualistic effort _versus_ the rights of a community. The zeal of the capitalists had burned in their hearts until they broke through morality in an effort to make good. But of course most of our American radicals have not been even illegal in their idealism. Their zeal has encountered only obstinacy, stupidity, and the intractable conservatism of ordinary life. These men have built up great industries that made life more facile, or extended great educational and health enterprises over States and beyond seas, with little harm to any man and much good to most, unless the source of the wealth expended be questioned, or the effect of a zealot’s ideas enforced upon millions.