But the infection of thought is spreading. I do not believe that the youths who will make the coming generation--the youths that fought the war--are going to be radicals in the sense that I have called European. If the ideas of Marx and Lenine ever take root in America, it will be because social injustice such as we have not yet been cursed with makes a soil for them. If they take root, they transform in the growing, like foreign plants in California weather. But the new generation is not like the old. It is more sensitive to the winds of doctrine. It is less empirical, less optimistic, less self-assured. Already one can divide into two classes the undergraduates as one finds them in American colleges. The smaller group their elders would call radical. But they are not socialists, not anarchists, not even consistently liberal. More truly, they are critics of things as they are. Their minds are restless; they are ever seeking for definitions, for solutions, for a cause to enroll under. They are restless under the push of common sense America that drives them into activity without explanation. They are painfully aware of the difference between their ideas and the conditions of life in modern society, and are determined to test one by the other. Their native idealism has become intellectual. The other group is far larger, but, if less restless, is no more static. Most of its members are indifferent to the new ideas scintillating all over the world, if indeed they are not ignorant of them. Nevertheless, their faith in society as it was is curiously weak. If few of them are likely to become socialists, few also will be inspired by the physical and moral idealism of their fathers. The naïve enthusiasm of those fathers for “movements,” “ideals,” “progress” is not (unless I miss my guess) common among them. They are not likely to overturn America a second time in order to make great fortunes; philanthropy does not interest them; education as a missionary endeavor does not seem to attract them. Their moral foundations are less solid than in old days; their energies less boundless; aimless endeavor for the sake of doing something is no longer a lure. Either they will find a program of their own to excite them, or stand pat upon the fortune they expect to inherit. If their future is to be narrowed to a choice between pleasure and mere productivity, why, then these men would rather run motor-cars than make them. There is a very real danger that rather than hustle for the sake of hustling, they will prefer to “lie down” on their job. And thanks to the homogeneity of the current American mind, this analysis, if it is true at all, is true of thousands.