No future in the history of the world has been so interesting as is the immediate future of America. Our next great political leader, who may be conservative, but is probably radical, is now in college or has but lately been graduated--unless, indeed, he has just been admitted to a labor-union. And he is studying, one hopes, the men who dealt most heavily in character, the amiable McKinley, the fiercely instinctive Roosevelt; he is studying the careers of the men who have been dominated chiefly by ideas, the moral idealist Wilson, the ruthless thinker Lenine. He is learning, one hopes, when and why each and all failed, each and all in their measure succeeded. Whether he profits, and we profit, from their experience, time alone will discover. CHAPTER IV AMERICAN IDEALISM Is American idealism a virtue, a disease, or an illusion? The question cannot be answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry with which Tennyson threatened the flower in the crannied wall--what man is, and what God is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can be made ready for answering. The writer, and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer to it; and that is better than the inner feeling of many an American just now, who, weary of five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly believes that American idealism is first of all a nuisance. Yet it was never so easy to make a case for the virtue of idealism as in retrospect of the years 1914-18. What many have never grasped in the confusion of the times is that exactly the same idealistic prime motive made us join hearts from the first with Great Britain and France, kept us out of war for two years and a half, and brought us in on that April of 1917. There is always a complex of motives behind every war, but there is also, with few exceptions, a _primum mobile_, and with us it was the distrust, the fear, the hatred that were the reactions of our idealism against arbitrary violence. The invasion of Belgium settled our will for Belgium and her allies. Our distrust of war, especially European war, as a means by which we could bring about justice and peace, kept us out of the struggle despite clamorous, and perhaps far-sighted, minorities. Our final conviction that violence was a fire loose in the world, which must be stamped out, drove us from easy neutrality into war. And if in the last of these three stages dread of the future and the need of immediate self-defense had their large part, they did no more than sharpen the angle of our resolve. Idealism kept us out of war, and idealism drove us into it.