He was quite wrong. The system my countrymen lived by permitted change, urged change, up to a certain point. They would demolish a ten-story building to erect one of twenty or scrap thousands of machines in order to adopt a better process, but when it came to principles and institutions they were conservative. The founders of their social and political order had been almost a century ahead of the times. The instruments of life and of government they had provided had served with slight modifications for the free-moving America of the nineteenth century. It had been a game for Americans, and a splendid one, to realize the liberality and democracy possible under the Constitution, to work out the independence available for the common man in a rich and undeveloped country in which his political power guaranteed him every advantage that could be gained in a capitalistic system, including the acquisition of capital. It had been a splendid game, and our wits had been sharpened, our faculties strengthened, our prosperity fortified, our self-confidence enormously increased in playing it. Given our rules, we could play the game more resourcefully than any other people on earth. And they were wise rules, which provided for growth, but not for a different kind of contest. We were so sure that America stood for freedom, independence, and liberality in general that we could not take seriously people who did not believe in democracy, nor conceive that there might be an idea of democracy different from our own. Indeed, on board that ship, a curious experience came to all of us, Englishmen, Americans, and I, the humble observer, when in the course of argument or conference the theories of life upon which we were variously living came momentarily into view. The Americans, it was clear, were certain that they were the most progressive people in the world. This certainty was like the fixed dogma of a Roman Catholic; it gave them elasticity and daring. Being sure of their principles, so sure as to be almost unaware of them, they ignored precedents, and solved or dismissed problems with equal ease. They made plans for a league of nations, they approved of a temporary autocracy for the President, they put the labor question on a business basis, and so disposed of it; they were afraid of nothing but a failure to act and act quickly. Nevertheless, as they talked and worked with the English, it became increasingly evident that their road ended in a wall. There were walls on the English road, too--walls of caste thinking and social privilege that seemed as ridiculous as a moat around an office building. Our wall was invisible to most of us, and as a body we never tried to pass it at all. It was the end wall of our liberal ideas, beyond which, if we thought of it at all, presumably lay socialism, anarchy, chaos.