Both of these American characteristics are operative to-day. Both are now factors and dangerous factors in our idealism, for the strong will of the Calvinists to do right has become erratic and perverted, and the common sense of Franklin’s school has degenerated. Here, as I shall endeavor to show, are two chief causes for the vagaries of the American mind in the years that ended the war. The mental discipline which the Puritans learned from the fear of a wrathful God remained a discipline long after it had lost its theological basis, and is responsible in no small measure for the disciplined will of nineteenth-century America to succeed in material endeavors as well as in philanthropic or moral purpose. But, divorced from the belief in a speedy damnation which had given it cause, it was bound to become, and it did become, a mere mental habit, a kind of aimless necessity of being virtuous. Bolted no longer to a belief in a revengeful God who demanded virtue, loosed, like an engine from its flywheel, this ancestral sense of necessity whirled on by its own momentum. It became will without thinking behind it, which was driven by material circumstance instead of religious belief. It became a restless energy whose aim, as a foreign observer has said, seemed to be “mere acceleration.” It became unreasonable, often absurd, sometimes hysterical. I find its manifestations in the insistence that America must always be described as sweet, lovely, and virtuous in disregard of the facts, in our “boosting” of prosperity and success by proclaiming them. I find them in the determination to be good and happy and prosperous immediately and without regard to circumstance which has created the American magazine story and brought about national prohibition by constitutional amendment. This hand-me-down will is responsible for much progress, good and bad, in America; it is also responsible for American sentimentalism. It has been a driving force in our idealism; but because it is not so much reasoned purpose as a mental habit inherited, it has run wild, become hysterical and erratic. It led us to propose to reform the world and to advertise our intention before our brains were ready for the task. It makes our idealism feverish and uncertain.