As for Franklin’s rule of common sense, it has become a positive deterrent to idealism. His idea of conduct reasonably shaped according to the needs of environment was, and is to-day, the most solid trait of Americans. It is the ethics of modern business, and American business has become, and for a little while yet will remain, the fundamental America. Nevertheless, every candid observer will admit, no matter how great his faith in the future of his country, that the reasonable good sense of the Franklin tradition suffered a progressive dilution or degeneration throughout the nineteenth century. Rational ethics became for the most of us materialistic rationalism, still reasonable, still ethical in its way, still backed and restrained by common sense (our profiteers have also been philanthropists), but an enemy, nevertheless, to all idealism that could not be made from steel, brick, rubber, or oil. We have been too reasonable to be sordid; too materialistic to remain in the best sense reasonable. Far from advocating a league of the virtues, our business common sense has been fighting a League of Nations. The contrast between our moral code and our business code has already been overwritten in muck-raking literature. Nevertheless, despite exaggeration, it exists. Our national life is dual. We can stand on our moral foot and our business foot, but usually we alternate. In 1918 we rested entirely on one; in 1919 we swung with relief to the other. Franklin’s rule of common sense as a stimulus to idealism has broken down. What reasonable sense of proportion I myself possess as a descendant of the compatriots of Franklin urges me to protest instantly that all this is not to be taken as a picture of contemporary America. Rather it is a plucking out merely of two strains of experience that all must recognize. But these are perilously interwoven in our national character. They affect the validity of our idealism. The hysterical will drives us into professions of virtue we cannot make good. It drove us to “boost” the war; and then, being a restless energy sprung from habit rather than from conviction, left us exhausted in spirit and cynical in mind when the moral profits were ready for the gathering. It stirred a passion for the League of Nations, rights of small countries, democracy, justice, and the rest, and then collapsed like the second day of “clean-up” week. It set the will going and left the brain unmoved.