The results in bourgeois America, which goes to the theater, wears the commonly advertised collars, sends its children to college, and keeps out of the slums and the police-court, are clearly visible and highly significant. Four classes, interlocking, but distinct enough for definition, may be readily described; and though they do not include the recent immigrant or the fire-new sophists of radicalism, the strongest brains, the most characteristic emotions, and the best character in America belong there with the mass of the mediocre undistinguished who are public opinion and the ultimate America. There are, first, the militant advance-guards of our idealism, the ethical enthusiasts who carry on the moral fervor of America. They range, like colors of the spectrum, from the rarer violet of the philosophical moralists, inheritors of the New England ethics or the Virginia ideology, through the solid blue of the organizers of great movements in social reform, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists and the Anti-tobacco League. I do not mean to be flippant. The irony, if there is irony, is bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so various an army all certain that by stopping this and beginning that the world can be saved. It is their certainty that makes them impressive--the same certainty which drove our colonials toward republican government and our pioneers to the conquest of a wilderness. Sneers at their banner, “Progress,” satisfy none but the reactionary. Progress where? Who knows. Progress for whom? It is hard to tell. But only the man who honestly believes in civilization for the benefit of the few can doubt the advance that has been made. I should have preferred the twelfth century to the twentieth if I could have lived in the right Benedictine monastery or been a count in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Elizabethan age more than my own if I could have voyaged--in the cabin--with Raleigh, been Shakespeare’s patron, or possessed a manor neither too near nor too far from London. I still think that life in a good English college, with a taste for letters and the proper port, is superior to any mental or physical luxury we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside from the point. Provençal poetry and perfect social intercourse, high adventure, the intellectual life in an appropriate physical setting, and even good port, may come again somewhere on the line along which our progress is marching. In the meantime, though the war has been a cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusiasms of the age have made the opportunities of the average man for most good things in life better, have made him, in the most accurate sense of the word, not nobler, but more civilized, and particularly in America, where the fire of opportunity was first set burning.