Just that far the American mind, like some light tank, ran, surmounting everything, taking to the fields if the road was blocked, turning, backing, doing everything but stop; only to halt dead at the invisible barrier, and zigzag away again. By such a free-moving process within the limits of law we had scrambled across a continent in turbulent, individualistic exploitation, and yet had built a sound political system carefully and well. And there we had stopped, convinced that we had solved the problem of democracy and equal opportunity for all. This explains why America is twenty years behind the best of Europe in social and economic reform. (To be sure, Europe needed reform more than we did). This is what it is to be a conservative-liberal. The Englishman is different. He is much more likely to be an obstinate Tory, blocking all advance, and living, as far as he is able, by a system as antiquated as feudalism; or if not a Tory, then an out-and-out radical eager for a legal revolution. But in either case he knows what different-minded men are thinking; and if there is a wall on his road, he looks over it. If he is a Tory, he understands radicalism and fights it because he prefers an inequality that favors him to a more logical system that might be personally disagreeable. If he is a radical, he understands Toryism. But the American conservative-liberal acknowledges no opinion except his own. He insists, in the words of a contemporary statesman, that the American system, as founded by our forefathers, is the best in the world, and he is not interested in others. There are a thousand proofs that it is not the best possible system even for America, and plenty of them are in print--proofs advanced by capitalists as well as labor leaders, by Catholics as well as socialists; but they do not trouble him, because he neither hears nor reads them. It is easier to call the writer a crank or a Bolshevik. This is the liberal-conservative mind that will not look beyond its own fixed principles and refuses to understand those who differ from it; that suffers a kind of paralysis when confronted by genuine radicalism. The American college undergraduate has it to perfection. Bubbling over with energy, ready for anything in the practical world of struggle or adventure, he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he has inherited as a girl of her reputation. He is armored against new thinking. The American business man fairly professes it. He speculates in material things with an abandon that makes a Frenchman pale; but new principles in the relations of trade to general welfare, questions of unearned increment, first bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him.