For three centuries now we have been at our experiment in democracy. We have been sordid and we have been magnificent. We have been timorous and we have set examples for hardihood in man. We have stumbled blindly on our road, and we have had great moments of illumination. We have not made a perfect democracy, but perhaps more men, women, and children have been happy in America than elsewhere in world history. And on the whole our course has been consistently onward. No purpose of the founders has failed to continue; no valuable element of character has yet been lost by the way. We are no worse men, by and large, than our forefathers. And either this great experiment is worth something or it is not. If it is worth something, it must pass into literature, and find men to make it pass. And these men and women must be lovers of what we have done here and what we are, as the young poets of England at war were above all lovers of their blessed England. They cannot be scoffers at our loose-held ideals and our nervous commercialism, who scold, which is easy, a great, though uneven, nation, but do not search out the cause of its greatness and proclaim its hope. Nor can they be recluses contemptuous of that public in whose progressive refinement lies the only chance for democracy. Nor mere buyers and sellers of emotion who have learned the speech of the great beast, as Hamilton called the common people, only to make profit by it. But you cannot summon a literature from the vasty deep by calling for it in oratorical vein. Perhaps, even now as I write, some wise youth, who takes his task more seriously than himself, has begun in humor a poem that is meant for some newspaper column, but will become a better description than an essay can give of the American who has been doing so much, but thinking also, who still knows how to grin at misfortune, and is not yet ready to declare himself bankrupt in ideas, deficient in character, or pallid in imaginative faith. As a nation we did our boasting early and got it out of our system; but the confidence and the strength and the hope that inspired that boasting remain, and approach fruition. CHAPTER VII THE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN In the preceding chapters there has been much said of conservatism and radicalism, of idealism and the religious instinct, of literature that expresses the soul of a race. Nevertheless, when we look about in this our America, it is painfully clear that not these absolutes but man who makes and possesses them must chiefly concern us. It is the American who will make or break his religion, his literature, his politics. He is the entity. He is our destiny.