And therefore one comes back after a survey of American traits, their strengths, and their weaknesses, to the man himself. Can we name him in this hive of millions? Can we find an everyday American that will be accepted here as typical, and be recognized abroad? If there is such a type, it will be among the middle class, the bourgeois Americans, that we shall discover it. The landholding aristocracy has passed. The moneyed aristocracy is in the best (and sometimes in the worst) sense bourgeois. Cosmopolitans are few. The intellectual aristocracy is but half emerged, like a statue of Rodin’s, from the common clay. What we find now is the middle class incarnate. What we may expect soon is the finished product of bourgeois life in America. For it is clear that this life is now in full career. We exult in it, and its characteristic virtues. We deprecate aristocracy. We heap scorn upon the proletariat and persecute its prophets. Better evidence still, no sooner does a new group rise to security in our social system than it becomes visibly bourgeois, and, what is more important, mentally bourgeois. This has been true of the railway employees, the carpenters, the plumbers, the tenant farmers, and many others. It has been also true of the “aristocracy” in the old sense of the word, whether native or European. They have come into the fold, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes at a run with poverty barking behind them. All these groups have been captured by the dominant class. And if the nature of our industrial system still keeps them in alignment against the capitalist (who is the soul of bourgeoisie) or dependent upon him, nevertheless they think as he does on all questions not involving work and wages, and especially in religion, politics, and morality. They act as he does; and the labor groups are coming to fight as he does, and for the same ends. All major influences in our American life seem to be directed toward this consummation, which is triumphant, or dismal, according to your point of view. The racial factor may seem to be an exception, but is not. It is true that as the old American assimilates more and more non-Teutonic and non-Latin races to his way of living, his psychology alters, and his habits are likely to follow. It is also true that the immigrant belongs prevailingly to the peasantry or the proletariat. But the immigrant has substantially no influence upon the dominant class until he is Americanized. And he is not Americanized in any true sense until he leaves his quarter and begins to read the papers, go to the theatres, eat the food, talk the talk, and think the thoughts of the American; in a word, until he becomes bourgeois. And in the majority of cases this takes at least one generation.