Rhetoric and sentimentalism have always appealed almost equally to the American people. “Waving the flag” and “sob stuff” are the two keys which unlock the hearts of our widest publics. It is not, therefore, perhaps wholly unfair to take the most rhetorical and emotional of the utterances of Jefferson and Hamilton with relation to their fundamental political philosophies to head this article. The complete divergence of the two men could be shown in many quotations more carefully worded, but would appear only the more clearly. That divergence was sharp-cut and complete. Their views as to the relation of the people at large to government were as far asunder as the poles. In examining the writings of both these statesmen, it has been borne in upon me that if, as Lincoln said, a nation cannot live half slave and half free, neither can it live half Hamilton and half Jefferson,[Pg 84] especially when the two ingredients are mixed, as they now are, in the blurred mentalities of the same individuals. The two men themselves knew this well in their own lifetimes. Each fought valiantly for his own beliefs. Each felt that one or the other, and one philosophy or the other, must conquer. Neither believed that the two could lie down together, lion and lamb, in that curious and conglomerately furnished mental apartment, the American consciousness. That this has come to be the case merely shows for how little ideas really count in modern American political life, a life which is almost wholly emotional and financial rather than intellectual. Ideas are supposed to be explosive. In America, apparently, they are as harmless as “duds.” Even the Civil War, our greatest “moral” struggle, was largely a matter of emotion; and as for the last war, anyone who, like myself, was in a position to watch the manufacture of propaganda can say whether it was directed to the heart or to the head of the multitude. There are certain ways in which conflicting ideas may be held in the one community without hypocrisy. In every age, for example, there has been one set of beliefs for the learned, the cultivated, and the sophisticated, and another for the mob. The mob in the past was never educated, and even “the people” to-day, in spite of a smattering of “book knowledge,” are not educated in the same way that the cultivated and, in an uninvidious sense, the privileged classes are. Here and there one may find a case of a mechanic, a farmer, a saleslady, or what not who really uses his or her mind, but how rare the cases are I leave to anyone who is not afraid to come out and tell the truth as he has found it, speaking broadly. Merely reading a newspaper, even if not[Pg 85] of the tabloid variety, or tucking away unrelated bits of information uncritically, is not thinking. Between the man who critically analyzes, compares, and thinks, and the one who merely reads, there is a great gulf fixed as to ideas.