He tries to gamble and speculate. Hence American ideology. When he has confused the issues the American gives it up and he passes his problems to his church, his lodge, his newspaper, or, preferably, to his wife, not to forget the mind reader and the palmist. Optimism at all costs is a necessity for the business man as well as for the pioneer. Expansion lives on assumptions, on foregone conclusions and hopes supported by haphazard calculation. According to Waldo Frank, Puritanism was tantamount to a religious decadence. It was essentially irreligious. Not the meek in spirit but the shrewd and the valiant were the elect of Puritanism. From the very beginnings of colonization in America, Puritan idealism and commercial imperialism went hand in hand. The decadence began at the epoch of the Reformation. While all Europe was advancing along intellectual, artistic and literary paths, the Puritan bartered his soul for earthly possessions. Spiritual energies turned material. Physical exertions for power paralyzed higher aspirations. The individual as such no longer counted. Expansion was all and the building of an empire. Even the notion of a personal God disappeared. The _genius loci_ replaced Providence. _Magnalia Christi_ became _Magnalia Christi Americana_.[2] That one of the most fervent forms of mysticism should have decayed into being only a craving for material prosperity is the paradox and the curse of Puritanism. America, we are told, is teeming to-day with all the riches of this earth. From the top of a mountain the Tempter would be proud to show it to Him who said that His kingdom did not belong to this world. From the heights of the ideal, however, America looks like a desert. Let her confess her sins, her emptiness, her impurities. Let America repent and convert herself! Let her find a way to salvation by giving up the Puritan ideals! Thus speaks the new Zarathustra with an intensity of conviction and a zeal which betrays the prophet and the idealist. Such an indictment takes us very far away from the days of optimism, from Emerson, Whitman, William James and Theodore Roosevelt. American idealism was buried in the grave of the Transcendentalists. As for American energy it floundered in the quagmire described by Theodore Dreiser in “An American Tragedy.” After Waldo Frank let us hear Mr. Henry Mencken, than whom no better expert for smashing the Puritan can be found (in “Puritanism as a Literary Force”). According to him, except in the course of brief escapades, the average American translates all values and even beauty in terms of right and wrong. He is at the bottom a policeman and a judge, a fanatic of the law.[3]