It is this same habit of crowd-thinking which accounts to a great extent for the dearth of intellectual curiosity in this country. From what we have seen to be the nature of the crowd-mind, it is to be expected that in a democracy in which crowds play an important part the condition described by de Tocqueville will generally prevail. There is much truth in his statement that it seems at first as if the minds of all the Americans "were formed upon the same model." Spiritual variation will be encouraged only in respect to matters in which one crowd differs from another. The conformist spirit will prevail in all. Intellectual leadership will inevitably pass to the "tight-minded." There will be violent conflicts of ideas, but they will be crowd ideas. The opinions about which people differ are for the most part ready-made. They are concerned with the choice of social mechanisms, but hardly with valuations. With nearly all alike, there is a notion that mankind may be redeemed by the magic of externally manipulating the social environment. There is a wearisome monotony of professions of optimism, idealism, humanitarianism, with little knowledge of what these terms mean. I am thinking of all those young people who, in the decade and a half which preceded the war, represented the finished product of our colleges and universities. What a stretch of imagination is needed before one may call these young people educated! How little of intellectual interest they have brought back from school to their respective communities! How little cerebral activity they have stirred up! Habits of study, of independent thinking, have seldom been acquired. The "educated" have possibly gained a little in social grace; they have in some cases learned things which are of advantage to them in the struggle for position. Out of the confused mass of unassimilated information which they dimly remember as the education which they "got," a sum of knowledge doubtless remains which is greater in extent than that possessed by the average man, but, though greater in extent, this knowledge is seldom different in kind. There is the same superficiality, the same susceptibility to crowd-thinking on every subject. The mental habits of American democracy are probably best reflected to-day by the "best-seller" novel, the _Saturday Evening Post_, the Chautauqua, the Victrola, the moving picture.