The secret must be sought elsewhere. Is it an inherited thing, this thing that makes a people? That can’t be; ours is a mixed inheritance here in America. Is it an abstract idea? Abstract ideas are never more than architectural pencillings and seldom harden into concrete foundations. Is it a common emotion? If it were we should be able to agree on a name for it. Is it an instinct? An instinct might be back of it. What is left? Can it be a religion? As such it should be easily recognizable. But an element of religion? An act of faith? Yes, for faith may exist with or without a creed, and the act of faith may be deliberate or involuntary. Willed or unwilled the faith is held; formulated or unformulated the essential creed is there. Let us look at the people of America, men and women of very divergent types and tempers far apart; men and women of inextricable heredities and of confusing beliefs--even, ordinarily, of clashing purposes. Each believes a set of things, but the beliefs of them all can be reduced to a lowest common denominator, a belief in each other; just as the beliefs of them all have a highest common multiple, a willingness to die in defence of America. To some of them America means a past, to some the past has no meaning; to some of them America means a future, to others a future is without significance. But to all of them America means a present to be safeguarded at the cost of their lives, if need be; and the fact that the present is the translation of the past to some and the reading of the future to others is incidental. 3 We would apply these considerations to the affair of literature; and having been tiresomely generalizing we shall get down to cases that every one can understand. The point we have tried to make condenses to this: The present is supremely important to us all. To some of us it is all important because of the past, and to some of us it is of immense moment because of the future, and to the greatest number (probably) the present is of overshadowing concern because it _is_ the present--the time when they count and make themselves count. It is now or never, as it always is in life, though the urgency of the hour is not always so apparent.