that the States have enough and to spare—­but a real sustaining conception of the collective interest embodied in the State as an object of simple duty and as a determining factor in the life of each individual.  It involves a sense of function and a sense of “place,” a sense of a general responsibility and of a general well-being overriding the individual’s well-being, which are exactly the senses the American tradition attacks and destroys.

For the better part of a century the American tradition, quite as much by reason of what it disregards as of what it suggests, has meant a great release of human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidy exploitation of the vast resources that the European invention of railways and telegraphic communication put within reach of the American people.  It has stimulated men to a greater individual activity, perhaps, than the world has ever seen before.  Men have been wasted by misdirection no doubt, but there has been less waste by inaction and lassitude than was the case in any previous society.  Great bulks of things and great quantities of things have been produced, huge areas brought under cultivation, vast cities reared in the wilderness.

But this tradition has failed to produce the beginnings or promise of any new phase of civilised organisation, the growths have remained largely invertebrate and chaotic, and, concurrently with its gift of splendid and monstrous growth, it has also developed portentous political and economic evils.  No doubt the increment of human energy has been considerable, but it has been much less than appears at first sight.  Much of the human energy that America has displayed in the last century is not a development of new energy but a diversion.  It has been accompanied by a fall in the birth-rate that even the immigration torrent has not altogether replaced.  Its insistence on the individual, its disregard of the collective organisation, its treatment of women and children as each man’s private concern, has had its natural outcome.  Men’s imaginations have been turned entirely upon individual and immediate successes and upon concrete triumphs; they have had no regard or only an ineffectual sentimental regard for the race.  Every man was looking after himself, and there was no one to look after the future.  Had the promise of 1815 been fulfilled, there would now be in the United States of America one hundred million descendants of the homogeneous and free-spirited native population of that time.  There is not, as a matter of fact, more than thirty-five million.  There is probably, as I have pointed out, much less.  Against the assets of cities, railways, mines and industrial wealth won, the American tradition has to set the price of five-and-seventy million native citizens who have never found time to get born, and whose place is now more or less filled by alien substitutes.  Biologically speaking, this is not a triumph for the American tradition.  It is, however, very clearly an outcome of the intense individualism of that tradition.  Under the sway of that it has burnt its future in the furnace to keep up steam.