The effectual modifying force at work is not the strangeness nor the temperamental maladjustment of the new elements of population, but the conscious realisation of the inadequacy of the tradition on the part of the more intelligent sections of the American population.  That blind national conceit that would hear no criticism and admit no deficiency has disappeared.  In the last decade such a change has come over the American mind as sometimes comes over a vigorous and wilful child.  Suddenly it seems to have grown up, to have begun to weigh its powers and consider its possible deficiencies.  There was a time when American confidence and self-satisfaction seemed impregnable; at the slightest qualm of doubt America took to violent rhetoric as a drunkard resorts to drink.  Now the indictment I have drawn up harshly, bluntly and unflatteringly in Sec. 4 would receive the endorsement of American after American.  The falling birth-rate of all the best elements in the State, the cankering effect of political corruption, the crumbling of independence and equality before the progressive aggregation of wealth—­he has to face them, he cannot deny them.  There has arisen a new literature, the literature of national self-examination, that seems destined to modify the American tradition profoundly.  To me it seems to involve the hope and possibility of a conscious collective organisation of social life.

If ever there was an epoch-marking book it was surely Henry Demarest Lloyd’s “Wealth against Commonwealth.”  It marks an epoch not so much by what it says as by what it silently abandons.  It was published in 1894, and it stated in the very clearest terms the incompatibility of the almost limitless freedom of property set up by the constitution, with the practical freedom and general happiness of the mass of men.  It must be admitted that Lloyd never followed up the implications of this repudiation.  He made his statements in the language of the tradition he assailed, and foreshadowed the replacement of chaos by order in quite chaotic and mystical appeals.  Here, for instance, is a typical passage from “Man, the Social Creator”.

  “Property is now a stumbling-block to the people, just
  as government has been.  Property will not be abolished,
  but, like government, it will be democratised.

“The philosophy of self-interest as the social solution was a good living and working synthesis in the days when civilisation was advancing its frontiers twenty miles a day across the American continent, and every man for himself was the best social mobilisation possible.

“But to-day it is a belated ghost that has overstayed the cock-crow.  These were frontier morals.  But this same, everyone for himself, becomes most immoral when the frontier is abolished and the pioneer becomes the fellow-citizen and these frontier morals are most uneconomic when labour can be divided and the product multiplied.