In any case, it does not seem to me probable that there can be any national revolutionary movement or any complete arrest in the development of an aristocratic phase in American history.  The area of the country is too great and the means of communication between the workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for effective political action in mass.  In the worst event—­and it is only in the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable—­the newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, all the apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the material of warfare, will be in the hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will necessarily be high.  So that, though the intensifying trouble between labour and capital may mean immense social disorganisation and lawlessness, though it may even supply the popular support in new attempts at secession, I do not see in it the possibility and force for that new start which the revolutionary Socialists anticipate; I see it merely as one of several forces making, on the whole and particularly in view of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for construction and reconciliation.

Sec. 10

What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of the people of the United States?  Two influences are at work that may modify this profoundly.  One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanying change in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the once prolific American home, and the second is the rising standard of feminine education.  There has arisen in this age a new consciousness in women.  They are entering into the collective thought to a degree unprecedented in the world’s history, and with portents at once disquieting and confused.

In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American synthesis, the immigrant European aliens, the Catholics, the coloured blood, and so forth.  I would now observe that, in the making of the American tradition, the women also have been to a large extent, and quite remarkably, a silent factor.  That tradition is not only fundamentally middle-class and English, but it is also fundamentally masculine.  The citizen is the man.  The woman belongs to him.  He votes for her, works for her, does all the severer thinking for her.  She is in the home behind the shop or in the dairy at the farmhouse with her daughters.  She gets the meal while the men talk.  The American imagination and American feeling centre largely upon the family and upon “mother.”  American ideals are homely.  The social unit is the home, and it is another and a different set of influences and considerations that are never thought of at all when the home sentiment is under discussion, that, indeed, it would be indelicate to mention at such a time, which are making that social unit the home of one child or of no children at all.