The fault in the vision of our national future possessed by the ordinary American does not consist in the expectation of some continuity of achievement.  It consists rather in the expectation that the familiar benefits will continue to accumulate automatically.  In his mind the ideal Promise is identified with the processes and conditions which hitherto have very much simplified its fulfillment, and he fails sufficiently to realize that the conditions and processes are one thing and the ideal Promise quite another.  Moreover, these underlying social and economic conditions are themselves changing, in such wise that hereafter the ideal Promise, instead of being automatically fulfilled, may well be automatically stifled.  For two generations and more the American people were, from the economic point of view, most happily situated.  They were able, in a sense, to slide down hill into the valley of fulfillment.  Economic conditions were such that, given a fair start, they could scarcely avoid reaching a desirable goal.  But such is no longer the case.  Economic conditions have been profoundly modified, and American political and social problems have been modified with them.  The Promise of American life must depend less than it did upon the virgin wilderness and the Atlantic Ocean, for the virgin wilderness has disappeared, and the Atlantic Ocean has become merely a big channel.  The same results can no longer be achieved by the same easy methods.  Ugly obstacles have jumped into view, and ugly obstacles are peculiarly dangerous to a person who is sliding down hill.  The man who is clambering up hill is in a much better position to evade or overcome them.  Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier vision of their national Promise as soon as they give it a house on a hill-top rather than in a valley.

The very genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have been drawing this inference.  They have been coming to see themselves more as others see them; and as an introduction to a consideration of this more critical frame of mind, I am going to quote another foreigner’s view of American life,—­the foreigner in this case being an Englishman and writing in 1893.

“The American note,” says Mr. James Muirhead in his “Land of Contrasts,” “includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility, an almost childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the present and the future, a wider realization of human brotherhood than has yet existed, a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the individual than by the class, a breezy indifference to authority and a positive predilection for innovation, a marked alertness of mind, and a manifold variety of interest—­above all, an inextinguishable hopefulness and courage.  It is easy to lay one’s finger in America upon almost every one of the great defects of civilization—­even