ordinary man by means of unjust laws and institutions.  Neither can this indictment be dismissed without argument.  When Mr. Muirhead’s book was written sixteen years ago, the majority of good Americans would assuredly have read the charge with an incredulous smile; but in the year 1909 they might behave differently.  The sins of which Mr. Muirhead accused Americans sixteen years ago are substantially the sins of which to-day they are accusing themselves—­or rather one another.  A numerous and powerful group of reformers has been collecting whose whole political policy and action is based on the conviction that the “common people” have not been getting the Square Deal to which they are entitled under the American system; and these reformers are carrying with them a constantly increasing body of public opinion.  A considerable proportion of the American people is beginning to exhibit economic and political, as well as personal, discontent.  A generation ago the implication was that if a man remained poor and needy, his poverty was his own fault, because the American system was giving all its citizens a fair chance.  Now, however, the discontented poor are beginning to charge their poverty to an unjust political and economic organization, and reforming agitators do not hesitate to support them in this contention.  Manifestly a threatened obstacle has been raised against the anticipated realization of our national Promise.  Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

The conscious recognition of grave national abuses casts a deep shadow across the traditional American patriotic vision.  The sincere and candid reformer can no longer consider the national Promise as destined to automatic fulfillment.  The reformers themselves are, no doubt, far from believing that whatever peril there is cannot be successfully averted.  They make a point of being as patriotically prophetic as the most “old-fashioned Democrat.”  They proclaim even more loudly their conviction of an indubitable and a beneficent national future.  But they do not and cannot believe that this future will take care of itself.  As reformers they are bound to assert that the national body requires for the time being a good deal of medical attendance, and many of them anticipate that even after the doctors have discontinued their daily visits the patient will still need the supervision of a sanitary specialist.  He must be persuaded to behave so that he will not easily fall ill again, and so that his health will be permanently improved.  Consequently, just in so far as reformers are reformers they are obliged to abandon the traditional American patriotic fatalism.  The national Promise has been transformed into a closer equivalent of a national purpose, the fulfillment of which is a matter of conscious work.