This faith in a combination of good intentions, organization, words, and money is not confined to women’s clubs or to societies of amiable enthusiasts.  In the state of mind which it expresses can be detected the powerful influence which American women exert over American men; but its guiding faith and illusion are shared by the most hard-headed and practical of Americans.  The very men who have made their personal successes by a rigorous application of the rule that business is business—­the very men who in their own careers have exhibited a shrewd and vivid sense of the realities of politics and trade; it is these men who have most faith in the practical, moral, and social power of the Subsidized Word.  The most real thing which they carry over from the region of business into the region of moral and intellectual ideals is apparently their bank accounts.  The fruits of their hard work and their business ability are to be applied to the purpose of “uplifting” their fellow-countrymen.  A certain number of figures written on a check and signed by a familiar name, what may it not accomplish?  Some years ago at the opening exercises of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Mr. Andrew Carnegie burst into an impassioned and mystical vision of the miraculously constitutive power of first mortgage steel bonds.  From his point of view and from that of the average American there is scarcely anything which the combination of abundant resources and good intentions may not accomplish.

The tradition of seeking to cross the gulf between American practice and the American ideal by means of education or the Subsidized Word is not be dismissed with a sneer.  The gulf cannot be crossed without the assistance of some sort of educational discipline; and that discipline depends partly on a new exercise of the “money power” now safely reposing in the strong boxes of professional millionaires.  There need be no fundamental objection taken to the national faith in the power of good intentions and re-distributed wealth.  That faith is the immediate and necessary issue of the logic of our national moral situation.  It should be, as it is, innocent and absolute; and if it does not remain innocent and absolute, the Promise of American Life can scarcely be fulfilled.

A faith may, however, be innocent and absolute without being inexperienced and credulous.  The American faith in education is by way of being credulous and superstitious, not because it seeks individual and social amelioration by what may be called an educational process, but because the proposed means of education are too conscious, too direct, and too superficial.  Let it be admitted that in any one decade the amount which can be accomplished towards individual and social amelioration by means of economic and political reorganization is comparatively small; but it is certainly as large as that which can be accomplished by subsidizing individual good intentions.  Heroism is not to be encouraged