interests or was not too costly in time and money.  No doubt, we also have had our domestic difficulties, and were obliged to shed a good deal of American blood, because we resolutely refused to believe that human servitude was not entirely compatible with the loftiest type of democracy; but then, the Civil War might have been avoided if the Abolitionists had not erroneously insisted on being consistent.  The way to escape similar trouble in the future is to go on preaching ideality, and to leave its realization wholly to the individual.  We can then be “uplifted” by the words, while the resulting deeds cannot do us, as individuals, any harm.  We can continue to celebrate our “noble national theory” and preserve our perfect democratic system until the end of time without making any of the individual sacrifices or taking any of the collective risks, inseparable from a systematic attempt to make our words good.

The foregoing state of mind is the great obstacle to the American national advance; and its exposure and uprooting is the primary need of American education.  In agitating against the traditional disregard of our full national responsibility, a critic will do well to dispense with the caution proper to the consideration of specific practical problems.  A radical theory does not demand in the interest of consistency an equally radical action.  It only demands a sincere attempt to push the application of the theory as far as conditions will permit, and the employment of means sufficient probably to accomplish the immediate purpose.  But in the endeavor to establish and popularize his theory, a radical critic cannot afford any similar concessions.  His own opinions can become established only by the displacement of the traditional opinions; and the way to displace a traditional error is not to be compromising and conciliatory, but to be as uncompromising and as irritating as one’s abilities and one’s vision of the truth will permit.  The critic in his capacity as agitator is living in a state of war with his opponents; and the ethics of warfare are not the ethics of statesmanship.  Public opinion can be reconciled to a constructive national programme only by the agitation of what is from the traditional standpoint a body of revolutionary ideas.

In vigorously agitating such a body of revolutionary ideas, the critic would be doing more than performing a desirable public service.  He would be vindicating his own individual intellectual interest.  The integrity and energy of American intellectual life has been impaired for generations by the tradition of national irresponsibility.  Such irresponsibility necessarily implies a sacrifice of individual intellectual and moral interests to individual and popular economic interests.  It could not persist except by virtue of intellectual and moral conformity.  The American intellectual habit has on the whole been just about as vigorous and independent as that of the domestic animals.  The freedom of opinion of which we boast