The foregoing considerations throw a new light upon the mistake made by the American heretics of the Middle Period.  In so far as their assertion of American intellectual independence was negative, it should not have been a protest against “feudalism,” social classification, social and individual discipline, approved technical methods, or any of those social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely believed to be exclusively European.  It should have been a protest against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism—­the Americanism of national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism.  The bondage from which Americans needed, and still need, emancipation is not from Europe, but from the evasions, the incoherence, the impatience, and the easy-going conformity of their own intellectual and moral traditions.  We do not have to cross the Atlantic in order to hunt for the enemies of American national independence and fulfillment.  They sit at our political fireside and toast their feet on its coals.  They poison American patriotic feeling until it becomes, not a leaven, but a kind of national gelatine.  They enshrine this American democratic ideal in a temple of canting words which serves merely as a cover for a religion of personal profit.  American moral and intellectual emancipation can be achieved only by a victory over the ideas, the conditions, and the standards which make Americanism tantamount to collective irresponsibility and to the moral and intellectual subordination of the individual to a commonplace popular average.

The heretics of the Middle Period were not cowardly, but they were intellectually irresponsible, undisciplined, and inexperienced.  Sharing, as they did, most of the deeper illusions of their time, they did not vindicate their own individual intellectual independence, and they contributed little or nothing to American national intellectual independence.  With the exception of a few of the men of letters who had inherited a formative local tradition, their own personal careers were examples not of gradual individual fulfillment, but at best of repetition and at worst of degeneracy.  Like the most brilliant contemporary Whig politicians, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, their intellectual individuality was gradually cheapened by the manner in which it was expressed; and it is this fact which makes the case of Lincoln, both as a politician and a thinker, so unique and so extraordinary.  The one public man of this period who did impose upon himself a patient and a severe intellectual and moral discipline, who really did seek the excellent use of his own proper tools, is the man who preeminently attained national intellectual and moral stature.  The difference in social value between Lincoln and, say, William Lloyd Garrison can be measured by the difference in moral and intellectual discipline to which each of these men submitted.  Lincoln sedulously turned to account every intellectual and moral opportunity