m and Wesleyanism. The old folks put every dollar they can
wring from a reluctant environment into real property or the banks; the
young folks put their inheritance into phonographs, Fords, boiled
shirts, yellow shoes, cuckoo clocks, lithographs of the current
mountebanks, oil stock, automatic pianos and the works of Harold Bell
Wright, Gerald Stanley Lee and O. Henry.

III

But what, then, is the character that actually marks the American--that
is, in chief? If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he
thinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest
when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of European
legend, then what is he? We offer an answer in all humility, for the
problem is complex and there is but little illumination of it in the
literature; nevertheless, we offer it in the firm conviction, born of
twenty years' incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct.
It is, in brief, this: that the thing which sets off the American from
all other men, and gives a peculiar colour not only to the pattern of
his daily life but also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for
want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration. That is to
say, his dominant passion is a passion to lift himself by at least a
step or two in the society that he is a part of--a passion to improve
his position, to break down some shadowy barrier of caste, to achieve
the countenance of what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes and
accepts as his betters. The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever
fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and
all his secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, group
themselves about the yearning to grasp it. Here we have an explanation
of the curious restlessness that educated foreigners, as opposed to mere
immigrants, always make a note of in the country; it is half aspiration
and half impatience, with overtones of dread and timorousness. The
American is violently eager to get on, and thoroughly convinced that his
merits entitle him to try and to succeed, but by the same token he is
sickeningly fearful of slipping back, and out of the second fact, as we
shall see, spring some of his most characteristic traits. He is a man
vexed, at one and the same time, by delusions of grandeur and an
inferiority complex; he is both egotistical and subservient, assertive
and politic, blatant and shy. Most of the errors