l stability that it needs, amid all the oscillation of a
gelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without
their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long
ago--and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie.

Nevertheless, this immutability of popular ideas is not quite perfect.
The main current, no doubt, goes on unbrokenly, but there are many
eddies along the edges and many small tempests on the surface. Thus the
aspect changes, if not the substance. What men believe in one century is
apparently abandoned in some other century, and perhaps supplanted by
something quite to the contrary. Or, at all events, to the contrary in
appearance. Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to
freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom
hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another
cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is
something fundamental and permanent--the basic delusion that men may be
governed and yet be free. It is only on the surface that there are
transformations--and these we must study and make the most of, for of
what is underneath men are mainly unconscious. The thing that colours
the upper levels is largely the instinctive functioning of race and
nationality, the ineradicable rivalry of tribe and tribe, the primary
struggle for existence. At bottom, no doubt, the plain men of the whole
world are almost indistinguishably alike; a learned anthropologist,
Prof. Dr. Boas, has written a book to prove it. But, collected into
herds, they gather delusions that are special to herds. Beside the
underlying mass thinking there is a superimposed group thinking--a sort
of unintelligent class consciousness. This we may prod into. This, in
the case of the _Homo americanus_, is what is prodded into in the
present work. We perform, it seems to us, a useful pioneering.
Incomplete though our data may be, it is at least grounded upon a
resolute avoidance of _a priori_ methods, an absolutely open-minded
effort to get at the facts. We pounce upon them as they bob up,
convinced that even the most inconsiderable of them may have its
profound significance--that the essential may be hidden in the trivial.
All we aim at is a first marshalling of materials, an initial running of
lines. We are not architects, but furnishers of bricks, nails and laths.
But it is our hope that what we thus rake up an