der
themselves cheated unless they are in a measure relieved of the curse of
poverty.

This conception of American life and its Promise is as much alive to-day
as it was in 1780. Its expression has no doubt been modified during
four generations of democratic political independence, but the
modification has consisted of an expansion and a development rather than
of a transposition. The native American, like the alien immigrant,
conceives the better future which awaits himself and other men in
America as fundamentally a future in which economic prosperity will be
still more abundant and still more accessible than it has yet been
either here or abroad. No alteration or attenuation of this demand has
been permitted. With all their professions of Christianity their
national idea remains thoroughly worldly. They do not want either for
themselves or for their descendants an indefinite future of poverty and
deprivation in this world, redeemed by beatitude in the next. The
Promise, which bulks so large in their patriotic outlook, is a promise
of comfort and prosperity for an ever increasing majority of good
Americans. At a later stage of their social development they may come to
believe that they have ordered a larger supply of prosperity than the
economic factory is capable of producing. Those who are already rich and
comfortable, and who are keenly alive to the difficulty of distributing
these benefits over a larger social area, may come to tolerate the idea
that poverty and want are an essential part of the social order. But as
yet this traditional European opinion has found few echoes in America,
even among the comfortable and the rich. The general belief still is
that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy.

Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence
and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American
mind with free political institutions. The "American Farmer" traced the
good fortune of the European immigrant in America, not merely to the
abundance of economic opportunity, but to the fact that a ruling class
of abbots and lords had no prior claim to a large share of the products
of the soil. He did not attach the name of democracy to the improved
political and social institutions of America, and when the political
differences between Great Britain and her American colonies culminated
in the Revolutionary War, the converted "American Farmer" was filled
with anguish