ork.

The transformation of the old sense of a glorious national destiny into
the sense of a serious national purpose will inevitably tend to make the
popular realization of the Promise of American life both more explicit
and more serious. As long as Americans believed they were able to
fulfill a noble national Promise merely by virtue of maintaining intact
a set of political institutions and by the vigorous individual pursuit
of private ends, their allegiance to their national fulfillment remained
more a matter of words than of deeds; but now that they are being
aroused from their patriotic slumber, the effect is inevitably to
disentangle the national idea and to give it more dignity. The
redemption of the national Promise has become a cause for which the good
American must fight, and the cause for which a man fights is a cause
which he more than ever values. The American idea is no longer to be
propagated merely by multiplying the children of the West and by
granting ignorant aliens permission to vote. Like all sacred causes, it
must be propagated by the Word and by that right arm of the Word, which
is the Sword.

The more enlightened reformers are conscious of the additional dignity
and value which the popularity of reform has bestowed upon the American
idea, but they still fail to realize the deeper implications of their
own programme. In abandoning the older conception of an automatic
fulfillment of our national destiny, they have abandoned more of the
traditional American point of view than they are aware. The traditional
American optimistic fatalism was not of accidental origin, and it cannot
be abandoned without involving in its fall some other important
ingredients in the accepted American tradition. Not only was it
dependent on economic conditions which prevailed until comparatively
recent times, but it has been associated with certain erroneous but
highly cherished political theories. It has been wrought into the fabric
of our popular economic and political ideas to such an extent that its
overthrow necessitates a partial revision of some of the most important
articles in the traditional American creed.

The extent and the character of this revision may be inferred from a
brief consideration of the effect upon the substance of our national
Promise of an alteration in its proposed method of fulfillment. The
substance of our national Promise has consisted, as we have seen, of an
improving popular economic co