es of going on;
a race compounded of materials crude but potent; raw, but with blood
that is red and bones that are big; a race that is accomplishing its
vital tasks, and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and
material energies into the finer play of mind and spirit.

From the very beginning, the American people have been characterized by
idealism. It was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker colonists; it
gleams no less in the faces of the children of Russian Jew immigrants
to-day. American irreverence has been noted by many a foreign critic,
but there are certain subjects in whose presence our reckless or
cynical speech is hushed. Compared with current Continental humor, our
characteristic American humor is peculiarly reverent. The purity of
woman and the reality of religion are not considered topics for
jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are held by our young men to be
not only desirable but attainable virtues. There is among us, in
comparison with France or Germany, a defective reverence for the State
as such; and a positive irreverence towards the laws of the
Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of high political positions.
Mayor, Judge, Governor, Senator, or even President, may be the butt of
such indecorous ridicule as shocks or disgusts the foreigner; but
nevertheless the personal joke stops short of certain topics which
Puritan tradition disapproves. The United States is properly called a
Christian nation, not merely because the Supreme Court has so affirmed
it, but because the phrase "a Christian nation" expresses the
historical form which the religious idealism of the country has made
its own. The Bible is still considered, by the mass of the people, a
sacred book; oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great
office, are administered upon it. American faith in education, as all
the world knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand with faith in
religion; the school-house was almost as sacred a symbol as the
meeting-house; and the munificence of American private benefactions to
the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the most striking
instances of idealism in the history of civilization.

The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and
section, of humanitarian and missionary effort, have all burned with a
clear flame in the United States. The optimism which lies so deeply
embedded in the American character is one phase of the national mind.
Charle