The American radical in the future, I take it, will still be idealist, but not Bolshevik. That generalization from the needs of poverty is at the same time too material to suit his temper, which is still fundamentally moral, and too rash economically to sit with his practical common sense. He will remain an idealist; but a sharpening of his intellect will give teeth to his idealism, and the practical common sense he will carry over from the days when his kind were pioneers in a new world will steady him. What he will want is not yet clear, except that it will certainly not be the world of Marx or the kaiser (himself in many respects a radical). What he will do I cannot venture to guess. But if one dare not prophesy, one may at least hope.
And my hope is that a principle now visibly at work among many Americans may guide him also. Principles, if they are sound, have a way of making themselves felt through the padding of mental habit and convention, like knobs in a chair-seat.
The principle I have in mind is merely this: that a man’s character and the ideas upon which, so to speak, he operates must be appraised separately. Tenacity of will, honesty of spirit, tenderness of heart—such elements of character make a man neither conservative nor radical, but they cannot be left out of political accounting.
And my hope is that the new generation is going to be forced toward such a weighing and discrimination of character and policies. Their mental padding has worn thin in war-time. The moral conventions that we have accepted almost unhesitatingly here in America no longer protect the youth with certainty from the shrewd blows of rationalism or superstition.
Therefore ideas and character are both likely to be more closely inspected in the days that are coming. The conservative minded, as in the past, will emphasize character; and as that is a much better platform to stand on than mere obstinacy or self-interest, they will presumably be better conservatives, provided that the intellectual unrest of the times forces them to think. The radicals will search for ideas that may transform the future, and if the abundance of ideas in relation to the paucity of accomplishment causes them to put a higher value upon character, why, so much for the better radicalism.
No future in the history of the world has been so interesting as is the immediate future of America. Our next great political leader, who may be conservative, but is probably radical, is now in college or has but lately been graduated—unless, indeed, he has just been admitted to a labor-union. And he is studying, one hopes, the men who dealt most heavily in character, the amiable McKinley, the fiercely instinctive Roosevelt; he is studying the careers of the men who have been dominated chiefly by ideas, the moral idealist Wilson, the ruthless thinker Lenine. He is learning, one hopes, when and why each and all failed, each and all in their measure succeeded. Whether he profits, and we profit, from their experience, time alone will discover.
CHAPTER IV
AMERICAN IDEALISM
IS American idealism a virtue, a disease, or an illusion? The question cannot be answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry with which Tennyson threatened the flower in the crannied wall—what man is, and what God is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can be made ready for answering. The writer, and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer to it; and that is better than the inner feeling of many an American just now, who, weary of five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly believes that American idealism is first of all a nuisance.