The man who is
clambering up hill is in a much better position to evade or overcome
them. Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier vision of
their national Promise as soon as they give it a house on a hill-top
rather than in a valley.
The very genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism
rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous
inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have
been drawing this inference. They have been coming to see themselves
more as others see them; and as an introduction to a consideration of
this more critical frame of mind, I am going to quote another
foreigner's view of American life,--the foreigner in this case being an
Englishman and writing in 1893.
"The American note," says Mr. James Muirhead in his "Land of Contrasts,"
"includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility, an almost
childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the
present and the future, a wider realization of human brotherhood than
has yet existed, a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the
individual than by the class, a breezy indifference to authority and a
positive predilection for innovation, a marked alertness of mind, and a
manifold variety of interest--above all, an inextinguishable hopefulness
and courage.
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