He generously recognizes almost as much
that is good about Americans and their ways as our most vivacious
patriotic orators would claim, while at the same time he has marshaled
an army of abuses and sins which sound like an echo of the pages of the
_London Saturday Review_. In the end he applies a friendly dash of
whitewash by congratulating us on the "grand fact of our noble national
theory," but to a discerning mind the consolation is not very consoling.
The trouble is that the sins with which America is charged by Mr.
Muirhead are flagrant violations of our noble national theory. So far as
his charges are true, they are a denial that the American political and
economic organization is accomplishing the results which its traditional
claims require. If, as Mr. Muirhead charges, Americans permit the
existence of economic slavery, if they grind the face of the poor, if
they exploit the weak and distribute wealth unjustly, if they allow
monopolies to prevail and laws to be unequal, if they are disgracefully
ignorant, politically corrupt, commercially unscrupulous, socially
snobbish, vulgarly boastful, and morally coarse,--if the substance of
the foregoing indictment is really true, why, the less that is said
about a noble national theory, the better.
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