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Indeed, an inherited liberalism has the same disadvantages as inherited money: all the owner has to do is to learn how to keep it; in other words, to become a conservative. That is what is going on in America. While we were pioneers in liberty and individualism, wealth and opportunity and independence were showered upon us, and although wealth for the average man is harder to come by, and opportunity is more and more limited to the fortunate, and independence belongs only to good incomes, nevertheless the conservative-liberal keeps the pioneer’s optimism, and is satisfied to take ready-made a system that his ancestors wrought by painful and open-minded experiment. In practice he is still full of initiative and invention; in principle he can conceive of only one dispensation, the ideas of political democracy which were the radicalism of 1861 and 1840 and 1789 and 1776.

Suppose that he could conceive of industrial democracy, of a system where every man began with an equal share of worldly privilege as he begins now with an equal share of worldly rights. Would he not work it out, with his still keen practicality, and test its value precisely as he tests a new factory method or an advertising scheme? But he cannot conceive of it. It lies beyond his dispensation. His liberalism turns conservative at the thought. It was different with political democracy and With religious toleration. The first cannot even now be said to be precisely a perfect system, and the second has left us perilously near to having no religion at all. Nevertheless, the liberal ancestor of our American never doubted that they were his problems, to be worked out to some solution. He followed boldly where they led.