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But by all odds the most important fact as regards this conservative-liberal mind of which I have been writing remains to be stated, and that is its success, for it is now the prevailing mind in America. As our soldiers in France, though bearing Italian names, Irish names, Hebrew, Polish, German names, yet in helmet and uniform looked all, or nearly all, like the physical type we call American, so in this confusing country of ours, immigrant-settled, polylingual, built upon fragments of the empires of England and Spain and Russia and France, there is indubitably a mental type which we may call with some confidence American, a mind liberal in its principles, but in its instincts conservative.

Indeed it is arguable and perhaps demonstrable that this American mental type is the most definite national entity to be found anywhere in the Western world. I know that this sounds paradoxical. We have heard much for several years now of the lack of homogeneity in America. We felt in 1914 our German-Americans cleave away from us (to be sure, they came back); we saw in 1918 and 1919 the radical socialist and the I. W. W. and the vehement intellectual manifest symptoms that were certainly not American as the ’nineties knew America. We began to realize that the immigrant changes his language more quickly than his mores, and frequently changes neither. All this is true. And yet, in spite of it, this conservative-liberal way of looking at things which we know so well in America comes nearer to being a definite national psychology that acts in expected fashions, has qualities that you can describe as I have been describing them, and characteristics common to all varieties of it, than either the “British mind” or the “French mind” of which we write glibly.