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Whether familiar or not, the effects of this political disease—for it is a disease, a hardening of the arteries of the mind—are easily observable all about us in the America of to-day. Indeed, we see them so frequently that they awaken no surprise, are scarcely seen at all in any intellectual sense of the word. They are like our clear atmosphere, our mixture of races, our hurried steps—things we scarcely notice until an outsider speaks of them. I am not an outsider. I am so much a part of America that I find it difficult to detach myself from a mood that is mine in common with many other Americans. And yet, once one sees it plainly, the educated conservatism of liberal America becomes portentous, a unique political phenomenon.

I think that this peculiarity of our political thinking first became evident to me on an ocean voyage in war-time. There were a score or so of Americans on board, members, most of them, of various government missions, picked business men, picked professional men, thoroughly intelligent, intensely practical, and entirely American. They were democratic, too, as we use the word in America; that is, good “mixers,” free from snobbery, and nothing new in action was alien to their sympathies. They could remold you a business or a legal practice in half an hour’s conversation; tear down an organization and build it up again between cigars. Their committee meetings went off like machine-guns, whereas the English officers and trade diplomats, when they got together, snarled themselves in set speeches and motions and took an afternoon to get anywhere. The English, indeed, seemed puzzled and a little dazed by the ease with which the Americans seized upon and put through reorganization of any kind. They seemed positively to leap at change, so long as basic ideas were not involved. “Nothing,” said an Indian colonel, “is sacred to them. They would scrap the empire and build a new one—on paper—at sixty miles an hour.”