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This is the liberal-conservative mind that will not look beyond its own fixed principles and refuses to understand those who differ from it; that suffers a kind of paralysis when confronted by genuine radicalism. The American college undergraduate has it to perfection. Bubbling over with energy, ready for anything in the practical world of struggle or adventure, he is as confident and as careful of the ideas he has inherited as a girl of her reputation. He is armored against new thinking. The American business man fairly professes it. He speculates in material things with an abandon that makes a Frenchman pale; but new principles in the relations of trade to general welfare, questions of unearned increment, first bore and then, if pressed home, frighten him.

And yet the college undergraduates, after hatching, and the American business man have made for us a very comfortable America, just now the safest place in the world to live in, the most prosperous country in the world, the most cheerful. The liberal-conservative way of doing things has its great advantages. America is its product, and the ranter who describes the United States as the home of super-capitalism, a sink of cheaply exploited labor, a dull stretch of bourgeois mediocrity, does not seem to be able to persuade even himself that the United States is not the best of all countries for a permanent residence.