From the War of Independence onward until our own times that tradition, that very definite ideal, has kept pretty steadily the same.  It is the image of a man and not the image of a State.  Its living spirit has been the spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and irresponsible.  It is the spirit of men who have thrown off a yoke, who are jealously resolved to be unhampered masters of their “own,” to whom nothing else is of anything but secondary importance.  That was the spirit of the English small gentry and mercantile class, the comfortable property owners, the Parliamentarians, in Stuart times.  Indeed even earlier, it is very largely the spirit of More’s “Utopia.”  It was that spirit sent Oliver Cromwell himself packing for America, though a heedless and ill-advised and unforeseeing King would not let him go.  It was the spirit that made taxation for public purposes the supreme wrong and provoked each country, first the mother country and then in its turn the daughter country, to armed rebellion.  It has been the spirit of the British Whig and the British Nonconformist almost up to the present day.  In the Reform Club of London, framed and glazed over against Magna Charta, is the American Declaration of Independence, kindred trophies they are of the same essentially English spirit of stubborn insubordination.  But the American side of it has gone on unchecked by the complementary aspect of the English character which British Toryism expresses.

The War of Independence raised that Whig suspicion of and hostility to government and the freedom of private property and the repudiation of any but voluntary emotional and supererogatory co-operation in the national purpose to the level of a religion, and the American Constitution with but one element of elasticity in the Supreme Court decisions, established these principles impregnably in the political structure.  It organised disorganisation.  Personal freedom, defiance of authority, and the stars and stripes have always gone together in men’s minds; and subsequent waves of immigration, the Irish fleeing famine, for which they held the English responsible, and the Eastern European Jews escaping relentless persecutions, brought a persuasion of immense public wrongs, as a necessary concomitant of systematic government, to refresh without changing this defiant thirst for freedom at any cost.

In my book, “The Future in America,” I have tried to make an estimate of the working quality of this American tradition of unconditional freedom for the adult male citizen.  I have shown that from the point of view of anyone who regards civilisation as an organisation of human interdependence and believes that the stability of society can be secured only by a conscious and disciplined co-ordination of effort, it is a tradition extraordinarily and dangerously deficient in what I have called a “sense of the State.”  And by a “sense of the State” I mean not merely a vague and sentimental and showy public-spiritedness—­of