unanticipated material prosperity and success.  From that British middle-class tradition comes the individualist protestant spirit, the keen self-reliance and personal responsibility, the irresponsible expenditure, the indiscipline and mystical faith in things being managed properly if they are only let alone.  “State-blindness” is the natural and almost inevitable quality of a middle-class tradition, a class that has been forced neither to rule nor obey, which has been concentrated and successfully concentrated on private gain.

This middle-class British section of the American population was, and is to this day, the only really articulate ingredient in its mental composition.  And so it has had a monopoly in providing the American forms of thought.  The other sections of peoples that have been annexed by or have come into this national synthesis are silent so far as any contribution to the national stock of ideas and ideals is concerned.  There are, for example, those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, the French Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, the French-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New Englander from New England, the Germans, the Italians the Hungarians.  Comparatively they say nothing.  From all the ten million of coloured people come just two or three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. Church Terrell, mere protests at specific wrongs.  The clever, restless Eastern European Jews, too, have still to find a voice.  Professor Muensterberg has written with a certain bitterness of the inaudibility of the German element in the American population.  They allow themselves, he remonstrates, to count for nothing.  They did not seem to exist, he points out, even in politics until prohibitionist fury threatened their beer.  Then, indeed, the American German emerged from silence and obscurity, but only to rescue his mug and retire again with it into enigmatical silence.

If there is any exception to this predominance of the tradition of the English-speaking, originally middle-class, English-thinking northerner in the American mind, it is to be found in the spread of social democracy outward from the festering tenement houses of Chicago into the mining and agrarian regions of the middle west.  It is a fierce form of socialist teaching that speaks throughout these regions, far more closely akin to the revolutionary Socialism of the continent of Europe than to the constructive and evolutionary Socialism of Great Britain.  Its typical organ is The Appeal to Reason, which circulates more than a quarter of a million copies weekly from Kansas City.  It is a Socialism reeking with class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic in spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American moral and intellectual synthesis.  It is remarkable chiefly as the one shrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance.