those defects which are specially characteristic of the civilization of the Old World.  The United States cannot claim to be exempt from manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor, of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of respect of persons, and of a preference of the material over the spiritual.  In a word, America has not attained, or nearly attained, perfection.  But below and behind, and beyond all its weakness and evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory founded on reason and conscience.”  The reader will remark in the foregoing quotation that Mr. Muirhead is equally emphatic in his approval and in his disapproval.  He generously recognizes almost as much that is good about Americans and their ways as our most vivacious patriotic orators would claim, while at the same time he has marshaled an army of abuses and sins which sound like an echo of the pages of the London Saturday Review.  In the end he applies a friendly dash of whitewash by congratulating us on the “grand fact of our noble national theory,” but to a discerning mind the consolation is not very consoling.  The trouble is that the sins with which America is charged by Mr. Muirhead are flagrant violations of our noble national theory.  So far as his charges are true, they are a denial that the American political and economic organization is accomplishing the results which its traditional claims require.  If, as Mr. Muirhead charges, Americans permit the existence of economic slavery, if they grind the face of the poor, if they exploit the weak and distribute wealth unjustly, if they allow monopolies to prevail and laws to be unequal, if they are disgracefully ignorant, politically corrupt, commercially unscrupulous, socially snobbish, vulgarly boastful, and morally coarse,—­if the substance of the foregoing indictment is really true, why, the less that is said about a noble national theory, the better.  A man who is a sturdy sinner all the week hardly improves his moral standing by attending church on Sunday and professing a noble Christian theory of life.  There must surely be some better way of excusing our sins than by raising aloft a noble theory of which these sins are a glaring violation.

I have quoted from Mr. Muirhead, not because his antithetic characterization of American life is very illuminating, but because of the precise terms of his charges against America.  His indictment is practically equivalent to the assertion that the American system is not, or at least is no longer, achieving as much as has been claimed on its behalf.  A democratic system may permit undefiled the existence of many sins and abuses, but it cannot permit the exploitation of the