IN the preceding chapters there has been much said of conservatism and radicalism, of idealism and the religious instinct, of literature that expresses the soul of a race. Nevertheless, when we look about in this our America, it is painfully clear that not these absolutes but man who makes and possesses them must chiefly concern us. It is the American who will make or break his religion, his literature, his politics. He is the entity. He is our destiny.

And therefore one comes back after a survey of American traits, their strengths, and their weaknesses, to the man himself. Can we name him in this hive of millions? Can we find an everyday American that will be accepted here as typical, and be recognized abroad? If there is such a type, it will be among the middle class, the bourgeois Americans, that we shall discover it. The landholding aristocracy has passed. The moneyed aristocracy is in the best (and sometimes in the worst) sense bourgeois. Cosmopolitans are few. The intellectual aristocracy is but half emerged, like a statue of Rodin’s, from the common clay.

What we find now is the middle class incarnate. What we may expect soon is the finished product of bourgeois life in America. For it is clear that this life is now in full career. We exult in it, and its characteristic virtues. We deprecate aristocracy. We heap scorn upon the proletariat and persecute its prophets. Better evidence still, no sooner does a new group rise to security in our social system than it becomes visibly bourgeois, and, what is more important, mentally bourgeois. This has been true of the railway employees, the carpenters, the plumbers, the tenant farmers, and many others. It has been also true of the “aristocracy” in the old sense of the word, whether native or European. They have come into the fold, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes at a run with poverty barking behind them. All these groups have been captured by the dominant class. And if the nature of our industrial system still keeps them in alignment against the capitalist (who is the soul of bourgeoisie) or dependent upon him, nevertheless they think as he does on all questions not involving work and wages, and especially in religion, politics, and morality. They act as he does; and the labor groups are coming to fight as he does, and for the same ends.

All major influences in our American life seem to be directed toward this consummation, which is triumphant, or dismal, according to your point of view. The racial factor may seem to be an exception, but is not. It is true that as the old American assimilates more and more non-Teutonic and non-Latin races to his way of living, his psychology alters, and his habits are likely to follow. It is also true that the immigrant belongs prevailingly to the peasantry or the proletariat. But the immigrant has substantially no influence upon the dominant class until he is Americanized. And he is not Americanized in any true sense until he leaves his quarter and begins to read the papers, go to the theatres, eat the food, talk the talk, and think the thoughts of the American; in a word, until he becomes bourgeois. And in the majority of cases this takes at least one generation.

Economic conditions, on the other hand, favor this triumph of the bourgeoisie. We seem to be entering upon a period when a vastly greater number of men and women will have reasonable security of moderate income. But security of a moderate income, which means a guaranteed mediocrity, is the mainstay, is almost the cause, of the bourgeois spirit, just as privilege was the support of the aristocracy. And if in the next generation ten times as many families can count on a cost plus basis of living, this will but increase the middle class. It will make, to be sure, more education, more refinement, and perhaps more cerebration possible; but such a circumstance will not radically affect the character of the typical American.

Culturally, we already see the results of the many influences which are making the United States bourgeois in warp and woof. Our traits are not the fine exclusiveness, the discrimination, the selfishness of an aristocracy. Nor are they the social solidarity, the intellectual democracy, the intolerance of a proletariat. One finds rather individualism in opinion and unity in thought. One finds conservatism in institutions and radicalism in personal ambitions. One finds a solid, though dull morality, a distrust of ideas, a plentiful lack of taste, an abundance of the homely virtues of industry, truth telling, optimism, idealism, and charity, which, in an age that suits such talents, make a man healthy, wealthy, and, in his own generation, wise. Such a cultural level, and such a national character are becoming more and more familiar in America.

There must be some peak ahead; some top of the curve when the bourgeois spirit, even in the United States, will have reached the climax of its power, and the height of its vigor, and will begin to lose its sharpness of outline, and to give way to the spirit of the next age, be that what it may.

This peak is perhaps nearer than we suppose. What will happen afterwards lies in darkness, but must depend in some measure upon the temper of the bourgeoisie; and as America bids fair to be the capital of Bourgeoisia, upon the temper of America. The question may be posed this way. Are we, who are no longer the middle class, since there is no power other than spiritual or intellectual above us, are we proposing to imperialize, or to federalize the world which we dominate?

Is the bourgeois conception of security for all, and superiority (other than economic) for none, to be forced upon the years ahead? Is our democracy, as Brooks Adams thinks, a democracy of degradation, a level to which all must be either lifted, or lowered? Will we hold back, as long as our power lasts, the proletariat, feeding them, clothing them, converting them, but suppressing them, so that we may be secure? Will we tyrannize the exceptional in art, in literature, in statesmanship, in pure thinking, freezing it by distrust, or exploiting it for sensation and reducing its fruits to vulgarity? Will we resolve religion into a social emotion and poetry to rhythmic prose? Must the poor fragments of the privileged classes that still remain, and the little shopkeepers, and the teachers with their hankerings after an intellectual aristocracy, and the skilled workman with the feverish zeal of a new convert to security still upon him—must they all unite with the industrial magnate in a holy alliance of things as they are to crush into uniformity a humanity where only rebels against our authority and the uncivilized remain?

This would be the imperialism of the bourgeoisie. And neither our churches, which are rigidly bourgeois, nor our universities, which are ponderously bourgeois, and both trading in security, offer leadership that guarantees escape.

Or will we attempt to federalize this world that apparently we have conquered, allowing autonomy for races of ideas, nations of customs, and room enough for plantations of new desires in our fat fields? Will we tolerate fineness, encourage variety, permit heresy, prepare for change? It is said by way of compliment that here in America we have neither aristocrats nor peasants. Will we preserve, or destroy, the peasant virtues, the ideas of the aristocrat, the desires of the intellectual. Will we make possible a nation where to be average is not the highest good?

I have no answer, naturally. There is no reply that can now be formulated. But the solution is already present in the problem itself. It is to be found in men and women, in boys and girls especially, who will belong to the new order and who will answer in their time. If you wish to speculate upon what will become of the post-bellum American, whose traits as they exist to-day have been the subject of this book, study, on the one hand, the younger leaders in the labor parties, and on the other, the college undergraduates. In them lies the future.