EVERYDAY AMERICANS BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY Author of “College Sons and College Fathers,” “Our House,” “Education by Violence,” etc. NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1920 Copyright, 1919, 1920, by The Century Co....

This is emphatically not a war book; and yet the chapters that follow, in one sense, are the fruits of the war, inasmuch as they represent reflections upon his own people by one returning to a familiar environment after active contact with English, Scottish, Irish, and French in the turbulent, intimate days of 1918. They are complementary, in a way, to a volume of essays which sprang from that experience and was published in 1919 under the title “Education by Violence.” But though representing i

IN England there developed long ago, perhaps as far back as the days of Shakespeare, who was aristocratic in his tastes and democratic in his sympathies, a curious political animal called the radical-conservative. The radical-conservative, as Lord Fitzmaurice once said, is a man who would have been a radical outright if radicals had not been dissenters; by which he clearly meant that the species agreed with radical principles, but objected to radicals because they did not have good manners, seld

THERE is one experience that conservative-liberal America—bourgeois America, the pushing America that gets what it wants on this side of the ocean—possesses in common, and that is its education. We of the vast American middle class have all been to high school, or we have lived with high school graduates; we have all been to college, or we have worked with college graduates. Our education, when viewed with any detachment, is astoundingly homogeneous. In a given generation most of us have studied

IT is with no intention to be paradoxical that I call America a radical nation. I know well by experience, sometimes galling, what an English labor leader or a French socialist thinks of America, as he understands it. A mere congestion of capital, a spawning-ground of the bourgeoisie, the birthplace of trusts, where even the labor-unions are capitalistic. If the world is to be saved for democracy, he says, it will not be by America. I am not so sure. Being one of those who doubted whether the su

IS American idealism a virtue, a disease, or an illusion? The question cannot be answered in an essay. It is like the inquiry with which Tennyson threatened the flower in the crannied wall—what man is, and what God is? But it can be turned and twisted; it can be made ready for answering. The writer, and perhaps the reader, can seek an answer to it; and that is better than the inner feeling of many an American just now, who, weary of five years of idealistic oratory, profoundly believes that Amer

THE rarest experience in America is a discussion of morals. You can hear morals preached about, but that is not a discussion. You can read about morals in arguments disguised as essays, but these seldom cause discussion. Fully a third of successful American plays and stories turn upon a moral axiom, but one that we accept without argument, like rain in April and the August drouth. One hears very little real discussion of moral questions here because “old Americans,” at least, agree in their mora

THESE were the modest aspirations for American genius, and especially American literary genius, expressed by Joel Barlow, the once famous author, in his “Columbiad” of 1807. It was not a democratic literature, as we understand the term, that Barlow, and hundreds of others on both sides of the Atlantic, hoped and expected to see arise in the new republic. It was not a literature that would interpret the homely, though vigorous, personality of a new nation. Nothing so concrete and so commonplace a

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 surve