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that the activities of the people he describes present a distinct psychological type; that a characteristic mode of action deter- mines alike their economic, political, and cultural activities; and that this mode of action is the offspring of prevailing ethical ideas which have been occasioned by the past and present con- ditions of American social development. These ideals, he says, are self-direction, self -initiation, self-perfection. Of our political activities he writes :
Such is the America which receives the immigrant and so thoroughly transforms him that the demand for self-determination becomes the pro- foundest passion of his soul. Such is the America toward which he feels a
proud and earnest patriotism A nation which in every decade has
assimilated millions of aliens, and whose historic past everywhere leads back to strange peoples, cannot, with its racial variegation, inspire a profound feeling of indissoluble unity. And yet that feeling is present here, as it is perhaps in no European country. American patriotism is directed neither to soil nor to citizen, but to a system of ideas respecting society, which is com- pacted by the desire for self-direction. And to be an American means to be a partisan of this system. Neither race nor tradition, nor yet the actual past, binds him to his countryman, but rather the future which together they are building. It is a community of purpose, and it is more effective than any
tradition because it pervades the whole man To be an American means
to co-operate in perpetuating the spirit of self-direction throughout the body politic ; and whoever does not feel this duty and actively respond to it, although perhaps a naturalized citizen of the land, remains an alien forever.
If this be true, the American differs from other peoples, not in that the social life is any more psychic than elsewhere, but that it is compounded of certain ideals and hopes rather than of vener- able traditions. Of our teeming economic activity Professor Miinsterberg writes:
The colossal industrial successes, along with the great evils and dangers which have come with them, must be understood from the make-up of the
(acquired) American character When a short time ago there was a
terrific crash in the New York stock market, and hundreds of millions were lost, a leading Parisian paper said : " If such a financial crisis had happened here in France, we should have had panics, catastrophies, a slump in rentes, suicides, street riots, a ministerial crisis all in one day; while America is perfectly quiet, and the victims of the battle are sitting down to collect their wits. France and the United States are obviously two entirely different worlds in their civilization and in their way of thinking."
