Page:Americans (1922).djvu/303

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nationalistic egoism and selfishness will win some partial and temporary triumphs in this as in other countries. In the immediate future the memory of Roosevelt will be the most animating force among our American Junkers. There will be an attempt to repopularize just those Bismarckian characteristics of their hero which made him so utterly unlike Lincoln—his moral hardness, his two-fistedness, the symbolic big stick. But his commanding force as chief moulder of the national mind is over. He must take his rank somewhere among the kings and kaisers in competition with whom he made his place in the spiritual history of his times. He can never again greatly inspire the popular liberal movement in America. The World War has too profoundly discredited the masters of Weltpolitik in his epoch. It has too tragically illuminated the connections between the cataclysm and the statecraft and militaristic psychology behind it. He was a realist with no nonsense about him; but all the realists of the period are now under suspicion of being unrealistic in that they ignored the almost universal diffusion of "nonsense" or idealism among mankind. When Mr. Roosevelt fell out with "practical" men, he almost invariably strengthened his position with the plain people. It was when he offended their "nonsense"—as in his vindictive and ruthless onslaughts upon his successor and upon his great rival, and in his conduct of the Panama affair—that they began to doubt whether he had the magnanimity, the fair-