American people—faith in the sense and virtue of the community and in the sense and virtue of the majority of its components.
With Socrates as his guide through the modern world, "P. E. M." might have left his library and have broken from the circle of his Immortals, to stand on one leg and grow wise in the market-place. He might have suppled and vulgarized his tongue to chat with the work-master and carpenter and the driver of oxen who have had an American education and have fought under the American flag from Verdun to Archangel for, as they thought or hoped, an American democratic faith. He might have fallen in with the young carpenter, cited for gallantry in the Argonne, who is repairing my roof; or with another, concealing a Carnegie medal, who built me a tolerable bookcase after saving, singlehanded, seventeen lives in a fire. He might have met with a Northern peasant farmer of my acquaintance who, after recounting the hardships of his winter work in the absence of his eldest son, said to me, with a smile as profoundly philosophical as anything in Epictetus: "Well, I suppose that is what we are here for." He might have read the halting, ill-spelled letters of that stalwart eldest son who, while breaking mules for the Expeditionary Force in France, wrote to his old mother with a filial piety as beautiful as anything that Mr. More commends in Pope.
If he had enjoyed opportunities such as these—
