PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

not even the memory of a king; and they do not seem to
visage God as a secular ruler or as a family-man.

The third predisposition of mind was that they believed that *change* was a possible thing.

Now, my friends, there are different ways in which we all act when we are caught in situations from which there is apparently no escape, when we find ourselves trapped and walled in; and there are different ways in which the peoples of the world act in such situations. The prototype of all inextricable situations is death. Most people bitterly resent dying and the way they confront the thought of their ultimate death has its relation to the way they confront those other situations in life which have variously a character of inescapability, — personal, social, and national. Some resort to violence or spend a great deal of time brooding about violence; some fling themselves into absorbing activity; some take flight into fancy — they invest everything with unreality so that the inescapable and inevitable will also be unreal. Others quietly and assiduously and soothingly cultivate the doctrine that injustice and illusion and misunderstanding are inherent in the very nature of things; the universe, of life, and of society; that stuggle is ridiculous; that nothing can be done about anything.

That what passes for change is an illusion. Reformers are naive. Tend your own guarden. Plus ça change, plus s'est la meme chose.

Even today a large part of European thinking and action seems to an American to proceed from distrust in the efficacy of change; and to Europeans Americans seem to be motivated by the doctrine of progress. We are.

fluence of some of its substantial consequences. It was a comet that
left a long gaseous tail behind it. During the thousands of years of
its sway it had insinuated itself into every aspect of thought and
action, into religion and philosophy, art and education. I shall
show later how it even colors the way in which one apprehends beauty
in nature and into how how describes an object or an event.

Those who crossed the ocean were willing, but not hast-
ily, to accord deference to ability, learning, and virtue, but not
to inherited status. And the ocean voyage seems to have had the eff-
ect of liberating them further from many of the derived
secondary consequences, the comet's tail, the dead hand of old
deferences.

It was while thinking of this that Walt Whitman wrote:
"Of the great poems receiv'd from abroad and from the ages, and
today enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is
consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable
to them as they are and as they are to be? Is there one whose
underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy?"

(So much for Homer and Dante and Shakespeare!)

We shall see the extent to which this liberation affect-
ed American thinking. I only add now that this prodigious untruth
had been fortified and enriched by two impressive analogies: The
what
Privileged Man was to the lower orders as God was to the universe,
and what a father was to his family. The three conditions got all
mixed up together. A king was like a god and a father. A father
participated in the natures of kings and gods. In Europe the
emergence from this nonsense was an anguished passage, for it
partook oflex blasphemy on the one hand and of filial dis-
obedience, of patricide, on the other. The founders of America
were spared a portion of this anguish and remorse; the sea was