It has its roots in the salient conditions of American life, and in the actual experience of the American people.

The national Promise, as it is popularly understood, has in a way been fulfilling itself.

If the underlying conditions were to remain much as they have been, the prevalent mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism might retain a formidable measure of justification; and the changes which are taking place in the underlying conditions and in the scope of American national experience afford the most reasonable expectation that this state of mind will undergo a radical alteration.

It is new conditions which are forcing Americans to choose between the conception of their national Promise as a process and an ideal.

Before, however, the nature of these novel conditions and their significance can be considered, we must examine with more care the relation between the earlier American economic and social conditions and the ideas and institutions associated with them.