The Promise, which bulks so large in their patriotic outlook, is a promise of comfort and prosperity for an ever increasing majority of good Americans.

At a later stage of their social development they may come to believe that they have ordered a larger supply of prosperity than the economic factory is capable of producing.

Those who are already rich and comfortable, and who are keenly alive to the difficulty of distributing these benefits over a larger social area, may come to tolerate the idea that poverty and want are an essential part of the social order.

But as yet this traditional European opinion has found few echoes in America, even among the comfortable and the rich.

The general belief still is that Americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy.
Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American mind with free political institutions.