In case the proposed conception of the Promise of American life cannot be applied to our political and economic history without essential perversion, it must obviously fall to the ground; and as a matter of fact, the ideal itself has been sensibly modified during the course of this attempt to give it an historical application.

In spite of all these modifications it remains, however, an extremely controversial review.

Our political and economic past is, in a measure, challenged in order to justify our political and social future.

The values placed upon many political ideas, tendencies, and achievements differ radically from the values placed upon them either by their originators and partisans or in some cases by the majority of American historians.

The review, consequently, will meet with a far larger portion of instinctive opposition and distrust than it will of acquiescence.