28 American Ideals 



pulse which gives to the world statesmen, patriots, 

 warriors, and poets, and which makes a nation other 

 than a cumberer of the world's surface. In the 

 concluding page of his article Mr. Atkinson, com- 

 placently advancing his panacea, his quack cure-all, 

 says that "all evil powers of the world will go down 

 before" a policy of "reciprocity of trade without 

 obstruction" ! Fatuity can go no further. 



No Populist who wishes a currency based on corn 

 and cotton stands in more urgent need of applied 

 common-sense than does the man who believes that 

 the adoption of any policy, no matter what, in ref- 

 erence to our foreign commerce, will cut that tan- 

 gled knot of social well-being and misery at which 

 the fingers of the London free-trader clutch as help- 

 lessly as those of the Berlin protectionist. Such a 

 man represents individually an almost imponderable 

 element in the work and thought of the community ; 

 but in the aggregate he stands for a real danger, 

 because he stands for a feeling evident of late years 

 among many respectable people. The people who 

 pride themselves upon having a purely commercial 

 ideal are apparently unaware that such an ideal is 

 as essentially mean and sordid as any in the world, 

 and that no bandit community of the Middle Ages 

 can have led a more unlovely life than would be the 

 life of men to whom trade and manufactures were 

 everything, and to whom such words as national 

 honor and glory, as courage and daring, and loyalty 

 and unselfishness, had become meaningless. The 

 merely material, the merely commercial ideal, the 



