shall grow more and more exacting; we shall "discover," as Mr. Brownell says, "new requirements in the ideal"—to which I would add: if we have an ideal. There are, indeed, at the present time many indications that our proverbial American hypersensitiveness to adverse comment on our institutions, our society, and our literature is at length beginning to yield ground before a new spirit of somewhat drastic self-examination and self-censure. In its popular manifestations this new spirit is as yet mainly iconoclastic, uncertain of its standards, and chiefly admirable, perhaps, in its readiness to give and receive hard knocks in the contest for solid footing. It is not in any sense an ancestor-worshiping spirit. Its temper is so depreciatory and its general attitude toward the past so contemptuously irreverent that all danger of overvaluing our hereditary possessions seems for the time being quite to have disappeared. It is a spirit of potentiality which may under wise guidance become a spirit of power.
