The American Omen

VISTA

THERE have been two great American constructions.

The first was political. Perilous ideas of common freedom were put headlong to a working trial; and the proof now is that among the major units of human society this is the only one that has endured as a nation for a century and a half by no grace of king, priest, tyrant or dictator.

The second was economic; and here now is a standard of common living the highest so far as we know in the history of the race.

Beginning to appear are the ground signs of a third construction. Its significance, if it happens, will be social.

Freedom as we know it is a condition of ego. Prosperity is a condition of things. Increase these satisfactions to any degree and there is still that knowledge of incompleteness which torments the spirit. This is the anxiety of the perishable I fragment to make affinity with an imperishable whole. Beyond the sense of belonging to himself man craves also the sense of himself belonging. We are bound to live two lives at a time. One is our own, a little arc, sudden and discontinuous; the other is the life of society, perpetual and perhaps immortal. To live them consciously, without conflict, so that one shall fulfill the other, is the next achievement. Necessity lies in one, completion in the other.

That servile status of the individual binding him to the sceptre, to the state, to the lord, to the land on which he grew, with no inalienable rights of being, is the oldest political story. The extreme revolution, wherein the state itself becomes the cringing body, mob-serving, owing everything to the individual who owes it nothing in return, is a complicated modern story, with some fearful and abrupt periods. An entirely new story would be that of a people jealously egoistic dedicating their freedom to a social imperative discovered in themselves and learning by that act what freedom is for.

In the mirror of faith there is already reflecting an aerial image of this third great American construction. Let us be not discouraged if for moments together it disappears from view. Its beginnings, as were those also of the other two, are involved in confusion, uproar and episodes of disaster, with besides some aspects of new unsightliness. This is inevitable. We stand too near. So however the world was made, it was not made without much waste and litter; and truth itself must first come true.