Not every American, of course, sees the world this way. Henry Adams
didn't, and William Allen White doesn't. But those men do, who in the
magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of
America. They mean just about that when they preach evolution,
progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing
things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great
pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal
criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it
is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the ideal
confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature
with contraption. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever
actuated any moral code, or ever will. The desire for the biggest, the
fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or
microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the
"peerless," is in essence and possibility a noble passion.
Certainly the American version of progress has fitted an extraordinary
range of facts in the economic situation and in human nature. It
turned an unusual amount of pugnacity, acquisitiveness, and lust of
power into productive work. Nor has it, until more recently perhaps,
seriously frustrated the active nature of the active members of the
community. They have made a civilization which provides them who made
it with what they feel to be ample satisfaction in work, mating and
play, and the rush of their victory over mountains, wildernesses,
distance, and human competition has even done duty for that part of
religious feeling which is a sense of communion with the purpose of
the universe.
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