ABSTRACT
The higher American patriotism, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise. The Land of Democracy has always appealed to its more enthusiastic children chiefly as a land of wonderful and more than national possibilities. This chapter examines the relation between the earlier American economic and social conditions and the ideas and institutions associated with them. The increased momentum of American life, both in its particles and its mass, unquestionably has a considerable moral and social value. Americans are usually satisfied by a most inadequate verbal description of democracy, but their national achievement implies one which is much more comprehensive and formative. The transformation of the old sense of a glorious national destiny into the sense of a serious national purpose will inevitably tend to make the popular realization of the Promise of American life both more explicit and more serious.
