ABSTRACT
The American spirit is hostile to the idea of a hierarchy in social organization; but few modern countries have given a power so great or an authority so wide to men who have been successful in business or in law. It sought to make of the United States a refuge for the oppressed of other lands; the immigration laws of the United States have, since the twenties, made that tradition a faded memory which disappointed innumerable hopes in the bitterest epoch of modern times. The discovery of gold, the possibilities of free land, the growth of the conviction that public education was by all odds the best means to counter crime and pauperism and to safeguard the implications of Andrew Jackson's democracy, all these were elements in the making of the American spirit. The problem of the American spirit was the problem foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville over a hundred years ago.
