Ugly obstacles have jumped into view, and ugly obstacles are peculiarly dangerous to a person who is sliding down hill.

The man who is clambering up hill is in a much better position to evade or overcome them.

Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier vision of their national Promise as soon as they give it a house on a hill-top rather than in a valley.
The very genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have been drawing this inference.

They have been coming to see themselves more as others see them; and as an introduction to a consideration of this more critical frame of mind, I am going to quote another foreigner's view of American life,--the foreigner in this case being an Englishman and writing in 1893.
"The American note," says Mr.James Muirhead in his "Land of Contrasts," "includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility, an almost childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the present and the future, a wider realization of human brotherhood than has yet existed, a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the individual than by the class, a breezy indifference to authority and a positive predilection for innovation, a marked alertness of mind, and a manifold variety of interest--above all, an inextinguishable hopefulness and courage.

It is easy to lay one's finger in America upon almost every one of the great defects of civilization--even those defects which are specially characteristic of the civilization of the Old World.