578 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
North America, another in the Soviet Union, and a third in Western
Europe.

The North American approach (which was shared with the peoples
of the United States by the English-speaking element in the population
of Canada) was inspired by the ideal of creating an Earthly Paradise in
a New World. 'The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground; yea, I have a
goodly heritage.'1 The motive that had moved the ancestors of the living
generation of Americans to pull up their roots in the Old World and
to make a fresh start in life on the farther side of the Atlantic had been
a hope of being able to leave behind them the tares in their social
heritage and to sow an American crop in which there should be nothing
but wheat;2 and in American eyes freedom for private enterprise in
economic affairs was one of those good things in America's heritage
from the Old World that were to be, not discarded, but transplanted.
The American people believed in private economic enterprise whole-
heartedly, and they were confident of being able, in their New World,
to allow private economic enterprise to retain the freedom that was
its life-breath without exposing themselves to the inconveniences and
abuses that had been bred by private enterprise in the Old World when
its freedom had there been left unrestricted.

In their New World the Americans claimed to have found a practical
solution for a social problem which in the Old World had proved
intractable. They claimed to have succeeded in getting rid of class-
conflict in an industrial society, not by the inhuman and uneconomic
crime of liquidating the middle class, but by building up a classless
society on a middle-class footing. As middle-class Americans saw it,
the American way of life had satisfied all reasonable demands for social
justice that the industrial workers could make by raising the minimum
standard of living in North America to at least the West-European
middle-class level and by providing every industrial worker who chose
to exert himself with opportunities for rising into the middle class, or
at least with opportunities for educating his children into a middle-class
career. The proof of a pudding is in the eating; and the social success
of the American way of life was demonstrated (so its middle-class
American advocates would contend) by the industrial workers' attitude.
They were (it was asserted) much more eagerly concerned to change
their momentary station in life for a better one than to spend their
energies in striving for improvements in the conditions of the transi-
tional station in which they happened at the moment to find themselves.3
The strong point in this North American approach to the social
problem of an industrial society was its recognition of the truth that
the energy which had set the wheels of a mechanized industry turning
was the psychic energy generated by the pre-industrial ethos of the

1 Ps. rvi 6. a See p. 545, above.

3 Professor William McNeill comments: *I feel that your description of the American
response to the problem of class-conflict [as seen through middle-class American eyes in
AJD. 1952] is valid only for the period before A.D. 1929.1 feel that the differences between
the United States and [Western] Europe are growing much narrower, and this in both
economic and cultural organization and activity. In general the United States lags a bit
behind^the more advanced [West] European nations in its internal development, but
surely jt has been catching up, and doing so rapidly over the past generation.'