58 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

aseptic precautions in eating, drinking and wash-
ing, or of the legend I have seen at street crossings,
" Safety or suicide/' all betokening their* solicitude
to keep America " safe." No wonder. It is the
most dangerous country in the world.

Strange it is how the human mind reacts upon
itself, even to the point of becoming frightened
at its own courage. For it is one thing to be
courageous—a fighting bull may be that—and
quite another thing to be conscious how
courageous you are—a discovery which has been
known to have the effect of turning a brave man
into a coward on the spot.1 America is the land
where these reactions, shared in some degree by
all peoples, may be studied in their most sudden
and violent forms. The swing of the pendulum
between the point where you do a thing and the
point where you criticize yourself for doing it is
more rapid in America than elsewhere. The
swing from one extreme to another—as, say, from
Modernism to Fundamentalism—which takes a
moment elsewhere (as history counts time) takes
only half a moment in America.

And there is another cause. With the De-
claration of Independence was born the idea that
the mission of America was to set a good example
to the world of liberty and its fruits, and surely
it was a laudable ambition. The political
utterances of Thomas Jefferson are full of this
idea and a thousand instances of it could be culled
1 Compare Hamlet, " Conscience makes cowards of us all/*