But to grant that the essentials of such movements are not to be found in casual external circumstances, but must lie in the mental make-up of the nation, might lead in this case to ascribing the chief influence to quite a different mental trait. The average European, permeated as he is with Old World culture, is, in fact, convinced that this intense economic activity is the simple result of unbounded greed. The search for gold and the pursuit of the dollar, we often hear, have destroyed in the American soul every finer ambition; and since the American has no higher desire for culture, he is free to chase his mammon with undisguised and shameless greed. The barbarity of his soul, it is said, gives him a considerable economic advantage over others who have some heart as well as a pocket-book, and whose feelings incline to the humane.
Whether such a contemptuous allegation is a useful weapon in the economic struggle, is not here in question. One who desires to understand the historical development of events in the New World is bound to see in all such talk nothing but distortion, and to realize that Europe could face its own economic future with less apprehension if it would estimate the powers of its great competitor more temperately and justly, and would ask itself honestly if it could not learn a thing or two here and there.
Merely to ape American doings would, in the end, avail nothing; that which proceeds from intellectual and temperamental traits can be effectively adopted by others only if they can acquire the same traits. It is useless to organize similar factories or trusts without imitating in every respect the men who first so organized themselves. Whether this last is necessary, he alone can say who has understood his neighbours at their best, and I has not been contented to make a merely thoughtless and uncharitable judgment. A magnificent economic life such as that of America can never spring from impure ethical motives, and the person is very naïve who supposes that a great business was ever built up by mere impudence, deception, and advertising. Every merchant knows that even advertisements benefit only a solid business, and that they run a bad one into the ground. And it is still more naïve to suppose that the economic strength of America has been built up through underhanded competition without respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and purely material ambition. One might better believe that the twenty-story office buildings on lower Broadway are supported merely by the flagstones in the street; in point of fact, no mere passer-by who does not actually see the foundations of such colossal structures can have an idea of how deep down under the soil these foundations go in order to find bed-rock. Just so the colossal fabric of American industry is able to tower so high only because it has its foundation on the hard rock of honest conviction.