National Affairs: The Huge Credit

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Amid the anti-American shellbursts of the crisis, the London Times's influential Editor Sir William Haley reported to his readers on a recent tour of the U.S.: "It is easy to be superior about American brashness and naivety, to be scornful of material progress as a purpose; to picture a whole continent slowly being moulded to the ideals of Hollywood," he wrote. "These things are only the surface froth that gets whipped about by the winds of publicity. Underneath there is the great solid sea of an American nation as simple in its aspirations, as traditional in its virtues, as conscious of its high destiny as any there has ever been in the old world."

Sir William then paid the traditional respects of the sensitive traveler to the breathtaking scope of U.S. farming, the "defiant pinnacles" of its cities, the eagerness of its university students. He concluded: "Here is a people rather baffled, but a people resolved to know; a people faced, as it seems to them, with a whole globe needing to be set to rights, but determined, either with or without it, to get things done.

"Of all nations, its history has a higher proportion of greatness than of baseness; of all peoples its motives are the least suspect. Its errors have been, and are, many. Its instincts have been, and are, magnificently right. We see the small debits from day to day. Let us look rather at the huge credit through the years. Amidst all the dangers that beset us, we can be thankful that it is to this dynamic, humorous, impatient, impulsive, generous people there has passed the leadership of the world."