THE AMERICAN IDEA OF MISSION

America's sense of destiny- and its self-declared capacity and worth- has social and economic and ethnic sources; a pattern of emergence, reversal, redirection; spokesmen; occasions of more acute national self-awareness; and a continual responsiveness to the state of the world at large. Burns, though forced to throw chronology to the winds, sifts through the material of history, and somehow points up the recognizable themes. Perhaps other themes, no less potent and applicable, do exist, but Burns' selection seems immensely significant, apt, conclusive. The theme of Puritanism, the theme of rugged individualism, the theme of the linkage of all values to the ever-changing concept of what America's democratic institutions are and mean, such themes appear inescapable, and Burns has made the most of them.