The ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the Occidentals. It is a relatively important matter to him to be true to his own ideals and to carry them out in actual life.
It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.
Language, as we know, is full of illogicalities.