miles off one can see that the American town is on an entirely different plan.  In his remarkable “American Scene,” Mr. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the Church as one sees it and feels it universally in Europe is altogether absent, and he adds a comment as suggestive as it is vague.  Speaking of the appearance of the Churches, so far as they do appear amidst American urban scenery, he says: 

“Looking for the most part no more established or seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated pretensions merely), and fatally despoiled of the fine old ecclesiastical arrogance, ...  The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; a truth that the myriad little structures ‘attended’ on Sundays and on the ‘off’ evenings of their ‘sociables’ proclaim as with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice....

“And however one indicates one’s impression of the clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may well reside a certain critical thrill.  I say hereafter because it is a question of one of those many measurements that would as yet, in the United States, be premature.  Of all the solemn conclusions one feels as ‘barred,’ the list is quite headed in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance of judgment.  When an ancient treasure of precious vessels, overscored with glowing gems and wrought artistically into wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted through a vast community into the small change, the simple circulating medium of dollars and ‘nickels,’ we can only say that the consequent permeation will be of values of a new order.  Of what order we must wait to see.”

America has no Church.  Neither has it a peasantry nor an aristocracy, and until well on in the Victorian epoch it had no disproportionately rich people.

In America, except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no lower stratum.  There is no “soil people” to this community at all; your bottom-most man is a mobile freeman who can read, and who has ideas above digging and pigs and poultry-keeping, except incidentally for his own ends.  No one owns to subordination As a consequence, any position which involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult to fill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary dearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant immigration.  The servile tradition will not root here now; it dies forthwith.  An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goes on, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new assertion.