I have a good deal of sympathy with a Canadian friend who exclaimed:  “Oh, Boston!  I don’t include Boston when I speak of the United States.”  Max O’Rell has similarly noted that if you wish to hear severe criticism of America you have only to go to Boston. “La on loue Boston et Angleterre, et l’on debine l’Amerique a dire d’experts.” It would be a mistake, however, to infer that Boston is not truly American, or that it devotes itself to any voluntary imitation of England.  In a very deep sense Boston is one of the most intensely American cities in the Union; it represents, perhaps, the finest development of many of the most characteristic ideals of Americanism.  Its resemblances to England seem to be due to the simple fact that like causes produce like results.  The original English stock by which Boston was founded has remained less mixed here than, perhaps, in any other city of America; and the differences between the descendants of the Puritans who emigrated and the descendants of those of them who remained at home are not complicated by a material infusion of alien blood in either case.  The independence of the original settlers, their hatred of coercion and tyranny, have naturally grown with two centuries and a half of democracy; even the municipal administration has not been wholly captured by the Irish voter.  The Bostonian has, to a very appreciable extent, solved the problem of combining the virtues of democracy with the manners of aristocracy; and I know not where you will find a better type of the American than the Boston gentleman:  patriotic with enlightened patriotism; finely mannered even to the class immediately below his own; energetic, but not a slave to the pursuit of wealth; liberal in his religion, but with something of the Puritan conscience still lying perdu beneath his universalism; distributing his leisure between art, literature, and outdoor occupations; a little cool in his initial manner to strangers, but warmly hospitable when his confidence in your merit is satisfied.  We, in England, may well feel proud that the blood which flows in the veins of the ideal Bostonian is as distinctly and as truly English as that of our own Gladstones and Morleys, our Brownings and our Tennysons.

Prof.  Hugo Muensterberg, of Berlin, writes thus of Boston and Chicago:  “Ja, Boston ist die Hauptstadt jenes jungen, liebenswerthen, idealistischen Amerikas und wird es bleiben; Chicago dagegen ist die Hochburg der alten protzigen amerikanischen Dollarsucht, und die Weltausstellung schliesslich ist ueberhaupt nicht Amerika, sondern chicagosirtes Europa.” Whatever may be thought of the first part of this judgment, the second member of it seems to me rather unfair to Chicago and emphatically so as regards the Chicago exhibition.