in a way that has hardly ever been true in Europe.  It may not assume a more tangible shape than a feeling of self-respect that has never been wounded by the thought of personal inferiority for merely conventional reasons; but he must be a materialist indeed who undervalues this priceless possession.  It is something for a country to have reached the stage of passing “resolutions,” even if their conversion into “acts” lags a little; it is bootless to sneer at a real “land of promise” because it is not at once and in every way a “land of performance.”

There is something wonderfully rare and delicate in the finest blossoms of American civilisation—­something that can hardly be paralleled in Europe.  The mind that has been brought up in an atmosphere theoretically free from all false standards and conventional distinctions acquires a singularly unbiassed, detached, absolute, purely human way of viewing life.  In Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “it sees life steadily and sees it whole.”  Just this attitude seems unattainable in England; neither in my reading nor my personal experience have I encountered what I mean elsewhere than in America.  We may feel ourselves, for example, the equal of a marquis, but does he?  And even if he does, do A, and B, and C?  No profoundness of belief in our own superiority or the superiority of a humble friend to the aristocrat can make us ignore the circumambient feeling on the subject in the same way that the man brought up in the American vacuum does.

The true-born American is absolutely incapable of comprehending the sense of difference between a lord and a plebeian that is forced on the most philosophical among ourselves by the mere pressure of the social atmosphere.  It is for him a fourth dimension of space; it may be talked about, but practically it has no existence.  It is entirely within the bounds of possibility for an American to attempt graciously to put royalty at its ease, and to try politely to make it forget its anomalous position.  The British radical philosopher may attain the height of saying, “With a great sum obtained I this ’freedom’;” the American may honestly reply, “But I was free-born.”

It is necessary to take long views of American civilisation; not to fix our gaze upon small evils in the foreground, not to mistake an attack of moral measles for a scorbutic taint.  It is quite conceivable that a philosophic observer of a century ago might almost have predicted the moral and social course of events in the United States, if he had only been informed of the coming material conditions, such as the overwhelmingly rapid growth of the country in wealth and population, coupled with a democratic form of government.  Even if assured that the ultimate state of the nation would be satisfactory, he would still have foreseen the difficulties hemming its progress toward the ideal:  the inevitable delays, disappointments, and set-backs; the struggle between the gross and the spiritual; the