It is the more to be regretted that he adopted this attitude of premature judgment of American characteristics because it is only too prevalent among his less distinguished fellow-countrymen.  From this position of parti pris, maintained with all his own inimitable suavity and grace, it seems to me that he was never wholly able to advance (or retire), though he candidly admitted that he found the difference between the British and American Philistine vastly greater than he anticipated.  The members of his preconceived syllogism seem to be somewhat as follows:  the money-making and comfort-loving classes in England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is given over to money-making; ergo, its inhabitants must all be Philistines.  Furthermore, the British Philistines are to a very large extent dissenters:  the United States has no established church; ergo, it must be the Paradise of the dissenter.

This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines as the essence of Philistinism, is not a predominant trait in the American class in which our English experience would lead us to look for it.  The American man of business, with his restless discontent and nervous, over-strained pursuit of wealth, may not be a more inspiring object than his British brother, but he has little of the smugness which Mr. Arnold has taught us to associate with the label of Philistinism.  And his womankind is perhaps even less open to this particular reproach.  Mr. Arnold ignores a whole far-reaching series of American social phenomena which have practically nothing in common with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity of nomenclature blind him too much to the differentiation of entirely novel conditions.  The Methodist “Moonshiner” of Tennessee is hardly cast in the same mould as the deacon of a London Little Bethel; and even the most legitimate children of the Puritans have not descended from the common stock in parallel lines in England and America.

Mr. Arnold admitted that the political clothes of Brother Jonathan fitted him admirably, and allowed that he can and does think straighter (c’est le bonheur des hommes quand ils pensent juste) than we can in the maze of our unnatural and antiquated complications; he wholly admired the natural, unselfconscious manner of the American woman; he saw that the wage-earner lived more comfortably than in Europe; he noted that wealthy Americans were not dogged by envy in the same way as in England, partly because wealth was felt to be more within the range of all, and partly because it was much less often used for the gratification of vile and selfish appetites; he admitted that America was none the worse for the lack of a materialised aristocracy such as ours; he praises the spirit which levels false and conventional distinctions, and waives the use of such invidious discriminations as our “Mr.”