Thus America may easily be abreast or ahead of us in such matters as the latest applications of electricity, while retaining in its legal uses certain cumbersome devices that we have long since discarded.  Americans still have “Courts of Oyer and Terminer” and still insist on the unanimity of the jury, though their judges wear no robes and their counsel apply to the cuspidor as often as to the code.  So, too, the extension of municipal powers accomplished in Great Britain still seems a formidable innovation in the United States.

The general feeling of power and scope is probably another fruitful source of the inconsistencies of American life.  Emerson has well said that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; and no doubt the largeness, the illimitable outlook, of the national mind of the United States makes it disregard surface discrepancies that would grate horribly on a more conventional community.  The confident belief that all will come out right in the end, and that harmony can be attained when time is taken to consider it, carries one triumphantly over the roughest places of inconsistency.  It is easy to drink our champagne from tin cans, when we know that it is merely a sense of hurry that prevents us fetching the chased silver goblets waiting for our use.

This, I fancy, is the explanation of one series of contrasts which strikes an Englishman at once.  America claims to be the land of liberty par excellence, and in a wholesale way this may be true in spite of the gap between the noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and the actual treatment of the negro and the Chinaman.  But in what may be called the retail traffic of life the American puts up with innumerable restrictions of his personal liberty.  Max O’Rell has expatiated with scarcely an exaggeration on the wondrous sight of a powerful millionaire standing meekly at the door of a hotel dining-room until the consequential head-waiter (very possibly a coloured gentleman) condescends to point out to him the seat he may occupy.  So, too, such petty officials as policemen and railway conductors are generally treated rather as the masters than as the servants of the public.  The ordinary American citizen accepts a long delay on the railway or an interminable “wait” at the theatre as a direct visitation of Providence, against which it would be useless folly to direct cat-calls, grumbles, or letters to the Times.  Americans invented the slang word “kicker,” but so far as I could see their vocabulary is here miles ahead of their practice; they dream noble deeds, but do not do them; Englishmen “kick” much better, without having a name for it.  The right of the individual to do as he will is respected to such an extent that an entire company will put up with inconvenience rather than infringe it.  A coal-carter will calmly keep a tramway-car waiting several minutes until he finishes his unloading.  The conduct of the train-boy, as described in Chapter