XII., would infallibly lead to assault and battery in England, but hardly elicits an objurgation in America, where the right of one sinner to bang a door outweighs the desire of twenty just persons for a quiet nap.  On the other hand, the old Puritan spirit of interference with individual liberty sometimes crops out in America in a way that would be impossible in this country.  An inscription in one of the large mills at Lawrence, Mass., informs the employees (or did so some years ago) that “regular attendance at some place of worship and a proper observance of the Sabbath will be expected of every person employed.”  So, too, the young women of certain districts impose on their admirers such restrictions in the use of liquor and tobacco that any less patient animal than the native American would infallibly kick over the traces.

In spite of their acknowledged nervous energy and excitability, Americans often show a good deal of a quality that rivals the phlegm of the Dutch.  Their above-mentioned patience during railway or other delays is an instance of this.  So, in the incident related in Chapter XII. the passengers in the inside coach retained their seats throughout the whole experiment.  Their resemblance in such cases as this to placid domestic kine is enhanced—­out West—­by the inevitable champing of tobacco or chewing-gum, than which nothing I know of so robs the human countenance of the divine spark of intelligence.  Boston men of business, after being whisked by the electric car from their suburban residences to the city at the rate of twelve miles an hour, sit stoically still while the congested traffic makes the car take twenty minutes to pass the most crowded section of Washington street,—­a walk of barely five minutes.[2]

Even in the matter of what Mr. Ambassador Bayard has styled “that form of Socialism, Protection,” it seems to me that we can find traces of this contradictory tendency.  Americans consider their country as emphatically the land of protection, and attribute most of their prosperity to their inhospitable customs barriers.  This may be so; but where else in the world will you find such a volume and expanse of free trade as in these same United States?  We find here a huge section of the world’s surface, 3,000 miles long and 1,500 miles wide, occupied by about fifty practically independent States, containing seventy millions of inhabitants, producing a very large proportion of all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, and all enjoying the freest of free trade with each other.  Few of these States are as small as Great Britain, and many of them are immensely larger.  Collectively they contain nearly half the railway mileage of the globe, besides an incomparable series of inland waterways.  Over all these is continually passing an immense amount of goods.  The San Francisco News Letter, a well-known weekly journal, points out that of the 1,400,000,000 tons of goods carried for 100 miles or upwards on