Nevertheless, before independence was thought of there were common characteristics distinguishing Americans from English people.  They are the better worth an attempt to note them because, as a historian of America wrote some years ago, “the typical American of 1900 is on the whole more like his ancestor of 1775 than is the typical Englishman.”  In all the Colonies alike the conditions of life encouraged personal independence.  In all alike they also encouraged a special kind of ability which may be called practical rather than thorough—­that of a workman who must be competent at many tasks and has neither opportunity nor inducement to become perfect at one; that of the scientific man irresistibly drawn to inventions which shall make life less hard; that of the scholar or philosopher who must supply the new community’s need of lawyers and politicians.

On the other hand, many of the colonists’ forefathers had come to their new home with distinct aspirations for a better ordering of human life than the old world allowed, and it has frequently been noticed that Americans from the first have been more prone than their kinsmen in England to pay homage to large ideal conceptions.  This is a disposition not entirely favourable to painstaking and sure-footed reform.  The idealist American is perhaps too ready to pay himself with fine words, which the subtler and shyer Englishman avoids and rather too readily sets down as insincere in others.  Moreover, this tendency is quite consistent with the peculiar conservatism characteristic of America.  New conditions in which tradition gave no guidance called forth great inventive powers and bred a certain pride in novelty.  An American economist has written in a sanguine humour, “The process of transplanting removes many of the shackles of custom and tradition which retard the progress of older countries.  In a new country things cannot be done in the old way, and therefore they are probably done in the best way.”  But a new country is always apt to cling with tenacity to those old things for which it still has use; and a remote and undeveloped country does not fully share the continual commerce in ideas which brings about change (and, in the main, advance) in the old world.  The conservatism which these causes tend to produce has in any case been marked in America.  Thus, as readers of Lowell are aware, in spite of the ceaseless efflorescence of the modern slang of America, the language of America is in many respects that of an older England than ours, and the like has all along been true of important literature, and still more of oratory, in America.  Moreover, as the sentences which have just been quoted may suggest, the maxim that has once hit the occasion, or the new practice or expedient once necessitated by the conditions of the moment, has been readily hallowed as expressing the wisdom of the ages.  An Englishman will quote Burke as he would quote Demosthenes or Plato, but Americans have been apt to quote their elder statesmen as they would quote the Bible.  In like manner political practices of accidental origin—­for instance, that a representative should be an inhabitant of the place he represents—­acquire in America something like the force of constitutional law.