else’s rookery.  Perhaps the American deceives himself when he says he wants repose; what he wants is perpetual activity and change; his peace of mind is postponed until he can get it in his own way.  It is in feeling that he is a part of growth and not of decay.  Foreigners are fond of writing essays upon American traits and characteristics.  They touch mostly on surface indications.  What really distinguishes the American from all others—­for all peoples like more or less to roam, and the English of all others are globe-trotters—­is not so much his restlessness as his entire accord with the spirit of “go-ahead,” the result of his absolute breaking with the Past.  He can repose only in the midst of intense activity.  He can sit down quietly in a town that is growing rapidly; but if it stands still, he is impelled to move his rocking-chair to one more lively.  He wants the world to move, and to move unencumbered; and Europe seems to him to carry too much baggage.  The American is simply the most modern of men, one who has thrown away the impedimenta of tradition.  The world never saw such a spectacle before, so vast a territory informed with one uniform spirit of energy and progress, and people tumbling into it from all the world, eager for the fair field and free opportunity.  The American delights in it; in Europe he misses the swing and “go” of the new life.

This large explanation may not account for the summer restlessness that overtakes nearly everybody.  We are the annual victims of the delusion that there exists somewhere the ideal spot where manners are simple, and milk is pure, and lodging is cheap, where we shall fall at once into content.  We never do.  For content consists not in having all we want, nor, in not wanting everything, nor in being unable to get what we want, but in not wanting that we can get.  In our summer flittings we carry our wants with us to places where they cannot be gratified.  A few people have discovered that repose can be had at home, but this discovery is too unfashionable to find favor; we have no rest except in moving about.  Looked at superficially, it seems curious that the American is, as a rule, the only person who does not emigrate.  The fact is that he can go nowhere else where life is so uneasy, and where, consequently, he would have so little of his sort of repose.  To put him in another country would be like putting a nineteenth-century man back into the eighteenth century.  The American wants to be at the head of the procession (as he fancies he is), where he can hear the band play, and be the first to see the fireworks of the new era.  He thinks that he occupies an advanced station of observation, from which his telescope can sweep the horizon for anything new.  And with some reason he thinks so; for not seldom he takes up a foreign idea and tires of it before it is current elsewhere.  More than one great writer of England had his first popular recognition in America.  Even this season the Saturday Review is struggling with Ibsen, while Boston, having had that disease, has probably gone on to some other fad.