leep--by a
certain personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this
habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of
the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do
things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and
hand-to-mouth insights--a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little
jerk of materialism the next--a kind of national palavering, and
see-sawing and gesturing, and talking excitedly and with little
flourishes. It is a nation that is always shrugging its shoulders, that
almost never seems to be capable of doing a thing with fine directness,
with long rhythms of purpose or sustained feeling; and all because every
man, woman, and child in the country--scores of generations of them for
hundreds of years--has been taught that the great spiritual truth or
principle at the bottom of correctly and beautifully buying a turnip is
to begin by saying that you do not want a turnip at all, that you never
eat turnips, and none of your family, and that they never would. The
other man begins by pointing out that he is never going to sell another
turnip as long as he lives, if he can help it. Gradually the facts are
allowed to edge in until at last, and when each man has taken off God
knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two shillings'
worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties
separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a
radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot,
or a battleship, or a war, or a rumour of a war, with somebody.

The United States, speaking broadly, is not like this. But it might have
been.

In the United States some forty years ago, being a new country, and
being a country where everything a man did was in the nature of things,
felt to be a first experiment, everybody felt democratic and
independent, and as if he were making the laws of the universe just for
himself as he went along.

There was a period of ten years or so in which every spool of thread and
bit of dress goods--everything that people wore on their bodies or put
in their months, and everything that they read, came up and had to be
considered as an original first proposition, as if there never had been
a spool of thread before, as if each bit of dress goods was, or was
capable of being, a new fresh experiment, with an adventurous price on
it; and before we knew it a moral nagging and