and he took the right road
to the climax of a narrative as unerringly as the homing bee follows
its viewless trail.

No one can be unaware how easily this superb American confidence may
turn to over-confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to run past the
signals, in our railroading and in our thinking. Emerson will "plunge"
on a new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever "plunged" in Wall
Street, and a pretty school-teacher will tell you that she has become
an advocate of the "New Thought" as complacently as an old financier
will boast of having bought Calumet and Hecla when it was selling at
25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get as good a bargain. I cannot
say.) Upon the whole, Americans back individual guesswork and pay
cheerfully when they lose. A great many of them, as it happens, have
guessed right. Even those who continue to guess wrong, like Colonel
Sellers, have the indefeasible romantic appetite for guessing again.
The American temperament and the chances of American history have
brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people
prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather
than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than
know.

Doubtless there are purely physical causes that have encouraged this
mental attitude, such as the apparently inexhaustible resources of a
newly opened country, the consciousness of youthful energy, the feeling
that any very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day can easily be
rectified when we pitch camp to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration
which was so particularly annoying to English visitors in the middle
of the last century--annoying even to Charles Dickens, who was himself
something of an expert in exuberance--is a physical and moral no less
than a mental quality. That monstrous braggadocio which Dickens
properly satirized in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was partly, of course, the
product of provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, and there are
still, plenty of Pograms who are convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel
Webster overtop all the intellectual giants of the Old World. But that
youthful bragging, and perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has
its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It springs from group
loyalty, from sectional fidelity. The settlement of "Eden" may be
precisely what Dickens drew it: a miasmatic mud-hole. Yet we who are
interested in the new town do not intend, as the popular phra