hind it in others; and
that just as you have to go to French Canada if you want to see Old
France, so, for many things, if you wish to see Old England you must
go to New England.

Thus America may easily be abreast or ahead of us in such matters as
the latest applications of electricity, while retaining in its legal
uses certain cumbersome devices that we have long since discarded.
Americans still have "Courts of Oyer and Terminer" and still insist on
the unanimity of the jury, though their judges wear no robes and their
counsel apply to the cuspidor as often as to the code. So, too, the
extension of municipal powers accomplished in Great Britain still
seems a formidable innovation in the United States.

The general feeling of power and scope is probably another fruitful
source of the inconsistencies of American life. Emerson has well said
that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; and no doubt the
largeness, the illimitable outlook, of the national mind of the United
States makes it disregard surface discrepancies that would grate
horribly on a more conventional community. The confident belief that
all will come out right in the end, and that harmony can be attained
when time is taken to consider it, carries one triumphantly over the
roughest places of inconsistency. It is easy to drink our champagne
from tin cans, when we know that it is merely a sense of hurry that
prevents us fetching the chased silver goblets waiting for our use.

This, I fancy, is the explanation of one series of contrasts which
strikes an Englishman at once. America claims to be the land of
liberty _par excellence_, and in a wholesale way this may be true in
spite of the gap between the noble sentiments of the Declaration of
Independence and the actual treatment of the negro and the Chinaman.
But in what may be called the retail traffic of life the American puts
up with innumerable restrictions of his personal liberty. Max O'Rell
has expatiated with scarcely an exaggeration on the wondrous sight of
a powerful millionaire standing meekly at the door of a hotel
dining-room until the consequential head-waiter (very possibly a
coloured gentleman) condescends to point out to him the seat he may
occupy. So, too, such petty officials as policemen and railway
conductors are generally treated rather as the masters than as the
servants of the public. The ordinary American citizen accepts a long
delay on the railway or an interminable "wait" at t