ability and fearlessness of both the present and
the future; a wider realisation of human brotherhood than has yet
existed; a greater theoretical willingness to judge by the individual
rather than by the class; a breezy indifference to authority and a
positive predilection for innovation; a marked alertness of mind and a
manifold variety of interest; above all, an inextinguishable
hopefulness and courage. It is easy to lay one's finger in America
upon almost every one of the great defects of civilisation--even those
defects which are specially characteristic of the civilisation of the
Old World. The United States cannot claim to be exempt from
manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding the faces of the poor,
of exploitation of the weak, of unfair distribution of wealth, of
unjust monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial
chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public
corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of
vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of
respect of persons, of a preference of the material over the
spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or nearly attained,
perfection. But below and behind and beyond all its weaknesses and
evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory, founded on
reason and conscience. Those may scoff who will at the idea of
anything so intangible being allowed to count seriously in the
estimation of a nation's or an individual's happiness but the man of
any imagination can surely conceive the stimulus of the constantly
abiding sense of a fine national ideal. The vagaries of the Congress
at Washington may sometimes cause a man more personal inconvenience
than the doings of the Parliament at Westminster, but they cannot
wound his self-respect or insult his reason in the same way as the
idea of being ruled by a group of individuals who have merely taken
the trouble to be born. The hauteur and insolence of those "above" us
are always unpleasant, but they are much easier to bear when we feel
that they are entirely at variance with the theory of the society in
which they appear, and are at worst merely sporadic manifestations.
Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared to the tyranny of
landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and (it is
hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while the
other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence