. It is the
old story of freedom and hardship being preferable to chains and
luxury. The material environment of the American may often be far less
interesting and suggestive than that of the European, but his mind is
freer, his mental attitude more elastic. Every American carries a
marshal's baton in his knapsack in a way that has hardly ever been
true in Europe. It may not assume a more tangible shape than a feeling
of self-respect that has never been wounded by the thought of personal
inferiority for merely conventional reasons; but he must be a
materialist indeed who undervalues this priceless possession. It is
something for a country to have reached the stage of passing
"resolutions," even if their conversion into "acts" lags a little; it
is bootless to sneer at a real "land of promise" because it is not at
once and in every way a "land of performance."

There is something wonderfully rare and delicate in the finest
blossoms of American civilisation--something that can hardly be
paralleled in Europe. The mind that has been brought up in an
atmosphere theoretically free from all false standards and
conventional distinctions acquires a singularly unbiassed, detached,
absolute, purely human way of viewing life. In Matthew Arnold's
phrase, "it sees life steadily and sees it whole." Just this attitude
seems unattainable in England; neither in my reading nor my personal
experience have I encountered what I mean elsewhere than in America.
We may feel ourselves, for example, the equal of a marquis, but does
he? And even if he does, do A, and B, and C? No profoundness of belief
in our own superiority or the superiority of a humble friend to the
aristocrat can make us ignore the circumambient feeling on the subject
in the same way that the man brought up in the American vacuum does.

The true-born American is absolutely incapable of comprehending the
sense of difference between a lord and a plebeian that is forced on
the most philosophical among ourselves by the mere pressure of the
social atmosphere. It is for him a fourth dimension of space; it may
be talked about, but practically it has no existence. It is entirely
within the bounds of possibility for an American to attempt graciously
to put royalty at its ease, and to try politely to make it forget its
anomalous position. The British radical philosopher may attain the
height of saying, "With a great sum obtained I this 'freedom';" the
American may honestly reply, "But