may well be asked whether the American school system is in this
respect unfavourably distinguished from that of any other country; and
it must not be forgotten that even instruction in ordinary topics
stimulates the soil for more valuable growths. The methods of the
Salvation Army do not appeal to the dilettante; but it is more than
possible that the grandchildren of the man whose imagination has been
touched, if ever so slightly, by the crude appeal of trombones out of
tune and the sight of poke-bonnets and backward-striding maidens, will
be more intelligent and susceptible human beings than the
grandchildren of the chawbacon whose mental horizon has been bounded
by the bottom of his pewter mug.

Those who think for themselves will naturally make more mistakes than
those who carefully follow the dictates of a competent authority; but
there are other counterbalancing advantages which bring the
enterprising mistake-maker more speedily to the goal than his
impeccable rival. The poet might almost have sung "'Tis better to have
erred and learned than never to have erred at all." The _intellectual_
monopoly of England is, perhaps, even more dangerous than the
material. The monastic societies of Oxford and Cambridge are too apt
to insist on certain _forms_ of knowledge, and to think that real
wisdom is the prerogative of the few. And we undoubtedly owe many of
the healthy breezes of rebellion and scepticism in such matters to the
example of America. The keen-eyed Yankees distinguish more clearly
than we do between the essential conditions of existence and the
"stupid and vulgar accidents of human contrivance," and are
consequently readier to lay irreverent hands on time-honoured abuses.
If a balance could be struck between the influence of Europe on
America and that of America on Europe, it is not by any means clear
that the scale would descend in favour of the older world.

There is a long list of influential witnesses in favour of the theory
that the development of the democratic spirit is bound inevitably to
hamper individuality and encourage mediocrity. De Tocqueville,
Scherer, Renan, Maine, Bourget, Matthew Arnold, all lend the weight of
their names to this conclusion. It does not seem to me that this
theory is supported by the social facts of the United States. When we
have made allowance for the absence of a number of picturesque
phenomena which are due to temporal and physical conditions, and would
be equally lacki