all the criticisms is that we are
essentially a lawless people.

If the critic, like de Tocqueville and Miss Martineau, had sympathy and
admiration for us, the revealed lawlessness came as an astonishment,
because it seemed to upset all sorts of pretty theories about democracy.
The doctrinaires had worked out to perfection the idea that a people who
could freely make and unmake their own laws would, for that plain
reason, respect the laws. Of course, a people who had laws thrust upon
them from above would hate them and disobey them. But a democracy would
escape this temptation.

It was apparently an amusement of many of these writers to collect, as
did the jaunty author of "Peter Simple" in his Diary, interminable pages
from our own press to illustrate the general contempt for those laws
which really interfered with pleasures or economic interests. Harriet
Martineau drove through Boston on the day when Garrison was being
dragged through the streets. The flame of her indignation burned high;
but it burned with new heat when she found that the very best of Boston
culture and respectability would not lift a finger or pay a copper to
have the law enforced in Mr. Garrison's favor. Beacon Street and Harvard
professors told her that the victim was a disreputable agitator, richly
deserving what he got. They seemed to think this English lady very
cranky and unreasonable. The mob had the entire sympathy of the best
people in the community, and that should satisfy her. De Tocqueville
had an awakening at a polling-booth in Pennsylvania that in the same
way disturbed all his presuppositions about us.

It is not my purpose to bristle up and strike back at these critics of
American behavior. Amid possible exaggeration, they are telling a great
deal of truth about us. It is a truth that it has its own natural
history. A long adventurous border-life was in some respects the great
fact of the nineteenth century in moulding our national habits. A large
part of the population lived under conditions where no appeal to legal
restraints was possible. There were no courts,--no police. The whole
constructive work of life was thrown so absolutely upon the man fighting
his life-battle alone, that excessive individualistic habits were
formed. Every self-reliant instinct was developed until it became a law
unto itself. They do not, says de Tocqueville of the Americans, ask
help. They do not "appeal." They understand that everything rests with
t