ans other than lacking in reverence?

It is true that now, by mere passage of years, there are monuments in
the United States which are beginning to gather the dignity and respect
which naturally attach to age. The American of the present day has great
veneration for the wisdom of the Fathers of the Republic, much love for
the old buildings which are associated with the birth of the nation.
Even the events of the Civil War are beginning to put on something of
the majesty of antiquity, but there are still alive too many of the
combatants in that war--who are obviously but commonplace men--for the
figures of any but some three or four of the greatest of the actors to
have yet assumed anything like heroic proportions. For the rest, what is
there in the country which the living American has not made himself, or
which his fathers did not make? The fabric of society is of too new a
weaving, he knows too well the trick of it, for it to be wonderful in
his eyes.

Lack of reverence is only a symptom of the American's strength--not
admirable in itself, yet, as the index to something admirable, not,
perhaps, altogether to be scorned. Nor must it be supposed that the lack
of reverence implies any want of idealism, or any poverty of
imagination, any absence of love or desire of the good and beautiful.
The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman.

The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the
European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and
angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even
grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise
the whole are likely to escape him. The blunders of American
diplomats--the _gaucheries_ and ignorances of American consular
representatives--these are familiar subjects to Europeans; on them many
a travelling Englishman has based his rather contemptuous opinion of the
culture of the American people as a whole. But it is unsafe to argue
from the inferiority of the representative to the inferiority of the
thing represented.

If two fruit-growers have adjoining orchards and, for the purpose of
making a display at an agricultural show, one spends months of careful
nourishing, training, and pruning of certain trees wherefrom he selects
with care the finest of his fruit, while the other without preparation
goes out haphazard to his orchard and reaches for the first fruit that
he sees, it is probab