nsiders it the duty of good
citizenship to go about to fashion first the roofs and walls, rafters,
cornices, and chimney-pots of a governmental structure, relying on the
State afterwards to legislate comfort and culture and virtue into the
people, he visited the wrong quarter of the globe. In the Latin races he
will find the "sense of the State" luxuriantly developed.

Mr. Wells appears infinitely distressed by his failure to find any
unified national feeling in the American people--by "the chaotic
condition of the American Will"--by "the dispersal of power"--by the
fact that "Americans knew of America mainly as the Flag." Which is a
most curiously complete demonstration of the inadequacy of his judgment.

If Mr. Wells had seen the United States twenty-five years ago, ten years
ago, and five years ago, before his present visit, the one thing that
would have most impressed him would have been the amazing growth of the
sense of national unity. Mr. Wells looks superficially upon the country
as it is to-day and finds society more chaotic, distances larger,
sentiment less crystallised than--_mirabile!_--in the older countries of
Europe, and is plunged in despair. Had he had any knowledge of
America's past conditions by which to measure the momentary phase in
which he found the people, he would have known that exactly that thing
of which he most deplores the absence is the thing which, in the last
thirty years, has grown with more wonderful rapidity than anything else
in all this country of wonderful growths.

The mere fact of this development of national feeling is a thing which
will necessarily call for attention as we go on; for the present it is
enough to say that Mr. Wells could hardly have exposed more calamitously
the superficial and cursory quality of his "study" of the country.[92:1]

As a man may not be able to see the forest because of the trees, so Mr.
Wells is as one who has stood by a great river's bank for a few minutes
and has not seen the river for the flash of the ripples in the sun, the
swirl of an eddy here and there, the flotsam swinging by on the current;
and he has gone away and prattled of the ripples and the eddy and the
floating branch. The great flow of the river down below does not expose
itself to the vision of three minutes. He only comes to understand it
who lives by the river for awhile, sits down by it and studies it--sees
it in flood and drought--swims in it, bathes in it. Then he will forg