onvince yourself that this race--your own with larger
opportunities--is not the finer race of the two?

I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American
national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than
the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now
but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the
reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or
in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies,
and sometimes even impertinences--call them what you will,--he is too
prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character.
The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the
English character--with elbow-room. "While the outlook of the New
Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the
same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that
new offshoots from the character will have developed--excrescences, not
perhaps in themselves always lovely--but if we remember what the trunk
is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think
better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the
likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may
also have expanded and strengthened and solidified.

The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is
for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock
which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this
magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as
compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained
rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries.

* * * * *

There have been, of course, many other influences at work in the
moulding of the American character, besides the mere vastness of his
continent; but the fact remains that this has been immensely the most
powerful of all the factors. English originally, the American is still
English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circumstances of his
material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his
horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the Titanic struggle with
the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development
of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which
the exigencies of that struggl