y the flag-stones in
the street. . . . The colossal fabric of American industry is able to
tower so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of
honest conviction."

"It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no
talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as
specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood
almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest,
though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the
diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but
in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor
commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American
will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is
looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of
prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.

All society is a struggle for the survival of the fittest; and in crude
and early forms of society, it is the strongest who proves himself most
fit. In savage communities--and Europe was savage until after the feudal
days--it is the big man and brutal who comes to the top. In the savage
days of American commerce, which, at least for the West, ended only a
generation back, it was too often the man who could go out and subdue
the wilderness and beat down opposition, who rode rough-shod over his
competitors and used whatever weapons, whether of mere brute strength or
fraud, with the greatest ferocity and unscrupulousness, who made his
mark and his fortune. But in a settled and complex commercial community
it is no longer the strongest who is most fit; it is the most honest.
The American commercial community as a whole, in spite of occasional
exceptions and in defiance of the cynicism of the press, has grasped
this fact and has accepted the business standards of the world at large.

Let me not be interpreted as implying that there are any fewer Americans
than there are Englishmen who live rightly from the fear of God or for
the sake of their own self-respect. The conclusion of most observers has
been that the American people is more religious than the English, that
the temperament, more nervous and more emotional, is more susceptible to
religious influence. It may be so. It is a subject on which the evidence
is necessarily so intangible--on which an individual judgment is likely
to be so entirely dependent on individ