lives among them.

So of the American people; we have conveyed no adequate impression of
the manly optimism, the courageous confidence in the ultimate virtue of
goodness and sound principles, on which the belief in the destiny of
their own country is based. The nation has prospered by its virtues.
Every page of their history preaches to the people that it is honesty
and faith and loyalty which succeed, and they believe in their future
greatness because they believe themselves to possess, and hope to hold
to, those virtues as in the past.

It may be that, living in the silences and solitudes of the frontier and
the wilderness, they have found the greater need of ready speech when
communication has offered. It may be that the mere necessity of planning
together the framework of their society and of building up their State
out of chaos has imposed on them the necessity of more outspokenness.
Certainly they have discarded, or have not assumed, the reticence of the
modern English of England; and much of this freedom of utterance
Europeans misinterpret, much (because the fashion of it is strange to
themselves) they believe to be insincere. In which judgments they are
quite wrong. The American people are profoundly sincere and intensely in
earnest.

Since the establishment of the Republic, in the necessity of civilizing
a continent, in the breathless struggle of the Civil War, in the
rapidity with which society has been compelled to organize itself, in
the absorption and assimilation of the continuous stream of foreign
immigrants, the people have always been at grips with problems of
immediate, almost desperate urgency; and they have never lost, or come
near to losing, heart or courage. They have learned above all things the
lesson of the efficacy of work. They have acquired the habit of action.
Self-reliance has been bred in them. They know that in the haste of the
days of ferment abuses grew up and went unchecked; and they know that in
that same haste they missed some of the elegancies which a more
leisurely and easier life might have given opportunity to acquire. But
for a generation back, they have been earnestly striving to eradicate
those abuses and to lift themselves, their speech, their manners, their
art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been
impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages)
to give any unified picture of this national character with its
activity, i