same skating-rinks. The monotony of this
spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not
conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for the free play of
character; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they
reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this
perpetual tribute to custom. Of course in all civilized societies the
tribute to custom is being constantly paid; if it is less observable in
America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual
independence is greater, but because custom is more sparsely
established. Where we have customs people certainly follow them; but for
five American customs there are fifty English. I am very far from having
discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of
that explosive personal force in the English character which is
compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain
awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the
fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most
striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is
of course the universal church-going. In the sight of all England
getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its
hat and drawing on its gloves and taking its wife on its arm and making
its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's,
propriety's sake, making its way to a place of worship appointed by the
State, in which it respects the formulas of a creed to which it attaches
no positive sense and listens to a sermon over the length of which it
explicitly haggles and grumbles,--in this great exhibition there is
something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows
whether to pronounce very sublime or very puerile. He inclines on the
whole to pronounce it sublime, because it gives him the feeling that
whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these
manoeuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will
have it in them to do so with tremendous force and cohesiveness. We hear
a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in
consolidating the German people and making them available for a
particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the
military punctuality which characterizes the English observance of
Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation whi