has well pointed out how natural it is that a colony should rush ahead
of the mother country in some things and lag behind it in others; and
that just as you have to go to French Canada if you want to see Old
France, so, for many things, if you wish to see Old England you must
go to New England.

Thus America may easily be abreast or ahead of us in such matters as
the latest applications of electricity, while retaining in its legal
uses certain cumbersome devices that we have long since discarded.
Americans still have "Courts of Oyer and Terminer" and still insist on
the unanimity of the jury, though their judges wear no robes and their
counsel apply to the cuspidor as often as to the code. So, too, the
extension of municipal powers accomplished in Great Britain still
seems a formidable innovation in the United States.

The general feeling of power and scope is probably another fruitful
source of the inconsistencies of American life. Emerson has well said
that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; and no doubt the
largeness, the illimitable outlook, of the national mind of the United
States makes it disregard surface discrepancies that would grate
horribly on a more conventional community. The confident belief that
all will come out right in the end, and that harmony can be attained
when time is taken to consider it, carries one triumphantly over the
roughest places of inconsistency. It is easy to drink our champagne
from tin cans, when we know that it is merely a sense of hurry that
prevents us fetching the chased silver goblets waiting for our use.

This, I fancy, is the explanation of one series of contrasts which
strikes an Englishman at once. America claims to be the land of
liberty _par excellence_, and in a wholesale way this may be true in