It is the more to be regretted that he adopted this attitude of
premature judgment of American characteristics because it is only too
prevalent among his less distinguished fellow-countrymen. From this
position of _parti pris_, maintained with all his own inimitable
suavity and grace, it seems to me that he was never wholly able to
advance (or retire), though he candidly admitted that he found the
difference between the British and American Philistine vastly greater
than he anticipated. The members of his preconceived syllogism seem to
be somewhat as follows: the money-making and comfort-loving classes in
England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is
given over to money-making; _ergo_, its inhabitants must all be
Philistines. Furthermore, the British Philistines are to a very large
extent dissenters: the United States has no established church;
_ergo_, it must be the Paradise of the dissenter.

This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid
self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines as the
essence of Philistinism, is _not_ a predominant trait in the American
class in which our English experience would lead us to look for it.
The American man of business, with his restless discontent and
nervous, over-strained pursuit of wealth, may not be a more inspiring
object than his British brother, but he has little of the smugness
which Mr. Arnold has taught us to associate with the label of
Philistinism. And his womankind is perhaps even less open to this
particular reproach. Mr. Arnold ignores a whole far-reaching series of
American social phenomena which have practically nothing in common
with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity of nomenclature
blind him too much to the differentiation of entirely novel
conditions. The Methodist "Moonshiner" of Tennessee is hardly cast in
the same mould as the deacon of a London Little Bethel; and even the