Before, however, any sufficiently great and capable body of men can be
found to abolish these shams, these shams that must necessarily hamper
and limit the development of our children, it is necessary that they
should have some clear idea of the thing that is to follow, and the
real security of these obsolete institutions lies very largely in the
fact that at present the thing that is to follow does not define
itself. It is too commonly assumed that the alternative to a more or
less hereditary government is democratic republicanism of the American
type, and the defence of the former consists usually in an indictment
of the latter, complicated in very illogical cases by the assertion
(drawn from the French instance) that Republics are unstable. But it
does not follow that because one condemns the obvious shams of the
British system that one must accept the shams of the United States.
While in Great Britain we have a system that masks and hampers the best
of our race under a series of artificial inequalities, the United
States theory of the essential equality of all men is equally not in
accordance with the reality of life. In America, just as in England,
the intelligent child grows up to discover that the pretensions of
public life are not justified, and quite equally to be flawed in
thought and action by that discovery.

The American atmosphere has one great and indisputable superiority over
the British: it insists upon the right of every citizen, it almost
presents it as a duty, to do all that he possibly can do; it holds out
to him even the highest position in the state as a possible reward for
endeavour. Up to the point of its equality of opportunity surely no
sane Englishman can do anything but envy the American state. In America
"presumption" is not a sin. All the vigorous enterprise that
differentiates the American from the Englishman in business flows quite
naturally from that; all the patriotic force and loyalty of the common