mainly to his different social and political circumstances. Just as the
relative defects of the common British, their apathy, their unreasoning
conservatism, and their sordid scorn of intellectual things is bound up
with their politico-social scheme, so, I believe, the noisiness, the
mean practicalness, and the dyspeptic-driving restlessness that are the
shadows of American life, are bound up with the politico-social
condition of America. The Englishman sticks in the mud, and the
American, with a sort of violent meanness, cuts corners, and in both
cases it is quite conceivable that the failure to follow the perfect
way is really no symptom of a divergence of blood and race, but the
natural and necessary outcome of the mass of suggestion about them that
constitutes their respective worlds.

The young American grows up into a world pervaded by the theory of
democracy, by the theory that all men must have an equal chance of
happiness, possessions, and power, and in which that theory is
expressed by a uniform equal suffrage. No man shall have any power or
authority save by the free consent and delegation of his fellows--that
is the idea--and to the originators of this theory it seemed as obvious
as anything could be that these suffrages would only be given to those
who did really serve the happiness and welfare of the greatest number.
The idea was reflected in the world of business by a conception of free
competition; no man should grow rich except by the free preference of a
great following of customers. Such is still the American theory, and
directly the intelligent young American grows up to hard facts he finds
almost as much disillusionment as the intelligent young Englishman. He
finds that in practice the free choice of a constituency reduces to two
candidates, and no more, selected by party organizations, and the free
choice of the customer to the goods proffered by a diminishing number
of elaborately advertised businesses; he finds political instruments