AND THE AMERICAN SPIRIT' BY NICHOLAS PAINE GILMAN Thet's the old Amerikin idee, To make a man a Man an' let him be. The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live forever. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1893 MX86 59333 Copyright, 1893, BY NICHOLAS PAINE GILMAN. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. TO THE RT. HON. JAMES BRYCE, M. P. L A SLIGHT SIGN OF THE GRATITUDE FELT BY MANY AMERICANS TO THE AUTHOR OF "THE AMERICAN COMMON WEALTH.” They steered by stars the elder shipmen knew, Who changed the Old World for the New, Than all perfection theorized The more imperfect that had roots and grew. They founded deep and well, Those danger-chosen chiefs of men Who still believed in Heaven and Hell, Nor hoped to find a spell, In some fine flourish of a pen, To make a better man Than long-considering Nature will or can, Content with what life gives or takes, And acting still on some fore-ordered plan, Too nicely poised to think or feel, Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal. Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, Because he was not what he should be here, Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. PREFACE. A NOTED author has urged the appointment in some leading university of a "professorship of America." He would like to see there one man whose special business it should be to teach the students "that there is such a reality as American thought, that there are certain principles which belong to the American government, that there are certain feelings which are experienced by none but an American, such customs as American customs, . . . and that there has grown up a social order which is distinctively American. Rev. Dr. Hale repudiates, of course, the notion that science is one thing in Europe and another in the United States. American economics has no more existence than Belgian physics or Spanish chemistry. But the main point is beyond dispute. There is "a social order which is distinctively American." It has been woven on the roaring loom of time by the American spirit. In these days when, as Mr. George Jacob Holyoake has said, the social question "is not only in the air, it fills the air," I have thought that a place is still open in an abundant literature for a discussion of the American answer to socialism. <This volume is not a history or exposition of modern socialism. Many matters that usually go to fill works on the general subject will be found conspicu |