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
.G5

59333

Copyright, 1893,

BY NICHOLAS PAINE GILMAN.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

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,
And laid their courses where the currents draw
Of ancient wisdom channelled deep in law,
The undaunted few

Who changed the Old World for the New,
And more devoutly prized

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,
Secure against his own mistakes,

Content with what life gives or takes,

And acting still on some fore-ordered plan,
A cog of iron in an iron wheel,

Too nicely poised to think or feel,

Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal.
They wasted not their brain in schemes

Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere,
As if he must be other than he seems

Because he was not what he should be here,
Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams:
Yet herein they were great

Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore,
And wiser than the wisdom of the shelf,
That they conceived a deeper-rooted state,
Of hardier growth, alive from rind to core,
By making man sole sponsor of himself.

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