and communicate, and plough and reap and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united. . . . But this union must be inward, and not one of the covenants. . . Government will be adamantine without any governor." The union must be ideal in actual individualism." Lecturing in London, in 1848, on Politics and Socialism, he "spoke well of Owen and Fourier, and said their conceptions should be gratefully appreciated; for they who think and hope well for mankind put the human race under obligation. They are the unconscious prophets of the true order of society, - men who believe that in the world God's justice will be done. Yet he protested against phalansteries in favor of the separate house, and declared it was individualism men needed, rather than having all things in common.”1

When a lofty idealist like Emerson thus speaks of individualism, we know—whatever the qualifications of his doctrine in the direction of coöperation which we may need to make- - that it is not a doctrine of greed or a spirit of low selfishness that he inculcates. The temper and the method, on the contrary, are precisely those which a materialistic Socialism should most carefully ponder. "Whilst I desire," says our great American teacher of the gospel of the soul, "to express the respect and joy I feel before this sublime connection of reforms, now in their infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of self-reliance. I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity."

The uncritical tendency to Socialism, visible among American men of letters, in the members of various 1 R. W. Emerson, by George Willis Cooke, p. 94.

professions, and in many of their readers, needs more careful treatment than that which the novelist and the essayist, however capable, have supplied. The inquiry is very pertinent, how far the system is compatible with the genius of the American people, under the conditions which their natural environment and their political history have determined. To such an inquiry-obviously lying neither in the realm of fiction nor in the province of the moralist - we will now turn. The answer may not be derived from imaginations of a possible future, or from theorizing upon what we suppose ought to be; it is to be drawn from the history of the American people, issuing in its actual character as shown in the life of to-day.

CHAPTER III.

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT.

FEW tasks are more difficult than the accurate delineation of the character of a people as shown in the whole range of its activities. When the people belongs to modern times, and shares the complexities of a developed civilization, the national psychologist has a labor before him far greater than when he would depict, for instance, the typical Greek and Roman of antiquity. After he has thoroughly studied for years the literature and the history of Greece and Rome, making himself familiar with their laws, customs, art and religion, he may undertake with some confidence to sketch the main lines of the character of the men who have left such a record of themselves in word and deed. The literary record, however imperfect, is finished: the relics of the art are in our hands; the social frame is antiquated; the customs have vanished; the religion is no more. Roman Law and Greek Literature are our great inheritance from classic antiquity, and many historians, entering into these rich bequests, have set forth the chief lineaments of the Greek victorious in the fields of beauty and knowledge, and of the Roman triumphant in every art of conquest and government. Each successive painter has the benefit of the attempts of his predecessors; he learns from them to heighten or tone down his colors, to adopt a more just perspective in portraying the

individual against the background of circumstance, and to realize the just image of a man once living, however different he may have been from the Greek or the Italian of to-day. There have thus been formed generally accepted characterizations of these two great peoples of antiquity, which have gradually been cleared of conventionality, rhetoric and extreme generalization, as the students of the whole record have corrected mistakes of interpretation.

The typical Greek, then, we know and the representative Roman; and neither can rise from his grave to correct our mistakes! We are not so free from controversy when we endeavor to describe a people of modern times. The gain in the nearness and fullness of testimony is more than offset by the complexity of the character of modern man and the national equation which the psychologist has to make, whether he is portraying his own people or another. The bias of patriotism and historic rancor forbid much expectation of an impartial picture of the Frenchman from the Englishman, or of the German from the French Neither of these, again, will describe his o countrymen to the satisfaction of the judicial-ny, ork out foreigner. Such attempts, indeed, are rar Far more common is incidental laudation ry, then, tues of his countrymen by the historian can Spirit, in contrast with the vices or weak he reports of across the Channel or over the Rh as the most able studies in psychology like Mr little value in the "French and English," or M "French Traits," based on knowledge, are few and far server belongs, as Mr. Bro which has generally been on

man.

arrow limits of these torical development of operation to-day, nor stive exposition of all

people he would represent, the antecedent probability is greater that he will do no gross injustice.

A writer who can justly describe the character of his own countrymen, free from both the partiality of the patriot and the bitterness of the censor, is more exceptional, perhaps, than a fair-minded exponent from another country. The task is not one which the discreet student will lightly undertake, so near are the dangers of eulogy and of fault-finding, two occupations equally unprofitable. A justification for the attempt by an American to draw here some lines of the American character may, however, be found in the presence of a great problem that now confronts all civilized peoples. The inquiry is natural whether there may not be in the character and condition of the German, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Englishman and the American some special reasons of weight for expecting a specific solution in each country. The opinion on this matter of an enlightened foreigner who has carefully studied the United States, for instance, is of high value, for such a student will aake points of view which the native's very familiarfinis with his own institutions leads him to neglect. social fr most cases, such an observer will commit ished; the mpossible to one born and bred in the Greek Literen the country is steadily progressive, he sic antiquity, athasize favorable tendencies much more rich bequests, havsting phenomena of an evil appearthe Greek victoriou

ledge, and of the Row" can be corrected from the conquest and governple and impartial outsider, the has the benefit of the le for the study of a particular learns from them to hid, or likely to be determined, to adopt a more justcter. These United States are