so. Yet it is impossible to deny that the main features of this incoherent view are familiar. We see the reflection of them in the singular choice and presentation of the rare items of American news which find their way into the columns of European newspapers. We recognize them in the talk of the street and of the table-d’hôte.
I remember very well the gravity and earnestness with which a learned German asked me, some years ago, whether, if he went to America, it would be a serious disadvantage to him in the first social circles to eat with his knife at the dinner-table. He was much relieved by my assurance that no one would take notice of it.
I recall also the charming naïveté with which an English lady inquired, “Have you any good writers in the States?” The answer was: “None to speak of. We import most of our literature from Australia, by way of the Cape of Good Hope.”
Sometimes we are asked whether we do not find it a great disadvantage to have no language of our own; or whether the justices of the Supreme Court are usually persons of good education; or whether we often meet Buffalo Bill in New York society; or whether Shakespeare or Bernard Shaw is most read in the States. To such inquiries we try to return polite answers, although our despair of conveying the truth sometimes leads us to clothe it in a humorous disguise.
But these are minor matters. It is when we are seriously interrogated about the prospect of a hereditary nobility in America, created from the descendants of railway princes, oil magnates, and iron dukes; or when we are questioned as to the probability that the next President, or the one after the next, may assume an imperial state and crown, or perhaps that he may abolish the Constitution and establish communism; or when we are asked whether the Germans, or the Irish, or the Scandinavians, or the Jews are going to dominate the United States in the twentieth century; or when we are told that the industrial and commercial forces which created the republic are no longer coöperant but divisive, and that the nation must inevitably split into several fragments, more or less hostile, but certainly rival; it is when such questions are gravely asked, that we begin to feel that there are some grave misconceptions, or at least that there is something important lacking, in the current notion of how America came into being and what America really is.
I believe that the thing which is lacking is the perception of the Spirit of America as the creative force, the controlling power, the characteristic element of the United States.
The republic is not an accident, happy or otherwise. It is not a fortuitous concourse of emigrants. It is not the logical demonstration of an abstract theory of government. It is the development of a life—an inward life of ideals, sentiments, ruling passions, embodying itself in an outward life of forms, customs, institutions, relations—a process as vital, as spontaneous, as inevitable, as the growth of a child into a man. The soul of a people has made the American nation.
It is of this Spirit of America, in the past and in the present, and of some of its expressions, that I would speak in these conferences. I speak of it in the past because I believe that we must know something of its origins, its early manifestations, its experiences, and its conflicts in order to understand what it truly signifies.
The spirit of a people, like the spirit of a man, is influenced by heredity. But this heredity is not merely physical, it is spiritual. There is a transmission of qualities through the soul as well as through the flesh. There is an intellectual paternity. There is a kinship of the mind as well as of the body. The soul of the people in America to-day is the lineal descendant of the soul of the people which made America in the beginning.
Just at what moment of time this soul came into being, I do not know. Some theologians teach that there is a certain point at which the hidden physical life of an infant receives a donum of spiritual life which makes it a person, a human being. I do not imagine that we can fix any such point in the conception and gestation of a people. Certainly it would be difficult to select any date of which we could say with assurance, “On that day, in that year, the exiles of England, of Scotland, of Holland, of France, of Germany, on the shores of the new world, became one folk, into which the Spirit of America entered.” But just as certainly it is clear that the mysterious event came to pass. And beyond a doubt the time of its occurrence was long before the traditional birthday of the republic, the 4th of July, 1776.
The Declaration of Independence did not create—it did not even pretend to create—a new state of things. It simply recognized a state of things already existing. It declared “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”
The men who framed this declaration were not ignorant, nor careless in the use of words. When practically the same men were called, a few years later, to frame a constitution for the United States, they employed quite different language: “We, the people of the United States, … do ordain and establish this Constitution.” That is the language of creation. It assumes to bring into being something which did not previously exist. But the language of the Declaration of Independence is the language of recognition. It sets forth clearly a fact which has already come to pass, but which has hitherto been ignored, neglected or denied.
What was that fact? Nothing else than the existence of a new people, separate, distinct, independent, in the thirteen American colonies. At what moment in the troubled seventeenth century, age of European revolt and conflict, the spirit of liberty brooding upon the immense wilderness of the New World, engendered this new life, we cannot tell. At what moment in the philosophical eighteenth century, age of reason and reflection, this new life began to be self-conscious and to feel its way toward an organic unity of powers and efforts, we cannot precisely determine. But the thing that is clear and significant is that independence existed before it was declared. The soul of the American people was already living and conscious before the history of the United States began.
I call this fact significant, immensely significant, because it marks not merely a verbal distinction but an essential difference, a difference which is vital to the true comprehension of the American spirit in the past and in the present.
A nation brought to birth by an act of violence, if such a thing be possible—or let us rather say, a nation achieving liberty by a sharp and sudden break with its own past and a complete overturning of its own traditions, will naturally carry with it the marks of such an origin. It will be inclined to extreme measures and methods. It will be particularly liable to counter-revolutions. It will often vibrate between radicalism and reactionism.
But a nation “conceived in liberty,” to use Lincoln’s glorious phrase, and pursuing its natural aims, not by the method of swift and forcible change, but by the method of normal and steady development, will be likely to have another temperament and a different history. It will at least endeavour to practice moderation, prudence, patience. It will try new experiments slowly. It will advance, not indeed without interruption, but with a large and tranquil confidence that its security and progress are in accordance with the course of nature and the eternal laws of right reason.
Now this is true in the main of the United States. And the reason for this large and tranquil confidence, at which Europeans sometimes smile because it looks like bravado, and for this essentially conservative temper, at which Europeans sometimes wonder because it seems unsuitable to a democracy—the reason, I think, is to be found in the history of the soul of the people.
The American Revolution, to speak accurately and philosophically, was not a revolution at all. It was a resistance.
The Americans did not propose to conquer new rights and privileges, but to defend old ones.
The claim of Washington and Adams and Franklin and Jefferson and Jay and Schuyler and Witherspoon was that the kings of England had established the colonies in certain liberties which the Parliament was endeavouring to take away. These liberties, the Americans asserted, belonged to them not only by natural
