discredited
systems of former ages and other countries--receiving them at second
hand, but making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the
national belief in their novelty. Novelty! Why, it is not possible to
make an experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology,
or in morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again.

The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that our
fathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the power,
the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century, but
of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the
preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "reverend
pile," the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle the
mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top
courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? The
American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in
England's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser
glory of his own country.

The English, are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the
virtues are solely the product of intelligence and cultivation--a rogue
being only a dunce considered from another point of view--they are our
moral superiors likewise. Why should they not be? Theirs is a land, not
of ugly schoolhouses grudgingly erected, containing schools supported by
such niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will
consent to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the
state and by centuries of private benefaction. As a means of dispensing
formulated ignorance our boasted public school system is not without
merit; it spreads out education sufficiently thin to give everyone
enough to make him a more competent fool than he would have been without
it; but to compare it with that which is not the creature of legislation
acting with malice aforethought, but the unnoted out-growth of ages, is
to be ridiculous. It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western
prairie, its right-angled streets, prim cottages, and wooden a-b-c
shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped with the clustered
domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges, the very names of
many of whose founders have perished from human record, as have the
chronicles of the times in which they lived.

It is not only that we have had to "subdue the wildern