blood, and the petty attorney becomes a legislator and statesman,
and Schmidt turns into Smith, and the newspaper reporter becomes a
_litterateur_ on the staff of the _Saturday Evening Post_, and all of us
Yankees creep up, up, up. The business is never to be accomplished by
headlong assault. It must be done circumspectly, insidiously, a bit
apologetically, _pianissimo_; there must be no flaunting of unusual
ideas, no bold prancing of an unaccustomed personality. Above all, it
must be done without exciting fear, lest the portcullis fall and the
whole enterprise go to pot. Above all, the manner of a Jenkins must be
got into it.

That manner, of course, is not incompatible with a certain superficial
boldness, nor even with an appearance of truculence. But what lies
beneath the boldness is not really an independent spirit, but merely a
talent for crying with the pack. When the American is most dashingly
assertive it is a sure sign that he feels the pack behind him, and hears
its comforting baying, and is well aware that his doctrine is approved.
He is not a joiner for nothing. He joins something, whether it be a
political party, a church, a fraternal order or one of the idiotic
movements that incessantly ravage the land, because joining gives him a
feeling of security, because it makes him a part of something larger and
safer than he is himself, because it gives him a chance to work off
steam without running any risk. The whole thinking of the country thus
runs down the channel of mob emotion; there is no actual conflict of
ideas, but only a succession of crazes. It is inconvenient to stand
aloof from these crazes, and it is dangerous to oppose them. In no other
country in the world is there so ferocious a short way with dissenters;
in none other is it socially so costly to heed the inner voice and to
be one's own man.

Thus encircled by taboos, the American shows an extraordinary
timorousness in all his dealings with fundamentals, and the fact that
many of these taboos are self-imposed only adds to their rigour. What
every observant foreigner first notices, canvassing the intellectual
life of the land, is the shy and gingery manner in which all the larger
problems of existence are dealt with. We have, for example, positive
laws which make it practically impossible to discuss the sex question
with anything approaching honesty. The literature of the subject is
enormous, and the general notion of its importance is thereby m