ons which shall make life less hard; that of
the scholar or philosopher who must supply the new community's need of
lawyers and politicians.

On the other hand, many of the colonists' forefathers had come to their
new home with distinct aspirations for a better ordering of human life
than the old world allowed, and it has frequently been noticed that
Americans from the first have been more prone than their kinsmen in
England to pay homage to large ideal conceptions. This is a disposition
not entirely favourable to painstaking and sure-footed reform. The
idealist American is perhaps too ready to pay himself with fine words,
which the subtler and shyer Englishman avoids and rather too readily sets
down as insincere in others. Moreover, this tendency is quite consistent
with the peculiar conservatism characteristic of America. New conditions
in which tradition gave no guidance called forth great inventive powers
and bred a certain pride in novelty. An American economist has written
in a sanguine humour, "The process of transplanting removes many of the
shackles of custom and tradition which retard the progress of older
countries. In a new country things cannot be done in the old way, and
therefore they are probably done in the best way." But a new country is
always apt to cling with tenacity to those old things for which it still
has use; and a remote and undeveloped country does not fully share the
continual commerce in ideas which brings about change (and, in the main,
advance) in the old world. The conservatism which these causes tend to
produce has in any case been marked in America. Thus, as readers of
Lowell are aware, in spite of the ceaseless efflorescence of the modern
slang of America, the language of America is in many respects that of an
older England than ours, and the like has all along been true of
important literature, and still more of oratory, in America. Moreover,
as the sentences which have just been quoted may suggest, the maxim that
has once hit the occasion, or the new practice or expedient once
necessitated by the conditions of the moment, has been readily hallowed
as expressing the wisdom of the ages. An Englishman will quote Burke as
he would quote Demosthenes or Plato, but Americans have been apt to quote
their elder statesmen as they would quote the Bible. In like manner
political practices of accidental origin--for instance, that a
representative should be an inhabitant of the place