hich
has had for its object the safe-guarding or the betterment of the
community. Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, and aside
from the short story as represented by such isolated artists as Poe and
Hawthorne, our literature as a whole has this civic note. It may be
detected in the first writings of the colonists. Captain John Smith's
angry order at Jamestown, "He that will not work neither let him eat,"
is one of the planks in the platform of democracy. Under the trying and
depressing conditions of that disastrous settlement at Eden in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_ it is the quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tapley
which prove him superior to his employer. The same sermon is preached
in Mr. Barrie's play, _The Admirable Crichton_: cast away upon the
desert island, the butler proves himself a better man than his master.
This is the motive of a very modern play, but it may be illustrated a
hundred times in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in America. The practical experiences of the colonists
confirmed them in their republican theories. It is true that they held
to a doctrine of religious and political individualism. But the moment
these theories were put to work in the wilderness a new order of things
decreed that this individualism should be modified in the direction of
fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value
of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of
all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin
became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the
writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any
further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a
triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came
promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to
over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and
a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of
democratic ideas.

One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed
its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the
eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and
Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found
themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who
hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards
anything that savored of Old Wor