re" of American tendencies, as interpreted
by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of
the _Nation_ will convey precisely the same impression of American
tendencies as a file of the _Sun_, for instance, or the _Boston Evening
Transcript_, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London _Punch_ and
the New York _Life_ does not differ more radically than the aspects of
American civilization as viewed by two rival journals in Newspaper Row.
The complexity of the material now collected and presented in daily
journalism is so great that adequate editorial interpretation is
obviously impossible. All the more insistently does this heterogeneous
picture of American life demand the impartial interpretation of the
historian, the imaginative transcription of the novelist. Humorist and
moralist, preacher and mob orator and social essayist, shop-talk and
talk over the tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more illuminating
instruction of events, are fashioning day by day the infinitely
delicate processes of our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr.
Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life
as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the
eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the
frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with
unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the
eighteen-seventies and eighties. Literary critics like Professor
Wendell or Professor Trent will deduce from our literature itself
evidence concerning this or that national quality; and all this mass of
American expert testimony, itself a result and a proof of national
self-awareness and self-respect, must be put into the scales to
balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the reports furnished by
foreigners.

I do not pretend to be able, like an expert accountant, to draw up a
balance-sheet of national qualities, to credit or debit the American
character with this or that precise quantity of excellence or defect.
But having turned the pages of many books about the United States, and
listened to many conversations about its inhabitants in many states of
the Union, I venture to collect a brief list of the qualities which
have been assigned to us, together with a few, but not, I trust, too
many, of our admitted national defects.

Like that excellent German who wrote the History of the English Drama
in six volumes, I begin with Physical Geo