d once meant life or death. "What's your
business, stranger, in these parts?" was an instinctive, because it had
once been a vital, question. That it degenerates into mere
inquisitiveness is true enough; just as the "acuteness," the
"awareness," essential to the existence of one generation becomes only
"cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's habit of mind, in the generation
following.

American inexperience, the national rawness and unsophistication which
has impressed so many observers, has likewise its double significance
when viewed historically. We have exhibited, no doubt, the
amateurishness and recklessness which spring from relative isolation,
from ignorance as to how they manage elsewhere this particular sort of
thing,--the conservation of forests, let us say, or the government of
colonial dependencies. National smugness and conceit, the impatience
crystallized in the phrase, "What have we got to do with abroad?" have
jarred upon the nerves of many cultivated Americans. But it is no less
true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like the isolated
individual, learns certain rough-and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of
getting things done. A California mining-camp is sure to establish law
and order in due time, though never, perhaps, a law and order quite
according to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of American
political history, it was not, after all, a question of profiting by
European experience. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest struggles,
had nothing to do with "abroad"; the problem had first to be thought
through, and then fought through, in American and not in European
terms. Not a half-dozen Englishmen understood the bearings of the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the wiser. We had
to wait until a slow-minded frontier lawyer mastered it in all its
implications, and then patiently explained it to the farmers of
Illinois, to the United States, and to the world.

It is true that the unsophisticated mode of procedure may turn out to
be sheer folly,--a "sixteen to one" triumph of provincial barbarism.
But sometimes it is the secret of freshness and of force. Your
cross-country runner scorns the highway, but that is because he has
confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes to take the fences.
Fenimore Cooper, when he began to write stories, knew nothing about the
art of novel-making as practised in Europe, but he possessed something
infinitely better for him, namely, instinct,