se has it,
"to give ourselves away." We back our own "proposition," so that to
this day Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor Harvard to
Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glorified through its rootage in loyalty;
and likewise extravagance--surely one of the worst of American mental
vices--is often based upon a romantic confidence in individual opinion
or in the righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded
American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right,
and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a
splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent.
Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist
philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the
Lord's side?" i.e., on the side of Wendell Phillips.

Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted combatant in a moral crisis
like the abolition controversy, the fact remains that the intellectual
dangers of the oratorical temperament are typically American. What is
commonly called our "Fourth of July" period has indeed passed away. It
has few apologists, perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is
possible to regret the disappearance of that old-fashioned assertion of
patriotism and pride, and to question whether historical pageants and a
"noiseless Fourth" will develop any better citizens than the fathers
were. But on the purely intellectual side, the influence of that
spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. Throughout wide-extended regions
of the country, and particularly in the South and West, the "orator"
grew to be, in the popular mind, the normal representative of
intellectual ability. Words, rather than things, climbed into the
saddle. Popular assemblies were taught the vocabulary and the logic of
passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. The "stump" grew more
potent than school-house and church and bench; and it taught its
reckless and passionate ways to more than one generation. The
intellectual leaders of the newer South have more than once suffered
ostracism for protesting against this glorification of mere oratory.
But it is not the South alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can
gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and
rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable
American temperament.

The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less
in our popular journalism. This j