rward movement in which we
are living, radicalism has shown its beneficent aspect of constructive
idealism.

No catalogue of American qualities and defects can exclude the trait of
individualism. We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. Brownell;
we like our institutions because they suit us, and not because we
admire institutions. "Produce great persons," declares Walt Whitman,
"the rest follows." Whether the rest follows or not, there can be no
question that Americans, from the beginning, have laid singular stress
upon personal qualities. The religion and philosophy of the Puritans
were in this respect at one with the gospel of the frontier. It was the
principle of "every man for himself"; solitary confrontation of his
God, solitary struggle with the wilderness. "He that will not work,"
declared John Smith after that first disastrous winter at Jamestown,
"neither let him eat." The pioneer must clear his own land, harvest his
own crops, defend his own fireside; his temporal and eternal salvation
were strictly his own affair. He asked, and expected, no aid from the
community; he could at most "change works" in time of harvest, with a
neighbor, if he had one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance,
from babyhood to the grave, that human society is ever likely to
witness. It bred heroes and cranks and hermits; its glories and its
eccentricities are written in the pages of Emerson, Thoreau, and
Whitman; they are written more permanently still in the instinctive
American faith in individual manhood. Our democracy idolizes a few
individuals; it ignores their defective training, or, it may be, their
defective culture; it likes to think of an Andrew Jackson who was a
"lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, and politician," before he
became President; it asks only that the man shall not change his
individual character in passing from one occupation or position to
another; in fact, it is amused and proud to think of Grant hauling
cordwood to market, of Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt rounding-up
cattle. The one essential question was put by Hawthorne into the mouth
of Holgrave in the _House of the Seven Gables_. Holgrave had been by
turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, editor, pedler, lecturer on
Mesmerism, and daguerreotypist, but "amid all these personal
vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, "he had never lost his identity.... He
had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience
along with him