." There speaks the local accent of Puritanism, but the
voice insisting upon the moral integrity of the individual is the
undertone of America.

Finally, and surely not the least notable of American traits, is public
spirit. Triumphant individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked
in spite of itself, by considerations of the general good. How often
have French critics confessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the
superior socialization of the French intelligence, France has yet to
learn from America the art and habit of devoting individual fortunes to
the good of the community. Our American literature, as has been already
pointed out, is characteristically a citizen literature, responsive to
the civic note, the production of men who, like the writers of the
_Federalist_, applied a vigorous practical intelligence, a robust
common sense, to questions affecting the interest of everybody. The
spirit of fair play in our free democracy has led Americans to ask not
merely what is right and just for one, the individual, but what are
righteousness and justice and fair play for all. Democracy, as embodied
in such a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. Nothing finer can be
said of a representative American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton
said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a "most public soul."

No one can present such a catalogue of American qualities as I have
attempted without realizing how much escapes his classification.
Conscious criticism and assessment of national characteristics is
essential to an understanding of them; but one feels somehow that the
net is not holding. The analysis of English racial inheritances, as
modified by historical conditions, yields much, no doubt; but what are
we to say of such magnificent embodiments of the American spirit as are
revealed in the Swiss immigrant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz,
the native-born mulatto Booker Washington? The Americanism of
representative Americans is something which must be felt; it is to be
reached by imaginative perception and sympathy, no less than by the
process of formal analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial
tendencies to find arithmetically the common denominator of such
American figures as Franklin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee,
Lincoln, Emerson, and "Mark Twain"; yet the countrymen of those typical
Americans instinctively recognize in them a sort of largeness,
genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, effectiveness, idea