s in
England are essentially Philistine; the United States as a nation is
given over to money-making; _ergo_, its inhabitants must all be
Philistines. Furthermore, the British Philistines are to a very large
extent dissenters: the United States has no established church;
_ergo_, it must be the Paradise of the dissenter.

This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid
self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines as the
essence of Philistinism, is _not_ a predominant trait in the American
class in which our English experience would lead us to look for it.
The American man of business, with his restless discontent and
nervous, over-strained pursuit of wealth, may not be a more inspiring
object than his British brother, but he has little of the smugness
which Mr. Arnold has taught us to associate with the label of
Philistinism. And his womankind is perhaps even less open to this
particular reproach. Mr. Arnold ignores a whole far-reaching series of
American social phenomena which have practically nothing in common
with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity of nomenclature
blind him too much to the differentiation of entirely novel
conditions. The Methodist "Moonshiner" of Tennessee is hardly cast in
the same mould as the deacon of a London Little Bethel; and even the
most legitimate children of the Puritans have not descended from the
common stock in parallel lines in England and America.

Mr. Arnold admitted that the political clothes of Brother Jonathan
fitted him admirably, and allowed that he can and does think
straighter (_c'est le bonheur des hommes quand ils pensent juste_)
than we can in the maze of our unnatural and antiquated complications;
he wholly admired the natural, unselfconscious manner of the American
woman; he saw that the wage-earner lived more comfortably than in
Europe; he noted that wealthy Americans were not dogged by envy in the
same way as in England, partly because wealth was felt to be more
within the range of all, and partly because it was much less often
used for the gratification of vile and selfish appetites; he admitted
that America was none the worse for the lack of a materialised
aristocracy such as ours; he praises the spirit which levels false and
conventional distinctions, and waives the use of such invidious
discriminations as our "Mr." and "Esquire." Admissions such as these,
coming from such a man as he, are of untold value in promoting the
growth of