ufficient sense of public duty?

Well, that is one way of putting it; but there is a more specific way.
Probably it will surprise you if I say the American has not, I think, a
sufficiently quick sense of his own claims, and, at the same time, as a
necessary consequence, not a sufficiently quick sense of the claims of
others--for the two traits are organically related. I observe that they
tolerate various small interferences and dictations which Englishmen are
prone to resist. I am told that the English are remarked on for their
tendency to grumble in such cases; and I have no doubt it is true.

Do you think it worth while for people to make themselves disagreeable
by resenting every trifling aggression? We Americans think it involves
too much loss of time and temper, and doesn't pay.

Exactly; that is what I mean by character. It is this easy-going
readiness to permit small trespasses, because it would be troublesome or
profitless or unpopular to oppose them, which leads to the habit of
acquiescence in wrong, and the decay of free institutions. Free
institutions can be maintained only by citizens, each of whom is instant
to oppose every illegitimate act, every assumption of supremacy, every
official excess of power, however trivial it may seem. As Hamlet says,
there is such a thing as "greatly to find quarrel in a straw," when the
straw implies a principle. If, as you say of the American, he pauses to
consider whether he can afford the time and trouble--whether it will
pay, corruption is sure to creep in. All these lapses from higher to
lower forms begin in trifling ways, and it is only by incessant
watchfulness that they can be prevented. As one of your early statesmen
said--"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." But it is far less
against foreign aggressions upon national liberty that this vigilance is
required, than against the insidious growth of domestic interferences
with personal liberty. In some private administrations which I have been
concerned with, I have often insisted that instead of assuming, as
people usually do, that things are going right until it is proved that
they are going wrong, the proper course is to assume that they are going
wrong until it is proved that they are going right. You will find
continually that private corporations, such as joint-stock banking
companies, come to grief from not acting on this principle; and what
holds of these small and simple private administrations holds st