nother ideal of freedom
which the English never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all.
There was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we built
no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it in
England; but you will find them in America.

The thing I mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. Its
religion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as in
Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and
atmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. It
had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as
that a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. It
knew Latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the
Republic should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was
anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even of
the prigs and fanatics of the American and French Revolutions we can
often say, as Stevenson said of an American, that 'thrift and courage
glowed in him.' And its virtue and value for us is that it did remember
the things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty to
the danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, in
the self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. And its
determination was really determined. In short, it believed in
self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicides
that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it the
marks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had a
crusade. Men died singing its songs; men starved rather than write
against its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, and
fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This was
the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century;
and there are still corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where
we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formal
manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us.

There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the real
religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. It
never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building
called the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if sometimes
frigid figure called the Citizen.

In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, partly perh