conviction that a great deal that is
called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female
convention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional;
it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions of
the tribe. If the females become conventional also, there is a danger of
individuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America; it is
common to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything which
substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the State for the personal
atmosphere of the home. But it is emphasised in America by the curious
contradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate the
individual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Where
men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each
other. They become featureless by 'featuring' the same part.
Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In
this respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the
Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life.
Those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the American
hotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to the
excess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even if
the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with the
corresponding truth; that the English have no public life. They on their
side have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic;
and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very
State itself has become a State secret.

The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the unconscious form of
nationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of a
nation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving
too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to
superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and with
too much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much too
unconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms of
consciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin is
ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things are
not the things that are most admired by the English, or for which the
English admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and in
daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should be
destroy