re bears witness to it on every page and it is in
truth one of the most fundamentally English things in the American
character. But the conditions of their life have developed it in
Americans beyond any need which the Englishman has felt. The latter,
living at home amid the established institutions of a society which
moves on its way evenly and without friction regardless of any effort
or action on his part, has had no occasion for those qualities on which
the American's success, his life, have commonly depended from day to day
amid the changing emergencies of a frontier life. The American of any
generation previous to that which is now growing up has seldom known
what it meant to choose a profession or a vocation in life; but must
needs do the work that came to him, and, without apprenticeship or
training, turn to whatever craft has offered.

The notion that every American is, without any special training, by mere
gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is
commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot,
of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."[68:1] It is undoubtedly a
dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief
and least of all men can the head of a great institution for the
training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less,
when the American character is compared with that of any European
people, it has, if not justification, at least considerable excuse.

* * * * *

Once into a new mining camp in the West there drove in the same
"stage-coach" two young men who became friends on the journey. Each was
out to seek his fortune and each hoped to find it in the new community.
Each had his belongings in a "valise" and in each "valise" among those
belongings was a "shingle," or name-plate, bearing each the name of its
respective owner followed by the words "Attorney at Law." The young men
compared their shingles and considered. The small camp would not need
two lawyers, even if it would provide a living for one. So they
"matched" coins (the American equivalent of tossing up) to see which of
the two should erase "Attorney at Law" from his sign and substitute
"Doctor of Medicine." Which is history; as also is the following:

In another mining camp, some twenty-three years ago, there was at first
no surveyor. Men paced off the boundaries of their claims and went to
work as fancy inclined them, and