the State" is in truth the
cardinal quality which has made the greatness of the United States--and
of England. It is precisely because the peoples rely on individual
effort and not on the State that they have become greater than all
other peoples. That is their peculiar political excellence--that they
are not for ever framing schemes for a paternal all-embracing State, but
are content to work each in his own sphere, asserting his own
independence and individuality, from the things as they are, little by
little towards the things as they ought to be.

If Mr. Wells had prevailed on any typical American to sit down and write
what, as he understood it, his people were working to accomplish, the
latter would have written something like this:

"We have got the basis of a form of government under which, when
perfected, the individual will have larger liberty and better
opportunity to assert himself than he has ever had in any country since
organised states have existed. We have a people which enjoys to-day more
of the material comforts of life than any other people on earth, and the
chief political problem with which we are wrestling to-day is to see
that that enjoyment is confirmed to them in perpetuity--not taken from
them or hampered or limited by any power of an oppressive capitalism. We
are spending more money, more energy, more earnest thought on the study
of education as a science or art and on the endowment of educational
establishments than any other people; as a result we hope that the next
generation of Americans, besides being the most materially blessed, will
be the most educated and intelligent of peoples. We are doing all we can
to weed out dishonesty from our commercial dealings. In the period of
our growth there was necessarily some laxity in our business ethics, but
we are doing the best we know how to improve that, and we believe that
on the whole our methods of doing business are calculated to produce
more honest men than those in vogue in other countries. What we hope to
make of our future therefore is to produce a nation of individuals
freer, better off, and more honest than the world has yet seen. When
that people comes it can manage its own government."

Not only are these, I fear, larger national aims than the average
Englishman dares to propose to himself, but they are, I venture to say,
much more definitely formulated in the "typical American's" mind. If Mr.
Wells desires to find a people which co