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onvince yourself that this race--your own with larger opportunities--is not the finer race of the two? I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies, and sometimes even impertinences--call them what you will,--he is too prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character. The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the English character--with elbow-room. "While the outlook of the New Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that new offshoots from the character will have developed--excrescences, not perhaps in themselves always lovely--but if we remember what the trunk is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may also have expanded and strengthened and solidified. The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries. * * * * * There have been, of course, many other influences at work in the moulding of the American character, besides the mere vastness of his continent; but the fact remains that this has been immensely the most powerful of all the factors. English originally, the American is still English in his essentials, modified chiefly by the circumstances of his material environment, the magnificence of his estate, the width of his horizons, the disciplining of his nature by the Titanic struggle with the physical conditions of the wilderness and the necessary development of those qualities of resourcefulness, buoyancy, and self-reliance which the exigencies of that struggl
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