we call public opinion. But
in a country like ours, of absolute democratic equality, public
opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. There is no
refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach; and the
result is that if you take the old Greek lantern and go about to
seek among a hundred, you will find not one single American who has
not, or who does not fancy at least that he has, something to gain
or lose in his ambition, his social life, or his business, from the
good opinion and the votes of those around him. And the consequence
is that instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly
blurting out his own convictions, as a nation, compared to other
nations, we are a mass of cowards. More than all other people, we
are afraid of each other."

If we take a bird's-eye view of our history, we shall find that this
constant element of democratic pressure has always been so strong a
factor in moulding the character of our citizens, that there is less
difference than we could wish to see between the types of citizenship
produced before the war and after the war.

Charles Pollen, that excellent and worthy German who came to this
country while still a young man and who lived in the midst of the social
and intellectual life of Boston, felt the want of intellectual freedom
in the people about him. If one were obliged to describe the America of
to-day in a single sentence, one could hardly do it better than by a
sentence from a letter of Follen to Harriet Martineau written in 1837,
after the appearance of one of her books: "You have pointed out the two
most striking national characteristics, 'Deficiency of individual moral
independence and extraordinary mutual respect and kindness.'"

Much of what Emerson wrote about the United States in 1850 is true of
the United States to-day. It would be hard to find a civilized people
who are more timid, more cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It is
easy to-day for the educated man who has read Bryce and Tocqueville to
account for the mediocrity of American literature. The merit of Emerson
was that he felt the atmospheric pressure without knowing its reason. He
felt he was a cabined, cribbed, confined creature, although every man
about him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy, and every day was
Fourth of July. He taxes language to its limits in order to express his
revolt. He says that no man should write except what he has dis