discipline necessary to the pursuit of
the common end is less exact than with us. As far as I can judge,
the members of an American association, on the contrary, take
their obligations more seriously than we, and precisely because
they have undertaken them very freely, without being forced into
them by environment or fashion, and also because the heads of the
association have not sought to make it serve their own interests.
In fine, their discipline is strong, but it is applied only to one
precise object; it may thus subsist intact and without tyranny,
despite the most serious divergences of view among the members
regarding objects foreign to its aim. These happy conditions--this
large and concrete mind, joined to the effective activity of the
Americans, have given rise to a multitude of groups that are
rendering the greatest service.

De Rousiers enlarges on this point at great length and gives many
illustrations. He returns to it even when he appears to have gone on to
other subjects. In an account of a visit to a militia encampment in
Massachusetts, where he was inclined at the outset to scoff at the lack of
formal military training, but finally became enthusiastic over the
individual efficiency and interest of the militiamen, he ends by saying:

What I have seen here resembles what I have seen everywhere
throughout the United States; each organism, each individual,
preserves all its freedom, as far as it can; hence the limited and
special character of the public authorities, to whom little is
left to do. This doubtless detracts from the massed effects that
we are in the habit of producing; we are apt to think that this
kind of liberty is only disorder; but individual efforts are more
energetic and when they converge toward a single end, by
spontaneous choice of each will, their power is incalculable. This
it is that makes the strength of America.

An interesting and satisfactory summary. There is, however, another way of
looking at it. A well-known scientific man recently expressed to me his
conviction that an "American" association of any kind is destined to
failure, whether it be of scientific men, commercial travellers or
plumbers. By "American" here he meant continental in extent. There may
thus be, according to this view, a successful Maine hotel-keeper's
association, a New York bar association, or a Pennsylvania acade