crupulous about
adequate service. He makes no virtue of frankness, but much of kindly
helpfulness and charity to the weak. He has no sense of duty in planning
or economising. He is polite and soft-spoken, and disposed to irony
rather than denunciation, ready to admire cuteness and condone
deception. Not so the rebel. That tradition is working in us also. It
has been the lot of vast masses of population in every age to be living
in successful or unsuccessful resistance to mastery, to be dreading
oppression or to be just escaped from it. Resentment becomes a virtue
then, and any peace with the oppressor a crime. It is from rebel origins
so many of us get the idea that disrespectfulness is something of a duty
and obstinacy a fine thing. And under the force of this tradition we
idealise the rugged and unmanageable, we find something heroic in rough
clothes and hands, in bad manners, insensitive behaviour, and
unsociableness. And a community of settlers, again, in a rough country,
fighting for a bare existence, makes a virtue of vehemence, of a hasty
rapidity of execution. Hurried and driven men glorify "push" and
impatience, and despise finish and fine discriminations as weak and
demoralising things. These three, the Serf, the Rebel, and the
Squatter, are three out of a thousand types and aspects that have gone
to our making. In the American composition they are dominant. But all
those thousand different standards and traditions are our material, each
with something fine, and each with something evil. They have all
provided the atmosphere of upbringing for men in the past. Out of them
and out of unprecedented occasions, we in this newer age, in which there
are no slaves, in which every man is a citizen, in which the
conveniences of a great and growing civilisation makes the frantic
avidity of the squatter a nuisance, have to set ourselves to frame the
standard of our children's children, to abandon what the slave or the
squatter or the rebel found necessary and that we find unnecessary, to
fit fresh requirements to our new needs. So we have to develop our
figure of the fine man, our desirable citizen in that great and noble
civilised state we who have a "sense of the state" would build out of
the confusions of our world.

To describe that ideal modern citizen now is at best to make a guess and
a suggestion of what must be built in reality by the efforts of a
thousand minds. But he will be a very different creature from that