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most ambitious science has become.

In the new communities which our emigrating habit now constantly
creates, this prosaic turn of mind is intensified. In the American mind
and in the colonial mind there is, as contrasted with the old English
mind, a LITERALNESS, a tendency to say, "The facts are so-and-so,
whatever may be thought or fancied about them". We used before the
civil war to say that the Americans worshipped the almighty dollar; we
now know that they can scatter money almost recklessly when they will.
But what we meant was half right--they worship visible value: obvious,
undeniable, intrusive result. And in Australia and New Zealand the same
turn comes uppermost. It grows from the struggle with the wilderness.
Physical difficulty is the enemy of early communities, and an incessant
conflict with it for generations leaves a mark of reality on the
mind--a painful mark almost to us, used to impalpable fears and the
half-fanciful dangers of an old and complicated society. The "new
Englands" of all latitudes are bare-minded (if I may so say) as
compared with the "old".

When, therefore, the new communities of the colonised world have to
choose a government, they must choose one in which ALL the institutions
are of an obvious evident utility. We catch the Americans smiling at
our Queen with her secret mystery, and our Prince of Wales with his
happy inaction. It is impossible, in fact, to convince their prosaic
minds that constitutional royalty is a rational government, that it is
suited to a new age and an unbroken country, that those who start
afresh can start with it. The princelings who run about the world with
excellent intentions, but an entire ignorance of business, are to them
a locomotive advertisement that this sort of government is European in
its limitations and mediaeval in its origin; that though it has yet a
great part to play in the old States, it has no place or part in new
States. The realisme impitoyable which good critics find in a most
characteristic part of the literature of the nineteenth century, is to
be found also in its politics. An ostentatious utility must
characterise its creations.

The deepest interest, therefore, attaches to the problem of this essay.
If hereditary royalty had been essential to Parliamentary government,
we might well have despaired of that government. But accurate
investigation shows that this royalty is not essential; that, upon an
average, it is not even in a