the better worth an attempt to note them because, as a historian of
America wrote some years ago, "the typical American of 1900 is on the
whole more like his ancestor of 1775 than is the typical Englishman." In
all the Colonies alike the conditions of life encouraged personal
independence. In all alike they also encouraged a special kind of
ability which may be called practical rather than thorough--that of a
workman who must be competent at many tasks and has neither opportunity
nor inducement to become perfect at one; that of the scientific man
irresistibly drawn to inventions which shall make life less hard; that of
the scholar or philosopher who must supply the new community's need of
lawyers and politicians.

On the other hand, many of the colonists' forefathers had come to their
new home with distinct aspirations for a better ordering of human life
than the old world allowed, and it has frequently been noticed that
Americans from the first have been more prone than their kinsmen in
England to pay homage to large ideal conceptions. This is a disposition
not entirely favourable to painstaking and sure-footed reform. The
idealist American is perhaps too ready to pay himself with fine words,
which the subtler and shyer Englishman avoids and rather too readily sets
down as insincere in others. Moreover, this tendency is quite consistent
with the peculiar conservatism characteristic of America. New conditions
in which tradition gave no guidance called forth great inventive powers
and bred a certain pride in novelty. An American economist has written
in a sanguine humour, "The process of transplanting removes many of the
shackles of custom and tradition which retard the progress of older
countries. In a new country things cannot be done in the old way, and
therefore they are probably done in the best way." But a new country is
always apt to cling with tenacity to those old things for which it still
has use; and a remote and undeveloped country does not fully share the