continual commerce in ideas which brings about change (and, in the main,
advance) in the old world. The conservatism which these causes tend to
produce has in any case been marked in America. Thus, as readers of
Lowell are aware, in spite of the ceaseless efflorescence of the modern
slang of America, the language of America is in many respects that of an
older England than ours, and the like has all along been true of
important literature, and still more of oratory, in America. Moreover,
as the sentences which have just been quoted may suggest, the maxim that
has once hit the occasion, or the new practice or expedient once
necessitated by the conditions of the moment, has been readily hallowed
as expressing the wisdom of the ages. An Englishman will quote Burke as
he would quote Demosthenes or Plato, but Americans have been apt to quote
their elder statesmen as they would quote the Bible. In like manner
political practices of accidental origin--for instance, that a
representative should be an inhabitant of the place he
represents--acquire in America something like the force of constitutional
law.

In this connection we must recall the period at which the earliest
settlers came from England, and the political heritage which they
consequently brought with them. This heritage included a certain
aptitude for local government, which was fostered in the south by the
rise of a class of large landowners and in the north by the
Congregational Church system. It included also a great tenacity of the
subject's rights as against the State--the spirit of Hampden refusing
payment of ship-money--and a disposition to look on the law and the
Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government. But it did not
include--and this explains the real meaning of the War of
Independence--any sort of feeling of allegiance to a Parliament which
represented Great Britain only, and which had gained its position even in