American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History | Page 5

houses of gentlemen stand quite
apart in the country, perhaps out of sight of one another, and
surrounded by very extensive grounds. The origin of the village, in a
mere aggregation of tenants of the lord of the manor, is thus vividly
suggested. In France one is still more impressed, I think, with this
closely packed structure of the village. In the New England village, on
the other hand, the finer and the poorer houses stand side by side along
the road. There are wide straight streets overarched with spreading elms
and maples, and on either side stand the houses, with little green lawns
in front, called in rustic parlance "door-yards." The finer houses may
stand a thousand feet apart from their neighbours on either side, while
between the poorer ones there may be intervals of from twenty to one
hundred feet, but they are never found crowded together in blocks.
Built in this capacious fashion, a village of a thousand inhabitants may
have a main street more than a mile in length, with half a dozen
crossing streets losing themselves gradually in long stretches of country
road. The finest houses are not ducal palaces, but may be compared
with the ordinary country-houses of gentlemen in England. The poorest
houses are never hovels, such as one sees in the Scotch Highlands. The
picturesque and cosy cottage at Shottery, where Shakespeare used to do
his courting, will serve very well as a sample of the humblest sort of
old-fashioned New England farm-house. But most of the dwellings in
the village come between these extremes. They are plain neat wooden
houses, in capaciousness more like villas than cottages. A New
England village street, laid out in this way, is usually very picturesque
and beautiful, and it is highly characteristic. In comparing it with things

in Europe, where one rarely finds anything at all like it, one must go to
something very different from a village. As you stand in the Court of
Heroes at Versailles and look down the broad and noble avenue that
leads to Paris, the effect of the vista is much like that of a New England
village street. As American villages grow into cities, the increase in the
value of land usually tends to crowd the houses together into blocks as
in a European city. But in some of our western cities founded and
settled by people from New England, this spacious fashion of building
has been retained for streets occupied by dwelling-houses. In
Cleveland--a city on the southern shore of Lake Erie, with a population
about equal to that of Edinburgh--there is a street some five or six miles
in length and five hundred feet in width, bordered on each side with a
double row of arching trees, and with handsome stone houses, of
sufficient variety and freedom in architectural design, standing at
intervals of from one to two hundred feet along the entire length of the
street. The effect, it is needless to add, is very noble indeed. The vistas
remind one of the nave and aisles of a huge cathedral.
Now this generous way in which a New England village is built is very
closely associated with the historical origin of the village and with the
peculiar kind of political and social life by which it is characterized.
First of all, it implies abundance of land. As a rule the head of each
family owns the house in which he lives and the ground on which it is
built. The relation of landlord and tenant, though not unknown, is not
commonly met with. No sort of social distinction or political privilege
is associated with the ownership of land; and the legal differences
between real and personal property, especially as regards ease of
transfer, have been reduced to the smallest minimum that practical
convenience will allow. Each householder, therefore, though an
absolute proprietor, cannot be called a miniature lord of the manor,
because there exists no permanent dependent class such as is implied in
the use of such a phrase. Each larger proprietor attends in person to the
cultivation of his own land, assisted perhaps by his own sons or by
neighbours working for hire in the leisure left over from the care of
their own smaller estates. So in the interior of the house there is usually
no domestic service that is not performed by the mother of the family
and the daughters. Yet in spite of this universality of manual labour, the

people are as far as possible from presenting the appearance of peasants.
Poor or shabbily-dressed people are rarely seen, and there is no one in
the village whom it would be proper to address in a patronizing tone, or
who would not consider it a gross insult to be offered a shilling. As
with