American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History | Page 6

poverty, so with dram-drinking and with crime; all alike are
conspicuous by their absence. In a village of one thousand inhabitants
there will be a poor-house where five or six decrepit old people are
supported at the common charge; and there will be one tavern where it
is not easy to find anything stronger to drink than light beer or cider.
The danger from thieves is so slight that it is not always thought
necessary to fasten the outer doors of the house at night. The
universality of literary culture is as remarkable as the freedom with
which all persons engage in manual labour. The village of a thousand
inhabitants will be very likely to have a public circulating library, in
which you may find Professor Huxley's "Lay Sermons" or Sir Henry
Maine's "Ancient Law": it will surely have a high-school and half a
dozen schools for small children. A person unable to read and write is
as great a rarity as an albino or a person with six fingers. The farmer
who threshes his own corn and cuts his own firewood has very likely a
piano in his family sitting-room, with the Atlantic Monthly on the table
and Milton and Tennyson, Gibbon and Macaulay on his shelves, while
his daughter, who has baked bread in the morning, is perhaps ready to
paint on china in the afternoon. In former times theological questions
largely occupied the attention of the people; and there is probably no
part of the world where the Bible has been more attentively read, or
where the mysteries of Christian doctrine have to so great an extent
been made the subject of earnest discussion in every household. Hence
we find in the New England of to-day a deep religious sense combined
with singular flexibility of mind and freedom of thought.
A state of society so completely democratic as that here described has
not often been found in connection with a very high and complex
civilization. In contemplating these old mountain villages of New
England, one descries slow modifications in the structure of society
which threaten somewhat to lessen its dignity. The immense
productiveness of the soil in our western states, combined with
cheapness of transportation, tends to affect seriously the agricultural

interests of New England as well as those of our mother-country. There
is a visible tendency for farms to pass into the hands of proprietors of
an inferior type to that of the former owners,--men who are content
with a lower standard of comfort and culture; while the sons of the old
farmers go off to the universities to prepare for a professional career,
and the daughters marry merchants or lawyers in the cities. The
mountain-streams of New England, too, afford so much water-power as
to bring in ugly factories to disfigure the beautiful ravines, and to
introduce into the community a class of people very different from the
landholding descendants of the Puritans. When once a factory is
established near a village, one no longer feels free to sleep with doors
unbolted.
It will be long, however, I trust, before the simple, earnest and
independent type of character that has been nurtured on the Blue Hills
of Massachusetts and the White Hills of New Hampshire shall cease to
operate like a powerful leaven upon the whole of American society.
Much has been said and sung in praise of the spirit of chivalry, which,
after all, as a great historian reminds us, "implies the arbitrary choice of
one or two virtues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to
become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are
forgotten." [1] Quite enough has been said, too, in discredit of
Puritanism,--its narrowness of aim, its ascetic proclivities, its quaint
affectations of Hebraism. Yet these things were but the symptoms of
the intensity of its reverence for that grand spirit of Hebraism, of which
Mr. Matthew Arnold speaks, to which we owe the Bible and
Christianity. No loftier ideal has ever been conceived than that of the
Puritan who would fain have made of the world a City of God. If we
could sum up all that England owes to Puritanism, the story would be a
great one indeed. As regards the United States, we may safely say that
what is noblest in our history to-day, and of happiest augury for our
social and political future, is the impress left upon the character of our
people by the heroic men who came to New England early in the
seventeenth century.
The settlement of New England by the Puritans occupies a peculiar
position in the annals of colonization, and without understanding this

we cannot properly appreciate the character of the purely democratic
society which I have sought to describe. As a general rule colonies have
been founded,