what? Nothing except the materialism of life and the corruption of politics. Now the reason for this is not, as Americans have so frequently believed, "a certain condescension in foreigners," that condescension that makes the foreigner regard himself and his culture, his morals and his habits, as superior to the American. It is purely psychological. In viewing his own development the European cannot stand outside himself; the genesis of his civilization is too remote for him to be able to comprehend that it has experienced the same “cyclical evolution" as a much younger civilization.

No living European has seen the society with which he is most familiar and of which he is a part, that is, of his own country, come into existence with the resistless and at times destructive force of a volcano that levels mountains and fills valleys. In the memory of living man in Europe human advancement has been the slow, steady, almost unperceived progress of a river that scours its own bed and with calm but irresistible force, so placid despite its power that at times the drift of the current is unnoticed, bears its detritus to the ocean. But in America the movement has been cataclysmic. It has cut a new channel, violently, with a sudden wrench, at times with great disorder, when a new channel was necessary. Like its own Mississippi it has made mock of tradition and scoffed sociological geographers, with their precise charts and their mathematical lines of boundaries.

In America man stands face to face with a civilization in the making, and the making of civilization has always been the play of primordial forces. He sees all that is noble and all that is base revealed in all its nobility and all its baseness. He sees the mind stripped of its covering. Civilization that is old, that has become fashioned into a mould and is a stereotyped convention, conceals its workings. Much that is shameful and sordid exists, but as civilized men cover their bodies, so civilized society has a horror of frankly revealing its mental processes. In America that stage has not yet been reached. What is bad is candidly pronounced bad, so that a remedy may be found. What is good all the world shall be told; it shall be to the world an inspiration, and to Americans an encouragement for redoubled effort. In England, says Masterman, reticence still forbids an eager sincerity about ultimate questions, but in America "a new child race will discuss its own spiritual anatomy with all the candor of interested children." 1

It is because the Americans came from England, it is because the mother tongue of America is English, and it is from England that America has derived her ideals, her law, and her literature, that England has been made the yardstick of comparison. The two countries have so much in common mentally and spiritually that Europe, which knows England so much better than it knows the United 1 Masterman: In Peril of Change, p. 60.

States, has fallen into the fashion of using England as the common denominator in which to express the terms of American civilization. But this is a mistake and leads to an error so grave that it makes all calculation worthless. America is no longer England or even a reflex of England. America is American, and if the character of the American people is to be understood and their civilization is to be correctly interpreted they must be measured by their own standards and not weighed in the scales of foreign make. And bearing this in mind, we shall see again with what exact fidelity the present reproduces the past. The corruption of politics,—perhaps the most fruitful theme of European writers, and not entirely neglected by American commentators, the sordidness of place-hunters, the dishonesty of demagogues, the lust for wealth, the vulgarity of display, - these things are neither new nor peculiar to America. For everything that has happened or is now happening in the United States we shall find its parallel and its precedent in English civilization in its various evolutionary stages; nor shall we find them at a time so remote from the present that they were merely the survival of the manners and customs of a people then but slowly emerging from barbarism and whose civilization was still rudimentary. Long after England had given to the world some of the world's greatest and most enduring literature; long after Newton had dis

covered his great principle, and Flamsteed had created the science of modern astronomy, and Hooke and Boyle and Wilkins (the list might be prolonged almost indefinitely) had made their great contributions to science; long after the courage and valor and patriotism of England had become the glorious heritage of Englishmen, the morals of England were so unspeakably vile that the titles of some of the poems of Lord Rochester, a fashionable poet, "are such as no pen of our day could copy";1 and politics were so openly a matter of barter and sale that seats in Parliament were sold to the highest bidder. "I came into Parliament for Newton in the Isle of Wight, a borough of Sir Leonard Holmes," wrote Lord Palmerston in his diary, May, 1807. "One condition required was that I would never, even for the election, set foot in the place, so jealous was the patron lest any attempt be made to get a new interest in the borough." Samuel Wilberforce, the great philanthropist, paid £9000 for Hull, which he represented when he first entered Parliament; the Earl of Shaftesbury, the friend of the working classes and the champion of protective labor legislation, as Lord Ashley, contested the County of Dorset at a time so near the present as 1831, and spent £15,600 only to meet defeat.

Parliamentary seats are no longer put up at auction, but the lock to Saint Stephens turns with a

1. Green: A Short History of the English People, p. 589.

golden key. The cost of getting a seat in England is often heavy. A considerable proportion of the English members of Parliament, a modern English writer says, would be satisfied if their annual outlay upon their divisions came to no more than £500. Many spend less, some a great deal more. There are large county divisions, and certain small and greedy urban communities, debauched by a succession of over-affluent members, in which the annual expenditure could be reckoned in thousands of pounds rather than hundreds. And this is exclusive of the actual cost of the election, which may be anything from £600 to £2000, and may have to be defrayed at any moment determined by the Fates and the Prime Minister. A man in straitened circumstances cannot meet all these demands with the open-handed liberality the electors appreciate. Against the average member of Parliament, especially if he be a Conservative, there can hardly be a more injurious imputation than that he 'does nothing" for the place that he spends no money there. And unless he is a politician of real distinction, or of exceptional personal popularity, he is in some danger of finding that his local association is angling industriously for a more munificent patron.1

"In these days of so-called debased politics," an American writer says, the Duke of Newcastle of George the Third's time, "would be denounced as

1 Low: The Governance of England, p. 181.