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a 'machine boss' of the most pronounced type; for it was he who controlled the patronage barrel; who received church dignitaries in quest of preferment; influenced Whigs in search of profitable contracts; and any individual that had rendered partisan service of any character and believed he should obtain a valuable concession of any kind. It was the Duke who patted this follower on the back, who gave money now and a promise then, who shook hands with the public generally and who tried to send away happy every person who called upon him for a favor. His methods were no better or no worse than political methods that have been practiced in our own day. To gain a point he never hesitated at bribery.”

Or we may go back to the century before George III reigned and see where the lesson of corruption was learned. When Randolph was sent to London in 1682 he wrote to the Bishop of London of "their great friend the L. P. S. [Lord Privy Seal] who cannot withstand their weighty arguments"; and it was the weight of gold. Anglesey was the Lord Privy Seal, and he is described by Burnet as one who "stuck at nothing and was ashamed of nothing; neither loved nor trusted by any man or any side; seemed to have no regard to common decencies, but sold everything that was in his power, and sold himself so often that at last the price fell so low that he grew useless." 2

1 Hastings: Introduction to Public Papers of George Clinton, vol. i, p. 24. • Doyle: English Colonies in America, vol. iii, p. 208.

If England in the eighteenth century could have been compared say with Germany, Germany with two hundred years more of civilization behind her, with the same liberal political institutions and the same language as England, what would Germany have thought of English political corruption, of English manners, of the brutality of justice? England to-day is no longer the England of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, because she has experienced and learned. So will the United States. The political corruption in England, as I have already shown, was greater, more shameless, more destructive of popular liberties than it has ever been in the United States. In England men and women were hanged where the money value of the article stolen was trifling because the hanging of a thief was supposed to be for the protection of society. In the United States men women seldom, if ever—are lynched because society, rude, violent, primitive, with stern ideas of justice, demands death for self-protection. Can any one doubt that the time will come when lynching in the United States will be as unknown as is to-day the spectacle of an English judge sentencing a woman to death for having stolen a few yards of cloth to save herself and her children from starvation?

Society is always striving for higher ethical standards and before attaining them it passes through the same stages of development that the body does physically. It must grow slowly, it must

experience the pains of growth; life comes to it as a practical experience and not as the theoretical teachings of the past. The child learns only by experience. Society at every stage has been like the child dimly groping for something better, ignoring precept and counsel, often hurt before it reaches a higher development; but society like the child, if it survives, if in it is implanted the vital essence, rises to a higher standard as a result of its experiences, its stumblings, its pains, and its sorrows.

In their analysis of the American mind and their explanation of the psychology of the American people most writers have based their conclusion on a false premise. It has come to be the fashion to believe that the chain of English civilization was unbroken in its transmission to the American colonies; that in the century and a quarter of national existence the United States should have developed along the same lines, and at the same pace, and subject to the same influences as the mother land. The intellectual phases of American history, therefore, are to be judged as exalted, arrested, or retrograded according as they measure up with contemporaneous conditions in England.

It cannot be too strongly asserted that nothing is more misleading than this belief in the transmission intact and the continuance of the established civilization of England among pioneer colonizers in a new country and with severed political allegiance. Its constant iteration has invested it with the sanc

tity that age gives to a “natural law,” and having been accepted by the world at large it has become a conviction. But even "natural laws" buttressed by the ignorance of centuries have been proved to be a perversion of the principles of truth when the test of knowledge has been scientifically applied. Copernicus destroyed the "natural law" of the universe and gave to man the truth of astronomy.

The English who came as the first settlers to America were in all things Englishmen in a foreign environment, at heart alien, just as the Englishman of to-day who serves his country in India or South America or Germany remains an Englishman, although he adopts the language of the country in which he lives and adjusts himself to its customs. But with the permanency of settlement, the revolutionizing influences of the struggle with natural conditions, and above all with a declared political independence of the British Crown, the bond with the old civilization snapped. Thus a new and distinct racial psychology began in America. After a race has been formed and bred to certain qualities within a limited field, Shaler says, after it has come to possess a certain body of characteristics which give it its peculiar stamp, the importance of the original cradle passes away.1

The civilization of England flowed on. Society was established, its traditions were fixed, there was no interruption in its orderly and progressive devel1 Shaler: Nature and Man in America, p. 165.

opment. Civilization in America, when America was no longer English but was American in fact as well as in name, paused long enough to give birth to a new civilization, the like of which the world before had never dreamed of. A new system of political philosophy, which was a moral code no less than a political, that gave man "kingship in right of his mere manhood," produced its own needs of civilization, which was largely influenced by natural conditions, as society always has been at every stage in its development. And there began a new civilization, a civilization that, whether good or bad, whether superior to or inferior to the civilization of the English, obeyed the inexorable law of evolution and in its own way has served its own purpose.

Democracy is not alone a polity. It is something much more than that. A people born in a democracy unconsciously acquire ideas and a mental process that make them unlike the subjects of a monarchy or the citizens of a country in which established class distinctions exist. We shall see, as the theme unfolds, the moral and psychological effects of a democratic form of government.

American civilization is the youngest of which the world knows. It is still formative. This makes a serious study fantastic almost, for judgment is but another name for comparison; we can reach a conclusion only by comparing it with something else, and when we compare American civilization with

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